Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture (2007)

Lamentation and Modernity in
Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

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Lamentation and Modernity in
Literature, Philosophy, and Culture
Rebecca Saunders
LAMENTATION AND MODERNITY IN LITERATURE,
PHILOSOPHY, AND CULTURE
Copyright © Rebecca Saunders, 2007.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of
brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by

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Aux copains
Tim, Dolly, the Other Rebecca, Nancy, Sarah, Laurent, Elise, Kathy, and Cheryl
Des bateaux j'en ai pris beaucoup

Mais le seul qu'ait tenu le coup
Qui n'ai jamais viré de bord
Mais viré de bord
Naviguait en père peinard
Sur la grand-mare des canards
Et s'app'lait les Copains d'abord
Les Copains d'abord
(Georges Brassens)
C o n t e n ts
Acknowledgments ix
Preface xi
1 Heavy Losses: Modernity, Trauma, Philosophy 1
2 “And the Women Wailed in Answer”:

The Lament Tradition 45
3 Lamentation and (Dis)Possession:

Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New South 83
4 Lamentation and Purity: Mallarmé’s “Hommage,”

Wagnérisme, and French Nationalism of the 1880s 109
5 Lamentation and National Identity: Hatzis’s To diplo

biblio and the (De)Construction of Modern Greece 129
6 Lamentation and Gender: Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant

de sable and the (De)Colonization of the Body 147
Epilogue 171
Notes 177
Index 225
Ac k n ow l e d g m e n ts
T he germ of this book was my dissertation, and its roots were nourished by
my professors at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, particularly by my
dissertation director, David Hayman, to whom I am grateful for generous
intellectual encouragement during my years in graduate school; by Próspero
Saíz, whose provocative seminars strongly influenced my thought; and by
Mary Lydon, whose brilliance, inspiration, and friendship remain with me
in the sorrow of her absence. I also gratefully acknowledge both the
UW–Madison and the Camargo Foundation for their support of this early
stage of my research.
I wish to warmly thank the American Association of University Women for
granting me a year’s fellowship to pursue this book. I also thank Ron
Fortune, the former chair of my department at Illinois State University, for
his exemplary support of junior faculty research. My work as co-editor of
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East has afforded
me new perspectives on this project, and I thank Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi
and Duke University Press for this opportunity.
A number of friends and colleagues—Rebecca Karoff, Tim Scheie,
Elizabeth Dolly Weber, Jen Travis, and Max Gulias II—have enriched this
work by reading and commenting on portions of it. I am grateful to each of
them for their generosity and insights. Others, such as Nesta Ramazani, Nabil
Abu-Assal, Coco Owen, and numerous interlocutors at the annual meetings
of the International Association for Philosophy and Literature, have shaped
this work through ongoing discussions. Vaheed Ramazani read and dis-
cussed this work with me over the course of many years; I am indebted to
him for innumerable references, insights, and corrections, as well as for his
wisdom and encouragement. The judicious evaluation of Palgrave’s anony-
mous reviewer greatly strengthened the final version of the manuscript.
The index is the handiwork of Rebecca Francescatti. Finally, I lovingly
thank my partner and stepson, Max and Max Gulias (II and III), for sur-
rounding me with the creative, intellectually fertile, and supportive home
that made finishing this book possible.
A portion of Chapter 3 of this book appeared as “On Lamentation and the
Redistribution of Possessions: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New
South,” in Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 730–62. © Purdue
Research Foundation. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins
University Press. An earlier version of Chapter 4 appeared as “‘Shaking Down
x ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
the Pillars’: Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ to Wagner” in

PMLA 111, no. 5 (1996): 1106–20. Reprinted by permission of the Modern
Language Association. Portions of Chapter 6 appeared in “Decolonizing the
Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de
sable,” in Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4 (2006): 136–60.
Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.
P re fac e
Nietzsche’s notorious announcement of the death of God depicted God’s

absence (the absence, that is, of transcendence, ideals, principles, values, and
meaning) not as simple non-existence but as an epochal transformation: it
described modernity in terms of traumatic loss. And Nietzsche’s announce-
ment by no means stands alone. The conception of modernity as traumatic
loss or crisis is a significant and frequent motif in literary, philosophical, and
social texts from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We could as
well begin this argument with the crisis of personal agency attendant upon
Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious, Marx’s descriptions of alienation, of
loss of self and the fruits of one’s labor, Weberian “Entzauberung der Welt”
(disenchantment of the World), or Durkheimian anomie. We could begin
with the shaking of European imperialism and its attendant ideologies or the
devastating events of World Wars: these texts, perceptions, or events could all
be rallied to testify to the conception of the modern as a moment of trau-
matic loss, one that is radically new (or “re-originated”), a moment of epis-
temological upheaval, cognitive disorientation, symbolic crisis, and loss of
values, a moment imbued with melancholy, anxiety, nostalgia, or dread.
But to take this broad interpretation of modernity at face value, to read lit-
erature, history, and philosophy as simple records of loss, is, I believe, to over-
look the troubled nature of loss itself, the ways in which languages of loss
may produce crisis, and the dramatic social consequences those lamentations
entail.1 Without in any way disavowing that many modern lives have been
shaped by painful experiences of loss both personal and collective, this book
aims to rethink the relation of traumatic loss to modernity in light of a num-
ber of crucial but often overlooked considerations:
First, loss is characterized by confusion and the burden of belated recon-
struction. The moment of loss—whether one loses a set of keys, a parent,
dignity, a war—produces disorientation and bewilderment. Both the experi-
ence of loss and the object that has been lost must be retrospectively (re)con-
structed: I must retrace my steps to decipher the moment at which I lost my
keys; we must (re)construct the character of the homeland now lost.
Second, loss is not all one thing: it can be synonymous with destruction,
with various kinds of obstruction (as when an object is misplaced or lost
from view), or with conceptual transfer (as one loses an intact and visible
piece of property through a legal transaction). Loss can also stand for defeat
or failure (as one loses a lawsuit or game of chess), entail ideological as well
xii Preface
as material property (as one loses rights, “face,” or nerve), and be used quasi-
euphemistically to stand for death. Indeed the term death, partaking of all
these senses of loss without being contained by any of them, is often used
quasi-metaphorically to stand for other kinds of losses.
Third, losses vary not only in kind, but in degree. Losing my keys and
losing a child may bear some structural affinities, but they are in no sense
affectively equivalent. Indeed, even the same object may be invested with dif-
ferent meanings and hence produce dramatically different experiences of
loss: whether or not a broken dish is a catastrophe may depend on whether I
inherited it from my great-grandmother or got it at a garage sale. Even those
quotidian losses whose repression constitutes the ordinary—the losses, for
example, that inhere in the passage of time, the constitution of subjectivity,
or the practice of signification—may at times erupt into consciousness and
produce the symptoms of crisis: an overwhelming dread of death, a melan-
cholic collapse, a symbolic aphasia. It is also quite possible to lose something
partially; I may lose a portion of my investment or a traumatized friend may
seem partly lost to me, although she is physically present.
Fourth, as the foregoing examples attest, the concept of loss is imbricated
in a complex web of interrelationships—with, for example, notions of mourn-
ing, trauma, crisis, negativity, absence, lack, memory, and death. A tremen-
dous amount of semantic seepage occurs between these terms, and while it is
crucial to recognize that they are not synonymous, it is equally crucial, as I
shall contend at greater length below, to analyze the ideological work per-
formed by their collusion. Such an analysis is, I argue, both clarified by, and
a significant perspective on, a body of philosophy in which those nuances
play a seminal role: Nietzsche’s description of nihilism, Heidegger’s discus-
sions of equipmental breakdown and “being-towards-death,” and Derrida’s
exploration of the deathliness in signs.
Fifth, the symptoms of traumatic loss, as psychological and psychoanalytic
work has taught us, are often disguised and displaced: they may not be
overtly recognizable, may indeed be empowered by their very obscurity.
Thus, modernity’s “sense of loss” may be manifest not only in texts that
announce themselves to be elegies or laments, or that contain explicit por-
trayals of crisis, but also in the inconspicuous rhetorical gestures of a much
larger body of texts.
Finally and most importantly, loss serves ideological purposes. While
loss is primarily negatively marked, it is also crucial to positively valued
notions such as purity and progress, indeed to modernity itself. Moods
related to loss, such as melancholy, anger, and dread, are also potent instru-
ments of ideology, as is the confusion characteristic of trauma. Indeed, as I
will demonstrate in the chapters that follow, modernity’s languages of loss
have been central to the formation of national identity and processes of
(de)colonization, to attendant conceptions of physical and metaphysical
purity, to the construction of gender, and to the redistribution of (both
ideological and material) property.
Preface xiii
This book investigates the relation of modernity to loss through a study of

a traditional response to loss: the lamentation. There are several reasons for
this approach, the most significant of which is that loss itself is not there to
be studied; it cannot be approached as a simple object of observation and
description. The best we can do is follow after it, decipher the cognitive,
affective, and material impressions it leaves behind, trace its contours from
the responses it evokes. The lamentation is not only one such response, but
also a long and rich tradition that is, in my view, of exceptional interpretative
value because it is at once a cultural artifact, a gendered language, a ritual
performance, a psychological witness, and a political tool. In many respects,
this project can be seen as bringing together these two discourses: the tradi-
tional lamentation and the discourse of loss in/of modernity to see how they
illuminate each other.
Though there are some striking similarities across cultures, lamentations
are inevitably embedded in specific cultural and social circumstances; they
are concerned with particular losses. They are, moreover, traditionally the
domain of women; in many parts of the world the lamentation is considered
a gender-specific genre, formally, functionally, and thematically distinct from
the epitaphios logos, encomium, or elegy. In contrast to these traditionally mas-
culine genres, lamentations are communally and antiphonally constructed,
emphasize inconsolable loss and unforgettable grief, insist on the inability of
language to compensate for loss, often focus on the pain of the lamenter, and
perform specific functions in mortuary ritual.
The lament tradition encompasses a range of utterances from shrieks and
cries to improvised oral performance to formal written texts. It is situated
on the borders between language and the unutterable, between the highly
formalized and the improvised, and between dance, song, poetry, and nar-
rative. It often re-enacts psychological responses to loss and warrants inves-
tigation as an extrainstitutional meditation on trauma. Ritual lamentation,
moreover, not only expresses and records grief, but is an expression intended
to produce grief. A well-performed lament, even when recited long after the
event of loss or performed by hired mourners, should evoke grief in partici-
pants and observers alike. The lamentation is performative, then, in J. L.
Austin’s sense or, more specifically, in the way that this linguistic concept has
been extended by theorists such as Judith Butler or Homi Bhabha to describe
“the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the
effects that it names.”2
Lamentations are also instruments of cultural power: they are significant
in the construction of oral history; they ratify truth claims by the emotional
force of pain and the jural force of antiphonic confirmation; they establish
rights of inheritance. While performing lamentations, women’s labor
becomes politically and culturally transformative. Indeed, from mourning
mothers in ancient Athens to the “Women in Black” of the present, women
have used mourning as a potent mode of resistance to religions, patriarchies,
and states.
xiv P R E FAC E
The traditional language of lamentation also bears an uncanny resem-

blance to many of the literary devices most commonly associated with lit-
erary modernism: its techniques of non-linearity and rearrangements of
time and space, for example, which are strikingly like the discontinuity,
uncertainty, and fragmentation of the language of lamentation; its stream-
of-consciousness narration, which positions itself, like the lamentation, on
the threshold of the utterable; or its multiple perspectives analogous to the
lamentation’s stichomythic form and shifting narrative stance. Indeed,
the “extremely provisional,” “uncertain and indeterminate” articulations
“heterogeneous to signification and to the sign,” by way of which Kristeva
describes the modern’s revolutionary signifying practices, could equally
accurately describe the hesitant, interrogative language of lamentation.3
In this book’s opening chapter, I situate my inquiry into lamentation and
modernity within the broader contexts of debates on the meaning of the
modern, theoretical discussions of trauma and loss, and a tributary of mod-
ern philosophy which conspicuously deploys a rhetoric of loss. This contex-
tualization will, I hope, illuminate some of the more remote corners, and
larger significance, of my argument.
In my second chapter, I turn to the lament tradition and, drawing on both
anthropological studies of women’s lament performances and collections of
written laments, sketch the lamentation’s theoretical and social significance:
its character as ritual performance, its gender specificity, its reference to a par-
ticular kind of time, its position on the border between the formulaic and
improvised, its tentative and interrogative discourse, its invocations and calls
to witness, its confrontation with foreignness, and its moods of melancholy,
anger, and dread.
The subsequent four chapters are case studies of temporally and spatially
dispersed sites of modernity and provide the evidence from which my cen-
tral argument is drawn. Each is focused on a specific aspect of the lamenta-
tion, its manifestation in a modern literary text, and its significance to a
larger social, discursive, and material context. These chapters pay particular
attention to the lamentation’s concerns with property, purity, national iden-
tity, and gender, concerns that are by no means unrelated: the demarcation
of property (the proper) is largely a process of purification, while purity,
which is often gendered, can function as a kind of “property”—an ideolog-
ical possession synonymous with moral virtue or clear thought; nations,
moreover, are customarily constituted through the construction of a “pure”
ethnicity, purgation of foreign influence, and the (re)acquisition of property
(a national territory).4
Chapter 3, on “Lamentation and (Dis)Possession” studies Faulkner’s
Absalom, Absalom! in the context of the “Old” and “New” South. This chap-
ter describes lamentation as both an act of retroactive possession and a rhet-
oric of dispossession. Faulknerian language and the rhetoric of the “Old
South,” I argue, both demarcate territory and certify possession in a manner
homologous to the lamentation. The lamentation’s rhetoric of dispossession,
Preface xv
moreover, the manner in which its negations and privatives effect a redistrib-
ution of possessions, structurally corresponds, I argue, to both Faulknerian
prose and the social program conceived by New South spokesmen.
In Chapter 4, “Lamentation and Purity,” I study Mallarmé’s “Hommage”
to Wagner, wagnérisme, and French Nationalism of the 1880s. I argue that
Mallarmé constructs a “crise de vers” that mimes the moment of lamentation
in the interest of producing his celebrated poetic purity, but that he con-
structs this purity out of the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement:
contact with the foreign, semantic contagion, syntactic fragmentation. The
significance of this defilement, I contend, spreads in multiple directions: it is
instrumental in producing newness and in mediating Mallarmé’s professional
rivalry with Wagner, it bears witness to the domestic crisis of the Troisième
République, and it functions as a form of resistance to cultural assimilation.
My fifth chapter, on “Lamentation and National Identity,” investigates
Greek novelist Dimitris Hatzis’s To diplo biblio and the (de)construction
of modern Greece. This chapter describes three sites of loss in the structure of
the nation: an inaugural crisis sublimated into national myth, the recupera-
tion of a lost identity, and a series of “losses-in-exchange” that the nation
obscures beneath a mechanism of compensation.
In Chapter 6, on “Lamentation and Gender,” I study Moroccan novelist
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable and the (de)colonization of the body.
Through Ben Jelloun’s tale of a transgendered youth (a young Moroccan girl
raised as a boy), I describe the losses that characterize the body colonized
by gender and analyze the implicit analogy between this bodily coloniza-
tion and the political (de)colonization of Morocco that functions as the
novel’s background.
These case studies have led me to ten hypotheses on the role of lamenta-
tion in modernity, which I set out skeletally in the preface and develop
throughout the rest of this book. While these hypotheses need to be tried out
in other, divergent local instances, the (con)texts I have studied suggest that
the language of lamentation—here conceived as a mode that nomadically
inhabits diverse genres, texts, and discourses—constitutes a significant and
consequential thread in the fabric of modernity.
1. Lamentation establishes the event of loss. The formal and public ges-
tures of a lamentation verify the fact of loss; by marking events as “loss”
or “crisis,” the lamentation formulates inchoate and polysemic circum-
stances into loss. The lamentation thus regulates which losses merit
being marked and mourned. For not all adversity merits ratification by
the public ritual of a lamentation: crises suffered by those without pro-
prietary rights, for example, losses accepted as part of an exchange rela-
tion, or the sort of sustained trauma that, rather than an exceptional,
disjunctive moment, is merely a disregarded circumstance of the every-
day. Formulating trauma into a language of lamentation has, for exam-
ple, been central to the establishment of modern nations, which have
xvi Preface
appropriated the gestures of lamentation to kindle communal mourning,

to inscribe present conditions in an affectively potent language of loss
and mark that loss as intolerable.
2. Lamentation is a form of retroactive possession. Language about loss
is perforce language about possession: loss is always loss of something,
and of a particular something perceived to be properly possessed by one-
self. Prior to mourning, the lamentation must construct a lost object, lay
claim to its possession, and (re)construct its value and significance.
Though speculative and uncertain, the lamentation’s acts of retroactive
possession are linguistically ratified by an insistent possessiveness and
quite capable of constructing a “possession” that never existed—an Old
South of cavalier landowners and happy slaves, a cohesive Greek (or
Italian or German) national identity, or an idyllic, pre-colonial society.
3. Lamentation furnishes a logic of loss and continuity. The lamenta-
tion at once retroactively constructs a lost object, declares it utterly
destroyed, and preserves its memory. The language of lamentation can
thus simultaneously place an object or event at an inaccessible remove—
rhetorically destroy it—and declare an absolute fidelity to it.
4. Lamentation is a return of the repressed. In modernity, it represents a
return of the ritual and irrational that have been repressed by philosophy.
Its anger and disorder, its indictment of justice and calls for revenge, are
a return of a violence and chaos repressed by social order and law. Its
melancholic mood exposes the losses repressed and obscured by signifi-
cation. Its urgent concern with material conditions is a return of an
embodied significance that has been repressed by symbolic systems and
philosophical idealism.
5. Lamentation is a sign of newness and purity. It marks a moment
when destruction has produced the radically new: when the world, “re-
originated” through catastrophe, has become primeval, strange, and
inexplicable. Indeed, destruction is so intimately associated with the pro-
duction of newness and purity that it may function as a sign of the new
or the pure. Such signs, moreover, increasingly function as substitutes for
their referents; the very act of destruction itself—however excessive or
gratuitous, however independent of the legitimately new—may produce
the appearance of newness or purity, as may a language that “records”
such destruction. The destruction of old knowledge, for example, is
easily purveyed as the production of new knowledge, and—because for-
mulations of knowing (revelation, disclosure, aletheia) often rely on a
primary act of destruction (of cover or forgetting)—as knowledge itself,
as truth.
6. Lamentation constructs desire. Because desire is a kind of anticipatory
loss—an anticipated possession and its lack—the lamentation, which
chronicles loss, inevitably produces desire: for a lost object, a forgotten
past, a less aversive future. Put otherwise, a language of loss rhetorically
impoverishes the present and thus provides the justification for radically
P R E FAC E xvii
altering it. This devaluation of the present often coincides in modern

texts with the recuperation of an older, putatively more authentic past;
it also serves the ideal of progress fetishized by modern industrial
nations. Intense desire may, moreover, produce traumatic symptoms
and thereby implicitly call for recovery, as well as confound interpreta-
tion and memory.
7. Lamentation disrupts social discipline. The wild and disorderly behav-
ior that characterizes the lament, its violent expressions of anger and blame
(against personal enemies, institutions, the state) are alien to the equanim-
ity demanded of social discourse and law; they are modes of expression
associated with barbarians and the insane; they interrupt the microphysics
of power governing disciplinary society. Re-enacting the dissolution of
social order, the lamentation, in its performativity, may contribute to the
destruction of (a) social order, to the collapse of the meanings and dis-
tinctions on which that order is founded.
8. Lamentation resists logical resolution. The lamentation marks a
moment when experience is at once incomprehensible and urgently
significant, when circumstances resist sublimation into philosophically
verifiable, or culturally useful, meaning. Not unlike numerous texts of
modernism, it forages for significance in that which is discarded by, and
disruptive to, philosophical idealism: the irrational and ambiguous, the
particular and anomalous, the fragmented, provisional, and material.
Embedded in rituals that are historically prior to philosophy, it mingles
with the primitive, the illogical, and the feminine. It reiterates a moment
when one can not see through or beyond material conditions and when
philosophy, consequently, seems frighteningly impotent.
9. Lamentation disorders the Symbolic. Expressive of a moment when
relationships of correspondence have been shattered and experience no
longer fits into language, lamentations reenact, and may precipitate,
symbolic crisis. The inconsolable grief expressed in the lamentation,
which rejects language as a replacement for the lost object and refuses to
accept a sign as compensation for loss, contests the representational
claims of language. For in the lamentation, words are no longer an ade-
quate vehicle for representing the world and the very possibility of com-
pensation is inconceivable.
10. Lamentation ratifies discourse with the affective potency of death.
The melancholy, angry, and dreadful moods that attach to the lamenta-
tion lend any discourse a formidable emotional intensity. Such moods,
shielded from intervention and critique by their terrible power, spread
from performers to witnesses; they infect judgment, incite exorbitant
response, goad to action.
Chapter 1

H e av y L o s s e s :
M o d e r n i t y, Tr au m a , P h i l o s o p h y
A swarm of contested meanings, inferences, and affects, modernity is a

term as vexed as the traumatic loss commonly associated with it; analyzing
the collusion of modernity and trauma thus requires that we nuance and his-
toricize both of those concepts, even if we resist defining them categorically.
This chapter proposes a number of alternative descriptions of modernity—as
a time period, a complex of institutions, a structure of social relations, an
experience or attitude, an epistemology, a particular conception of subjectiv-
ity, a value judgment, and an instrument of Euro-American hegemony—then
turns to a discussion of trauma and its history and theorizations within psy-
choanalysis, cultural studies, and literary analysis. Finally, I turn to an exami-
nation of three seminal thinkers of modernity: to Nietzsche and his conceptions
of creative destruction, uncertainty, and (in)justice; to Heidegger and notions
of breakdown, anxiety, and “being-towards-death”; and to Derrida, his lan-
guage of catastrophe, and his elaboration of the deathliness in signification.
The Culture of Modernity
Modernity designates neither a homogenous or clearly defined time period

nor a stable object of knowledge. I want to suggest a series of interwoven
narratives, however, that, while by no means exhausting the meanings of
modernity, at least adumbrate its complexity, its various temporal and geo-
graphical incarnations, and its sometimes tense negotiations between diver-
sity and uniformity.
2 L a m e n tat i o n a n d M o d e r n i t y / R e b e c c a S au n d e r s
Modernity as a Time Period
Circumstances are routinely unfaithful to temporal containment, and the

practice of delineating time periods is as much a process of disciplining unto-
ward details as it is a means of understanding. The time period we call
“modernity” is no exception; its onset has been variously identified with
events such as Renaissance discovery and world exploration, the Protestant
Reformation, the European Enlightenment, the French Revolution, or the
rise of industrialized capitalism. These beginnings, conceived of as a rupture
with the past, institute what Bernard Yack calls a “residual category”—antiq-
uity, traditional society, the Middle Ages, monarchical government—which,
by way of opposition, make modernity into a coherent temporal construct.1
But there is also a frequently marked rupture later within modernity, a “late
modernity” that begins in the latter half of the nineteenth century and
extends through the twentieth, when the term modernity itself comes into
use. This later modernity makes of “early” modernity its own residual cate-
gory to the degree that Matei Calinescu can speak of “two distinct and bit-
terly conflicting modernities.”2 Late modernity, which is the subject of this
book, is largely constituted through its opposition to Enlightenment concep-
tions of the subject, reason, science, and liberal democracy, which it disman-
tles and mourns to produce its own sense of modernity. By no means
irrelevant to this task is the concurrently appearing body of aesthetic prac-
tices known as “modernism.” For the purposes of this study, I take late
modernity to extend into the period after World War II, into the purportedly
“postmodern,” though I tend to resist this designation because the residual
category on which it is constructed has so often been an oversimplified, and
conspicuously Eurocentric, caricature of modernity.3
Modernity as a Complex of Institutions
The traditional sociological depiction of modernity narrates the rise, and

social effects, of a cluster of economic and political institutions in the nine-
teenth century: industrialization, capitalism, and urbanization; a large-scale
market economy based on mass production and consumption and a com-
plex division of labor; and secular political power, the nation state, liberal
democracy, and the interstate system.4 These sociological transformations
are collusive with other well-publicized characteristics of modernity, such as
Enlightenment beliefs in human reason and progress, altered conceptions of
subjectivity, and a body of experiences and moods supposed to epitomize
modernity, such as perpetual change, uncertainty, alienation, or anomie.
They are also often depicted as loss (e.g., the decline of a traditional social
order) that may also be perceived as, and is the precondition for, gain (e.g.,
the rise of dynamic social systems).
H e av y L o s s e s : M o d e r n i t y, T r a u m a , P h i l o s o p h y 3
Two recent theorists of modernity, Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens,

have revised this picture, Foucault depicting modernity less as a matter of
institutions than as a new modality of power, and Giddens describing moder-
nity’s institutional discontinuities as a matter of “time-space distanciation.”
Foucault contends that the spectacular and discontinuous exercise of sover-
eignty characteristic of the ancien régime, was replaced in seventeenth- and
eighteenth-century Europe by novel mechanisms of discipline that increas-
ingly infiltrated the social body and transformed it into a disciplinary society.
Characterized by the production of useful, legible, docile bodies, whose eco-
nomic utility is increased and political force decreased, this microphysics of
power was put to work in the military, in educational institutions and hospi-
tals, and, later, in workshops and factories. It also inaugurated a new regime
of surveillance, he argues, in which time, behavior, and speech are integrated
into a microscopic gratification-punishment system in which the “the whole
indefinite domain of the non-conforming” is punishable and in which disci-
pline, formerly “expected to neutralize dangers,” now was “being asked to
increase the possible utility of individuals.”5
Concentrating on late—or what he calls “reflexive”—modernity, Giddens
proposes that we should reformulate the discontinuity between modernity
and traditional societies in terms of “time-space distanciation”:
The advent of modernity increasingly tears space away from place by fostering
relations between “absent” others, locationally distant from any given situation
of face-to-face interaction. In conditions of modernity, place becomes increas-
ingly phantasmagoric: that is to say, locales are thoroughly penetrated by and
shaped in terms of social influences quite distant from them.6
Fundamental to the dynamism of modernity, this time-space distanciation

makes accessible options and possibilities that would otherwise be unavail-
able locally as much as it entails a “loss” of locality, familiarity, and personal
interaction. Giddens terms this process “disembedding”—“‘the lifting out’
of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring
across indefinite spans of time-space.”7
Modernity as an Epistemology
Those institutions that star in the traditional sociological script, as well as the
disciplinary mechanisms identified by Foucault and the time-space distancia-
tion marked by Giddens, are indicative of specific manners of understanding
and distinguishable ways of producing knowledge. Capitalism, industrializa-
tion, and liberal democracy, according to the most familiar plot, both condi-
tion, and are conditioned by, the Enlightenment valorization of reason,
which seemed to promise “an unending era of material progress and prosper-
ity, the abolition of prejudice and superstition and the mastery of the forces
of nature based on the expansion of human knowledge and understanding.”8
In Weber’s depiction of modernity, the formation of capitalism is governed by

the instrumental adaptation of means to ends; this instrumental reason is both
subtended by the prestige accorded to the scientific method and collusive with
a secular consciousness that focuses on the material present rather than a spir-
itual elsewhere. In Foucault’s view, modernity’s new ways of producing and
classifying knowledge are also techniques of power. New systems of classifica-
tion and discipline, such as the timetable, medical record, examination, and
documentary archive “constitute the individual as effect and object of power,
as effect and object of knowledge.”9 “[C]ombining hierarchical surveillance
and normalizing judgment,” these classificatory systems are the “dark side” of
Enlightenment processes: “the general juridical form that guaranteed a system
of rights that were egalitarian in principle” were subtended, that is, by multi-
ple disciplinary “systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian
and asymmetrical. . . . [W]hereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects
according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize;
they distribute along a scale, around a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation
to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate.”10
The knowledge produced by Enlightenment ideology, the furtive trajecto-
ries of which are traced by Foucault, begins to deteriorate in late modernity,
according to Giddens, when knowledge becomes increasingly reflexive and
unstable. “The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact that social
practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming infor-
mation about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their charac-
ter.”11 This reflexivity, both the outcome and undoing of Enlightenment
principles, subverts certainty and precludes mastery: “no knowledge under
conditions of modernity is knowledge in the ‘old’ sense, where ‘to know’ is to
be certain.”12 Indeed, “modernity institutionalizes the principle of radical
doubt and insists that all knowledge takes the form of hypotheses: claims that
may very well be true, but which are in principle always open to revision and
may have at some point to be abandoned.”13 Giddens concentrates on the
role of sociology in this epistemic shift, but others clearly have played their
part in it: theorists such as Nietzsche, Freud, Darwin, and Marx, as well as
numerous innovators in literature and the arts, contributed to the demise of
Enlightenment rationality. So too did the fact that, for many, belief in progress
or the emancipatory potential of reason was largely obviated by the experience
of world wars, the brutalities of colonization, and the evident tenacity of racial
terror. This undoing of instrumental reason, scientific method, progress, and
mastery is widely narrated as an epistemological crisis, lamented as the loss of
truth. The mechanisms, ideological commitments, and material effects of this
epistemological “crisis” are a central concern of this book.
Modernity as Ontology
Not unlike the story of knowledge, the fate of the subject in modernity
might be narrated in two episodes: a first Enlightenment phase productive
of the individual and a second phase, coincident with aesthetic modernism,

that challenges and fragments the subject. “The Enlightenment subject,”
writes Stuart Hall, “was based on a conception of the human person as a fully
centered, unified individual, endowed with the capacities of reason, con-
sciousness, and action, whose ‘center’ consisted of an inner core which first
emerged when the subject was born and unfolded with it, while remaining
essentially the same—continuous or ‘identical’ with itself—throughout the
individual’s existence.”14 This unified, stable identity, guarantor of both rea-
son and mastery, is called upon to—and will inevitably—subordinate nature,
irrational traditions, superstition, and deviant behaviors, as well as the unen-
lightened individuals and populations who perpetuate them.15
But as Virginia Woolf remarked, “on or about December, 1910, human
character changed.”16 And indeed the institutional and epistemological
transformations of late modernity entailed significant reconfigurations of the
subject, often narrated as a “crisis” of essential Enlightenment identities.
Marx and Freud both bear a certain responsibility for subverting the integrity
of the Enlightenment subject, insisting respectively on its economic and
unconscious determinations. The trauma of world wars also contributed to a
sense of subjective fragmentation, to a loss of a stable sense of self, as did aes-
thetic conventions of modernism, which both expressed and constructed a
multiperspectival, fractured, or fluid subjectivity.
The Enlightenment subject, it is crucial to recognize, was almost entirely
conceived of as European, bourgeois, and male. The idea of the modern was,
as Rita Felski argues, “deeply implicated from its beginnings with a project of
domination over those seen to lack this capacity for reflective reasoning,”17
most notable among which were women and non-Europeans. Even many
modernist versions of the subject continued to figure “an autonomous male
free of familial and communal ties,” that Felski depicts participating in “an
Oedipal revolt against the tyranny of authority . . . grounded in an ideal of
competitive masculinity.”18 But if the transformation was neither as sudden
or comprehensive as Woolf’s ironic pronouncement suggests, the late mod-
ern period did witness major social realignments of class, gender, sexuality,
ethnicity, nationality, and “race,” all of which were increasingly perceived to
inflect, and even constitute, identity. Feminism, anti-imperialism, racial jus-
tice movements, and global migrations contributed to a revised conception
of subjectivity, seen as composed of multiple, even contradictory subject
positions, capable of assuming different identities in different situations with-
out necessarily cohering into a unified self.
Modernity as an Experience
These transformations of society, knowledge, and subjectivity are also widely

held to be accompanied by cognitive transformations, by “experiences” or
“attitudes” that are prototypically modern. The most pervasive experience
produced by late modernity is, as expressed in that well-loved passage from

Marx and Engels, one of ceaseless development, progress, and change:
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instru-

ments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them
all the relations of society. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninter-
rupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation,
distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier times. All fixed, fast-frozen
relationships, with their train of venerable ideas and opinions, are swept away,
all new-formed ones become obsolete before they can ossify. All that is solid
melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man at last is forced to face with
sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his fellow men.19
This experience of ceaseless transformation is accompanied by a sense of

alienation that, for the proletariat, is a loss not only of the products of one’s
labor, but of one’s “essential being”:
What, then, constitutes the alienation of labour? First the fact that labour is
external to the worker, i.e., it does not belong to his essential being; that in his
work, therefore, he does not affirm himself but denies himself, does not feel
content but unhappy, does not develop freely his physical and mental energy but
mortifies his body and ruins his mind. . . . The external character of labour for
the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it
does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another. . . .
The worker’s activity is not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is
the loss of his self.20
The “experience” of modernity has been darkly depicted by numerous other

theorists: for Weber, the modern is a disenchanted world bereft of meaning,
driven by an instrumental rationality that simultaneously discredits tradi-
tional belief systems but is incapable of producing meaning on its own; for
Freud, it is largely a frustration of the pleasure principle, exacerbated by the
fact that humans’ newly-won powers over space and time have not “increased
the amount of pleasurable satisfaction which they may expect from life and
ha[ve] not made them feel happier”;21 for Durkheim, it is an experience of
anomie, of disorientation and the loss of shared moral values; for Kierkegaard,
a spiritual “leveling” that substitutes a sickly self-satisfaction for passion and
truth; for de Tocqueville, the threat of social disintegration consequent upon
the rise of individualism; and for Baudelaire or Kafka, the isolated, estranged
experience of an anonymous character in a crowded city.
Giddens’s account of modernity also arrives at the familiar experiential
topoi of anxiety, dread, and meaninglessness. The experience of trust that, he
argues, is central to late modernity is also a repressed anxiety. The disembed-
ding processes and time-space distanciation characteristic of modern life
necessitate trust in the expert knowledge of others (e.g., architects, engineers,
medical doctors) and in the efficacy of mechanisms and systems (e.g., build-
ings, modes of transportation, medical treatments) that one cannot verify and
that largely take the form of faceless commitments. While trust in such sys-
tems is “central to ontological security in conditions of modernity,” it creates
“novel forms of psychological vulnerability,” and when such systems falter,
“existential angst or dread” result.22 In Giddens’s account, moreover,
modernity represses not only the possibility of crisis, but the actualities of
madness, criminality, sickness, death, and sexuality. He proposes the term
“sequestration of experience” to describe the modern “separation of day-to-
day life from contact with experiences which raise potentially disturbing exis-
tential questions.”23 The “internally referential systems” in which modern
people largely operate provide ostensibly secure environments and protec-
tion from disturbing questions, but the routines that subtend them are largely
lacking in meaning and provide few resources for individuals’ inevitable
encounters with sequestered aspects of experience. As we shall see, the
lament is precisely the sort of discourse that must be sequestered: it disrupts
modernity’s speciously secure environments, poses disturbing questions, and
acknowledges humans’ lack of control. Indeed, when and where lamentation
emerges, it is often perceived to fuse with other sequestered aspects of
modernity: it is a form of madness, indecently close to nature, sickness, and
death, and sometimes against the law.
Modernity as a Value Judgment
The earliest sense of the word modern, from Latin modo (just now), was
nearer our sense of contemporary, according to Raymond Williams. But from
the Renaissance onward, there existed a conventional contrast between the
ancient and modern in which the modern fell consistently on the unfavorable
side of the comparison. In the late nineteenth century, however, this valua-
tion was largely inverted. No doubt in large part as an effect of capitalism,
industrialization, and the values that subtended them, the term modern
“became virtually equivalent to improved or satisfactory or efficient.”24 Thus
despite the disconcerting experiences of modernity sketched above, in late
modernity, the term modern had taken on an “unquestionably favorable or
desirable” meaning in much of European culture, and it is clear that the
transformations attendant upon modernity could be met with either anguish
or celebration, experienced as either crisis or exhilaration, rhetorically per-
formed as either loss or gain. “There are certainly forces there,” wrote
Nietzsche, “prodigious forces, but ones which are wild, primordial, and
completely merciless. One looks upon them with uneasy expectation, as one
might look into the cauldron in a witch’s kitchen: at any moment there can
be flashes of lightning heralding terrible appearances.”25
The “prodigious forces” of modernity have not, to be sure, lacked
their zealous proponents. Matthew Arnold, Guillaume Apollinaire, Vladimir
Mayakovsky, and Le Corbusier are among the most notable, and Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti certainly the most delirious. Marinetti’s “Manifesto of
Futurism” exults in the “aggressive action” and “feverish insomnia” of

modernity, the magnificence of speed, the techno-sublimity of planes and
automobiles, and the eradication of time, space, and impossibility.26
Somewhat more soberly, Marshall Berman’s influential study All That Is
Solid Melts into Air contends that modern society, “although racked with
pain and misery and riven with uncertainty, nevertheless enables men and
women to become freer and more creative than men and women have ever
been. . . . The fact that ‘all that is solid melts into air’ is a source of strength
and affirmation, not of despair. If everything must go, then let it go: modern
people have the power to create a better world than the world they have
lost.”27 But as Leo Bersani points out, these two attitudes—celebration and
lamentation—are not so much opposed, as related to, even productive of,
each other:
The type of historical reflection about the times we live in, expressed by efforts
to define discontinuities between the present and the past, is perhaps always
motivated by a need for historical celebration or historical mourning.
Modernism was rich in this type of reflection, and it included paeans to the pre-
sumably new consciousness of the times and elegiac expressions of regret for
the invaluable and irrecoverable modes of consciousness presumably enjoyed in
former times. And each of these moods can of course nourish the other: an
apocalyptic sense of loss gives an unprecedented glamour to the notion of
modernity; it summons the modern writer to nothing less than the reinvention
of the terms and conditions of human experience.28
Modernity as Euro-American Hegemony
The conspicuously European character of the subjectivities, institutions, and

experiences foregrounded in conventional narratives of modernity is sympto-
matic of the degree to which modernity itself has been conceived of as
“Western” or “European,” formulated as much as a geography as a time
period, and defined as much by the residual categories of “non-Western,”
“underdeveloped,” or “uncivilized,” as by the temporal category of the past.
This conflation of the culture of European modernity (of industrialized,
urban, secular society) with the temporal concept of modernity (the present)
is underwritten by major theorists of modernity such as Hegel, Marx, and
Weber. In Charles Taylor’s analysis, this “acultural” theory, rather than rec-
ognizing modernity itself as a culture (valuing scientific consciousness, a sec-
ular outlook, instrumental rationality, etc.), conceives modernity as
culture-neutral and the transition to modernity as an inevitable, “natural,”
development that all societies are destined to undergo.29 This conflation of
modernity with Western culture relegates non-Western cultures and tradi-
tions to the past, to backwardness and irrelevance, and results in what
Michael Hanchard describes as “racial time”: “inequalities of temporality
that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate
groups . . . unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources,

power, and knowledge.”30 This teleological conception of modernity as
inevitable trajectory was also a major ideological constituent of colonialism. If
all societies are naturally moving toward modernity, the argument ran, some
are clearly moving more sluggishly than others and advanced, Enlightened,
civilized societies bear the duty to lead others from their darkness.
This Eurocentric version of modernity, moreover, relegates to the uncon-
scious the degree to which modernity has relied on the rest of the world for
its identity, materials, and labor, facts that remain discreetly concealed by that
“innocent modernity” that, as Paul Gilroy puts it, “emerges from the appar-
ently happy social relations that graced post-Enlightenment life in Paris,
Berlin, and London.”31 In addition to being a story of Enlightenment, secu-
larization, and industrialization, modernity is also a period of maritime
exploration, of Europe’s mutually transformative contacts with other peoples
and cultures, and of the exploitation of those peoples through commerce,
conquest, and colonization. “These ‘Others,’” Hall argues, “were incorpo-
rated into the West’s image of itself—into its language, its systems of repre-
sentation, its forms of knowledge, its visual imagery, even its conception of
what sorts of people did and did not have access to reason itself.”32 Such
cross-cultural relations were, moreover, not just a matter of identity forma-
tion, but also of the material construction of the institutions of modernity,
the raw materials and labor for which were in large part provided through the
African slave trade and colonization. The counter-cultures of modernity con-
structed by those enslaved and colonized peoples not only refute any essen-
tialized description of modernity, but, as both Gilroy and Hanchard have
argued, mount trenchant critiques of the Enlightenment ideology and
nationalist politics constitutive of Euro-American modernity.
Modernism as Aesthetic Practice
The body of aesthetic practices gathered under the name modernism—which

include formal and structural experimentation, various disarticulations of
realism and representation, the fragmentation of time and space, multiple
and shifting perspectives, interior monologues and streams of conscious-
ness, and the breakdown of distinctions between genres and media—have
largely been interpreted as a reaction to the circumstances of late modernity.
Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, for example, delineate modernism
as a reaction to the epistemological crises, reconfigurations of subjectivity,
and experiences of disillusionment sketched above. Modernism is, they write:
the art consequent on Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle,’ of the destruction

of civilization and reason in the first World War, of the world changed and
reinterpreted by Marx, Freud, and Darwin, of capitalism and constant indus-
trial acceleration, of existential exposure to meaninglessness or absurdity. It is
the literature of technology. It is the art consequent on the dis-establishing of
communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of

traditional notions of the wholeness of individual character, on the linguistic
chaos that ensues when public notions of language have been discredited and
when all realities have become subjective fictions.33
But if modernism is in some respects an expression of late modernity, it can

also be interpreted as a reaction against a dominant modernity: its bourgeois
order, its stifling banality and conformism, and its repression of imagination
and passion in favor of instrumental reason, pragmatic calculation, and the
acquisition of commodities. There is “a tension, even an incompatibility
between modernity and modernism,” writes Art Berman, who views mod-
ernism as primarily a critique of modernity.34 In a similar vein, Calinescu
avers that “aesthetic modernity should be understood as a crisis concept
involved in a threefold dialectical opposition to tradition, to the modernity
of bourgeois civilization (with its ideals of rationality, utility, progress), and,
finally, to itself, insofar as it perceives itself as a new tradition or form of
authority.”35
Also at stake in any historicized analysis of modernism is the degree to
which modernist artifacts not only express (or respond to) the circumstances
of modernity, but produce them. As I have already proposed, to read mod-
ernist texts as records of the crises of modernity is not only to disregard the
problems that inhere within the entangled notions of loss, trauma, and crisis,
but to ignore the ways in which—and the reasons why—texts construct these
crises. We have noted that many of the literary devices we associate with
modernism bear a resemblance to traditional languages of lamentation, and
we have also noted that the lamentation is intended not only to express, but
to produce grief. This juxtaposition is but one indication that the languages
of loss characteristic of modernity may, to a greater or lesser degree, create
the effects they apparently document. Indeed, the confusion and disorienta-
tion produced by crisis are also often generated by modernist works of art,
and this space of confusion is the playing field of both ideology and resist-
ance. Elaboration of this point, and of the social and material consequences
that follow from it, are, in large part, the substance of this book.
Creating Trauma
We have already marked the degree to which the concept of loss is imbricated
with notions of mourning, trauma, crisis, negativity, absence, lack, and death,
as well as a number of sites that this semantic amalgamation inhabits in
modernity. These terms also appear regularly in a body of poststructural and
deconstructive thought concerned with the ways in which loss inheres in lan-
guage and in the epistemologies, histories, and selves that are structured by
it. These terms that we have been tracing in descriptions of modernity and
that underpin a body of theory are neither synonymous nor commensurate,
though a vast amount of semantic seepage occurs between them. Recognizing
just how much is at stake in this language, Dominick LaCapra has recently
analyzed two of these terms—absence and loss—and argued for the necessity
of distinguishing between them. “Losses cannot be adequately addressed
when they are enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence,” he
contends, “including the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundations.”
Conversely, absence at a “foundational” level cannot simply be derived from

particular historical losses. . . . When absence is converted into loss, one
increases the likelihood of misplaced nostalgia or utopian politics in quest of a
new totality or fully unified community. When loss is converted into (or
encrypted in an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the
impasse of endless melancholy, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia
in which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is
foreclosed or prematurely aborted.36
LaCapra’s astute clarification of these terms not only demonstrates the signif-
icance of their distinction, but testifies to the frequent leakage between them,
as well as to the necessity of exploring the ideological work done by their
indistinction. While I cannot by any means consider all the terms that tra-
verse this dense intersection of modernity, poststructural theory, and the
lament tradition (and a number of these concepts have been cogently theo-
rized by others),37 I do want to pursue the very significant example of the
relation of loss to trauma, both as an illustration of the kind of conceptual
indistinction I have signaled and as a site of some of the most troubling prob-
lems such porous nuances generate. It is no accident that it is precisely in a
stipulation on trauma and its symptoms that LaCapra acknowledges the dif-
ficulty of managing the slippage between terms: “To blur the distinction
between, or to conflate, absence and loss may itself bear striking witness to
the impact of trauma and the post-traumatic, which creates a state of disori-
entation, agitation, or even confusion. . . . Indeed, in post-traumatic situa-
tions in which one relives (or acts out) the past, distinctions tend to collapse,
including the crucial distinction between then and now.”38
So far we have admittedly finessed the difficult relation between trauma
and loss by speaking of “traumatic loss,” but while the terms often overlap
(for example, in depictions of modernity), not all loss is traumatic and trauma
does not necessarily involve loss. Although it has come colloquially to cover
a broad range of experience, including modern life itself, trauma is the prod-
uct of a specific socio-political and clinical genealogy that emerges with late
modernity. It is an artifact that responds to symptoms produced by modern
technology, warfare, and social relations; it first appears in its modern form in
the nineteenth century with attempts to treat “hysterical” symptoms, the
anguish produced by train accidents and shell shock and, later, by concentra-
tion camp experiences and domestic abuse. While the term itself had been
around for a long time—trauma is the ancient Greek word for wound—it is
in late modernity, and following the work of Charcot, Janet, Breuer, and
Freud, that it was “given more psychological meaning . . . to describe the
wounding of the mind brought about by sudden, unexpected, emotional
shock.”39 The ancient image of wounding nonetheless left a profound

imprint on modern psychological theory, which often conceived trauma as a
rupture of the protective envelope of the psyche, a kind of physiological
break-in that causes harm to the entire organism. Freud, for example, follows
this figure in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he hypothesizes a “stimu-
lus barrier” that defends the psyche against overwhelming external stimuli
that threaten psychic coherence.
Two key episodes in the social history of trauma are the two world wars.
During World War I, when soldiers began to experience psychological break-
down on a massive scale—and the term “shell shock” was coined to describe
the experience—medical descriptions of trauma were heavily inflected by two
factors: first, the disconcerting fact that soldiers’ symptoms seemed identical
to those of hysteria, which was assumed to be a strictly feminine disorder;
and second, the entry into medical debate of national governments, which,
not incidentally, needed functioning armies and fungible pension programs.
In this context, traumatic symptoms were largely interpreted as effeminacy or
moral weakness, and treatment was seen in terms of character rehabilitation
and discipline. Physicians were encouraged not to indulge patients’ childish-
ness, effeminacy, and passivity. Psychotherapists such as Paul-Charles Dubois
“urged physicians instead to increase the soldier’s virile self-discipline and
autonomy by strengthening his rational and critical power.”40 British psychi-
atrist Lewis Yealland recommended “a treatment strategy based on shaming,
threats, and punishment,” in which “patients were excoriated for their lazi-
ness and cowardice.”41 Such a treatment program clearly reflects the threat
trauma was perceived to pose to Enlightenment values of autonomy and rea-
son, as well as to their manifestations in constructions of masculinity and dis-
ciplinary society. During World War II, psychiatrists developed another
strategy called “forward psychiatric treatment,” which placed psychiatrists in
combat zones. “Physicians in the military were taught that symptoms that
might be considered abnormal in civilian life were to be regarded as normal
in the stressful situation of battle; the ‘normal battle reaction’ thus defined
was to be the standard against which pathological responses were henceforth
evaluated.”42 The aim of such treatment was clear: returning men to active
duty and minimizing long-term disability and pension expenditures.
“According to one report,” writes Judith Herman, “80 percent of the
American fighting men who succumbed to acute stress in the Second World
War were returned to some kind of duty, usually within a week. Thirty per-
cent were returned to combat units.”43
But some very different developments grew out of the Second World War
as well. One was the introduction of narcotherapy for treatment of trauma
victims: the use of drugs, particularly sodium amytal, to bring about cathar-
sis or abreaction, which fueled debates about the nature of recovery, the sig-
nificance of memory, and the role of interpretation. Another development
resulted from the presence of concentration camp survivors, whose experi-
ence posed two critical difficulties: first, it presented a kind of trauma that,
unlike “shell shock,” did not conform to the image of a sudden intrusion or
wound; and second, many of the psychic effects of this experience did not
manifest themselves until some years later. It was also during World War II
that American psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner developed a description of
trauma as a memory disorder that, half a century later, would become the
basis of the diagnostic category of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD):
The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror and surprise caused by certain
events, the mind is split or dissociated: it is unable to register the wound to the
psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition are
destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate the hurt-
ful experience in normal consciousness; instead, she is haunted or possessed by
intrusive traumatic memories. The experience of the trauma, fixed or frozen in
time, refuses to be represented as past, but is perpetually reeexperienced in a
painful, dissociated, traumatic present.44
Recognition of this category by the psychiatric establishment, however,

would take another war—Vietnam—and a significant political struggle by its
veterans. This struggle ultimately resulted in a five-volume study of post-war
trauma and, in 1980, the adoption of PTSD as a clinical category by the
American Psychological Association. According to the most recent Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), the characteristic
symptoms of PTSD include “persistent reexperiencing of the traumatic event,
persistent avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma and numbing of
general responsiveness, and persistent symptoms of increased arousal.”45 As
Herman has been central in signaling, these symptoms are not only charac-
teristic of men in war, but of many women in civilian life. “Only after 1980,”
she writes, “when the efforts of combat veterans had legitimated the concept
of posttraumatic stress disorder, did it become clear that the psychological
syndrome seen in survivors of rape, domestic battery, and incest was essen-
tially the same as the syndrome seen in survivors of war.”46
Though rarely read as a trauma theorist, Frantz Fanon draws attention to
crucial, yet often overlooked, episodes in the history of trauma: to the spe-
cific forms of trauma produced by colonial wars, by colonization itself, and,
more diffusely, by racism. Analyzing the “problem of mental disorders which
arise from the war of national liberation,” he contends that many of these
symptoms result as much from the colonial situation itself as from the war
against it. “The truth is,” writes Fanon, “that colonialism in its essence was
[before the war] already taking on the aspect of a fertile purveyor for psychi-
atric hospitals,” a state of affairs that is “easily understood if we simply study
and are alive to the number and depth of the injuries inflicted upon a native
during a single day spent amidst the colonial regime.”47 There is thus, he
avers, even “during this calm period of successful colonization a regular and
important mental pathology which is the direct product of oppression.”48
Fanon’s studies of the psychological effects of colonialism in Algeria extend
and make more specific his earlier analysis of racism in Black Skin, White
Masks, where he diagnoses a “situational neurosis,”49 and where, in a series

of powerful pages, he describes the quotidian experience of the man of color
as an always already violated bodily integrity that, rather than the embodied
consciousness that enables ordinary physical activity, is an incessant process
of wounding:
In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development
of his bodily schema. Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. . . .
The elements that I used [to construct a corporeal schema] had been provided
for me not by “residual sensations and perceptions primarily of a tactile, vestibu-
lar, kinesthetic, and visual character,” but by the other, the white man, who had
woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories. . . . Then, assailed at var-
ious points, the corporeal schema crumbled, its place taken by a racial epider-
mal schema. . . . I was responsible at the same time for my body, for my race, for
my ancestors. . . . I took myself far off from my own presence, far indeed, and
made myself an object. What else could it be for me but an amputation, an exci-
sion, a hemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood?50
Fanon’s correctives to the history of trauma institutionalized in psychiatry

effect three substantial theoretical shifts: from the individual psyche to a
social situation; from relations within the family unit to the relation between
families and the national unit; and from the singularity of a traumatogenic
event to the pervasive and diffuse inhumanity of colonialism. The first of
these shifts, which challenges the very basis of clinical psychology as practiced
on individuals, is inaugurated in Black Skin, White Masks, where Fanon posits
that “disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of
social and economic realities.”51 The key recognition that “in some circum-
stances the socius is more important than the individual”52 also underpins
Fanon’s analysis of Algeria, where numerous symptoms, diagnosed in terms
of mental disorders by the psychiatric establishment, are more correctly
viewed, he contends, as “the direct product of the colonial situation.”53 The
second of these shifts is a critique aimed at the familial focus of European psy-
choanalysis and its assumption of continuity between the family and national
culture. But, as Fanon writes, “we observe the opposite in the man of color. A
normal Negro child, having grown up within a normal family, will become
abnormal on the slightest contact with the white world.”54 Moreover,
“the Antillean family has for all practical purposes no connection with the
national—that is the French, or European—structure. The Antillean has
therefore to choose between his family and European society.”55 What
European psychology takes as natural agreement may, for colonized peoples,
be a distressing incongruity, a source of, rather than protection from, trauma.
The third shift, articulated on the evidence of the case studies presented in
“Colonial War and Mental Disorders”—which suggest “a much more widely
spread causality” of disorders than singular events—is formulated as a cri-
tique of the category of “reactionary psychoses.” In classifying disturbances
under this heading, “prominence is given to the event which has given rise
to the disorder,” writes Fanon, whereas “it seems to us that in the cases here
chosen the events giving rise to the disorder are chiefly the bloodthirsty and
pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, and the firm
impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse.”56
Fanon’s work signals that while trauma theory has primarily been pro-
duced in Europe and the United States, trauma itself has, with equal if not
greater regularity and urgency, been experienced elsewhere.57 His work also
inaugurates an inquiry into the relation between individual and collective
forms of trauma that has recently been renewed by scholars such as Ron
Eyerman and Jeffrey Alexander. Eyerman insists that “there is a difference
between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process,” and,
specifically, that “as cultural process, trauma is mediated through various
forms of representation and linked to the reformation of collective iden-
tity.”58 Alexander develops this conception of cultural trauma, contending
that trauma is culturally constructed through a claim to some fundamental
injury that is then transmitted through influential cultural agents, such as the
mass media and religious, aesthetic, legal, scientific, and state institutions
that, as we will see, the lamentation often confronts and contests. These
agents define the nature of the trauma and victim, establish the relation of
trauma to those who experience it only indirectly, and frequently assign
responsibility.59
There are five clusters of issues that emerge from this social and clinical his-
tory that are particularly germane to our consideration of loss, lamentation,
and modernity and that I wish to explore in further detail: (1) the notion of
recovery; (2) the scandal of interpretation; (3) the question of memory; (4)
trauma as regression; and (5) trauma as a negotiation of normalcy.
The Notion of Recovery
Trauma and loss, neither of which gives itself over to direct observation, are
thus often considered from the perspective of recovery. Recovery, however,
would seem to mean something quite different in each case. In relation to
trauma, recovery would seem to be synonymous with cure, with the repos-
session of health and normalcy. In relation to loss, it would seem to be syn-
onymous with (re)discovery, with the return of something missing, with
indemnification or restitution. The notion would thus seem to respond to
fundamentally different questions in each case: how to eliminate debilitating
symptoms on the one hand, what is rightfully owned or deserved on the
other. Yet it is striking the degree to which trauma has been clinically elabo-
rated as a species of loss: as a part of the self lost to consciousness or identity,
as a destruction or shattering of psychic organization, or as memory alienated
from integration within the ego. Equally striking is the degree to which heal-
ing has been described in terms of restoration or repossession, a theme which
has, for example, largely governed the treatment of PTSD. But it perhaps
bears inquiry whether this description derives from the intrinsic phenomenal
resemblances between trauma and loss, or from the imprecision of descrip-
tive language. To what degree may the latter have guided—or misguided—
clinical and juridical practice as well as their involvements with each other? Is
it not quite possible that healing may have nothing to do with restoring a lost
object and that indemnification or restitution may have little or no therapeu-
tic value? These questions, whose clinical implications I leave to others, also
bear on the discourse of loss in modernity: What kind of recovery is implic-
itly called for in descriptions of modernity as crisis, or as a loss of certainty,
values, or autonomy? Does such language solicit healing or indemnification?
What ideological work is done by confusion between the two?
Two other nuances of recovery are pertinent here. First, recovery also
means to gain something by the judgment of a court, a nuance that indicates
the degree to which loss is almost always embroiled with issues of justice.
Indeed, justice itself is often conceived as a kind of equilibration of gains and
losses, as evinced in the figure of the scales of justice. Both the judgments of
legal bodies and this sense of balance are (as our brief genealogy above
adumbrates) central to the conception of trauma, the parameters of which
have been defined as much legally as medically, and the remedy for which has
often been figured as a re-equilibration of psychic forces. It is no coinci-
dence, moreover, that this legality and this equilibration are central to the
maintenance of disciplinary society, to the balance produced by, and produc-
tive of, docile bodies organized usefully and legibly in space. Trauma disrupts
this order, and this order, in turn, seeks to discipline or eliminate trauma and
its effects. Second, recovery also means to obtain useful substances from
waste, and embedded in this meaning is an insight into societal attitudes
toward trauma victims. For from a societal perspective, the traumatized per-
son is tantamount to waste: worthless to a disciplinary system that thrives on
the utility of individuals, easily “disqualified and invalidated” by its hierar-
chizing operations.60
If, in the case of trauma, the aim of recovery is far from self-evident, so too
is the process through which that recovery is accomplished. Does healing
take place, clinicians have long debated, by emotional discharge or by cogni-
tively integrating the traumatic event into a life narrative? Is therapy prima-
rily a process of elimination (of pathogenic affect) or of restoration (of
memory and self)? Of forgetting or remembering? Is trauma fundamentally
an exorbitance or a lack?
Freud’s cathartic method (developed in conjunction with the hypnotic
treatments of the 1880s) conceived recovery, as the name clearly indicates, as
a purgation, as an abreaction dependent upon an adequate discharge of
pathogenic affects. On this model:
• Trauma is conceived, along the lines of infectious disease, as a kind of

deleterious substance that must be removed; not, that is, as loss or lack,
but as a surplus that must be treated by elimination.
• Insofar as the “losses” of catharsis rebalance or re-equilibrate an economic

system, they participate not only in the meaning of recovery as satisfying a
debt, but also in the structure of retributive justice that, like the “reliving”
of the traumatic event aimed at by certain therapeutic practices, endeavors
to undo harm by repeating it elsewhere.61
• The cathartic cure, governed by a notion of adequation, both implies a cal-
culability of harm and is associated with a certain and very pervasive model
of truth.
• Catharsis, adopted from the Aristotelian theory of tragedy as the “imita-
tion of an action,” inserts recovery into an economy of representation and
a problematics of simulation.62
If cathartic methods rely on emotional discharge, practices of integration, by

contrast, depend on cognitive recognition, narrative construction, and inter-
pretation. If catharsis conceives of therapy as elimination (of pathogenic
affect), integration conceives of therapy as restoration (of memory and self).
Freud’s theory of abreaction increasingly emphasized the latter, increasingly
moved from mimesis to diegesis, from a therapeutic process of purgation to
one of recollection, interpretation, and working through. Following World
War I, psychiatrists such as Charles Myers and William McDougall also
rejected the “emphasis on the emotions in hypnotic abreaction. They main-
tained that what produced the relief of symptoms was not the affective
catharsis but the cognitive dimensions of the cure.”63 This position was later
even endorsed by the pioneers of narcosynthesis, such as Roy Grinker and
John Speigel, who would conclude that “affective discharge as such was not
the essence of the cure, but the conscious integration and narration of the
historical or psychic truth of the traumatic origin.”64
On this view, trauma is directly conceived in terms of a lost object, as an
alienated memory or missing component of the self, and recovery is prima-
rily a matter of recuperation. As we have seen in the diagnostic description of
PTSD, this loss or alienation is often depicted as a “splitting” or shattering
of the ego, or as mental “dissociation.” Sándor Ferenczi was an early propo-
nent of this description, arguing that “in the moment of trauma the victim’s
psyche is split apart in such a way as to lose all psychic coherence.” As Ruth
Leys writes, “Splitting was imagined by him as the disintegration or fragmen-
tation of the psychical apparatus: the effect of shock was to destroy or disso-
ciate all mental associations and synthesizing functions.”65 Kardiner used
similar imagery, describing trauma as dissociation and loss of cognitive
integrity. But the fact that trauma is depicted as loss does not mean that a
simple recuperation constitutes “recovery” in the therapeutic sense. The
“return” of a lost memory or aspect of the self does not, unfortunately, guar-
antee its cognitive integration. Far from bearing inherent therapeutic value,
such a return may indeed constitute further trauma.
This is a point we must keep in mind in our analysis of modernity: return
does not necessarily constitute recovery. For these descriptions of fragmented
subjects bear a clear resemblance to the depiction(s) of modernity we have

evoked above: to the shattering of the Enlightenment subject, the “loss of
self” of which Marx speaks, or the “depersonalization” and “self-division”
elaborated by Fanon. But this very list is also a warning, an indication of how
simple it is, because of the similar terms used to describe these losses, to lump
them together as if they were identical, and to efface their distinct (philo-
sophical, economic, social, and racial) etiologies and their sometimes differ-
ing effects. We must, in short, remain attentive to the subtle ways that
modernity blurs these differences and to the interests served by doing so.
What is at stake, for example, in subsuming an alienation produced by colo-
nization into the “modern condition” or in offering an economic recom-
pense for an affective loss? What kind of recovery is called for by the alienated
philosopher, the estranged worker, or the victim of racism? Do their losses
bear anything in common at all?
The Scandal of Interpretation
Embedded in this question of recovery, in the question of the efficacy of

catharsis or integration as cure, is the more fundamental question of the
degree to which trauma can be represented, narrated, interpreted, or under-
stood. For trauma has often been seen precisely as a crisis of understanding
and of language (though the two are not necessarily commensurate); as a
moment when ordinary mechanisms of understanding are overwhelmed; as
a breakdown of the cognitive, affective, symbolic, and social structures that
condition meaning; as the unspeakable; as incomprehensibility itself. Ferenczi,
for example, wrestled with the fact that while the fragmentary nature of trau-
matic experience seemed to demand interpretation, “there is in the end
something that cannot, need not, and must not, be interpreted.”66 Janet
turned his attention to the way in which this breakdown was manifested in
symptoms: in disturbances of affective and cognitive patterns and in disrup-
tions of speech, self-reflection, and knowledge—a constellation of symptoms
later named “alexithymia.”67 Focusing on the collective effects of trauma,
Kai Erikson insists that these disturbances are as much social as psychologi-
cal. He notes the perception in traumatized communities, “that the laws by
which the natural world has always been governed as well as the decencies
by which the human world has always been governed are now suspended—
or were never active to begin with. Traumatized people can be said to have
experienced not only a changed sense of self and a changed way of relating to
others but a changed worldview.”68 He also suggests, in a passage that recalls
Giddens’s analysis of modern trust and its discontents, that particular kinds
of catastrophes may cause people to “doubt the findings of scientists and the
calculations of engineers” and can lead to loss of “confidence in the use of
logic and reason as ways to discern what is going on.”69
This crisis of understanding and of representation is one that is often the-

matized by the language of lamentation. It also bears a remarkable resem-
blance to the preoccupations of a body of poststructural and deconstructive
thought concerned with, for example, representation, the instability of signi-
fication, the uncertain relation of language to experience, and the fallacy of
hermeneutic notions of understanding.70 Situated at this intersection between
poststructural theory and trauma, Cathy Caruth takes the position that
trauma shatters consciousness and therefore resists representation; it can only
be witnessed where the referential functions of language break down, in its
telling aporias, in a complex relation between “knowing and not know-
ing.”71 In Caruth’s schema, however, the traumatic experience is nonetheless
scrupulously recorded and reenacted in nightmares or flashbacks that are, she
contends, “absolutely accurate and precise, [though] they are largely inacces-
sible to conscious recall and control.”72 Insisting on “the surprising literality
and nonsymbolic nature of [such] traumatic dreams and flashbacks,” she
avers that “it is this literality and its insistent return which thus constitutes
trauma and points toward its enigmatic core: the delay or incompletion in
knowing, or even in seeing, an overwhelming occurrence that then remains,
in its insistent return, absolutely true to the event.”73 These belated reenact-
ments are, then, at once “absolutely literal, unassimilable to associative chains
of meaning” and (hence) resistant to “psychoanalytic interpretation and
cure.”74 Implicitly taking post–World War II modernity as itself a kind of
trauma and suggesting, evocatively, that we rethink reference in such a way
that permits “history to arise where immediate understanding may not,”75 she
extends this conception of trauma into a theory of modernity: “Such a crisis
of truth extends beyond the question of individual cure and asks how we in
this era can have access to our own historical experience, to a history that is in
its immediacy a crisis to whose truth there is no simple access.”76
The crisis of understanding and representation that appears to be endemic
to trauma means that interpretation of traumatic experience bears the three-
fold threat of simulation, interestedness, and betrayal. These specters of falsity
lurk everywhere in clinical history and in therapeutic methods, in social dis-
courses and in personal testimonies. If the traumatic event, as both Ferenczi
and Kardiner suggest, produces “a state akin to hypnosis and at the cost of
the ego’s cognitive integrity and control,”77 and if that event, marked by
confusion, shock, and unawareness, is necessarily apprehended speculatively
and belatedly, how then is the therapist, a witness, a judicial body, or the sub-
ject him/herself to know if a representation of it is accurate? Isn’t such a rep-
resentation, like cathartic reenactment, by nature a simulation, an “imitation
of an action” as Aristotle would have it, and therefore marked by a certain
inauthenticity, by an epistemological, temporal, and affective décalage? What
is to guarantee that the representation is not total fabrication? “The problem
of the patient’s lack of confidence in the reality of the memory of the
trauma,” writes Leys, “the victim’s inability to remember, and hence testify
with conviction to, the facticity of the reconstructed event—will haunt not
only psychoanalysis but the entire modern discourse of trauma.”78 This

quandary is, moreover, historically conditioned by the fact that traumatic
symptoms were first clinically associated with hysteria, with feminine sug-
gestibility, and with the uncertain testimony produced by hypnosis. It is also
a predicament in which Freud plays a dramatic (if ambiguous) role, abandon-
ing the seduction theory and thereby relocating trauma from the exteriority
of an historical event to the interiority of primal fantasy, from the “real” to
the “imagined.”79 If the problem of simulation was first theorized as a risk
particular to cathartic reenactment, it increasingly became clear that similar
questions would bear upon integrative treatments. For how does one war-
rant the accuracy or adequation of a narrative? Is it more or less reliable than
cathartic reenactment? More or less therapeutic? And how, exactly, should
adequation be measured—in terms of facticity, perception, affect?
The swarm of questions surrounding simulation thus shades impercepti-
bly into that second threat we have noted—interestedness—the hazard, that
is, that one might fabricate a trauma or simulate its symptoms for psycholog-
ical, social, or material gain. Indeed the swampy terrain of traumatized and
reconstructed memory would seem to be the ideal breeding ground for
interested confabulation. During World War I, Paul-Charles Dubois fretted
over how to distinguish between legitimate trauma victims and “army strag-
glers” who might be fabricating symptoms to get out of combat duty: “We
do not know whether to believe in their hurts and put them in the infirmary,
or to handle them roughly and send them back to the ranks.”80 Numerous
governmental and indemnifying bodies (the German Restitution Authorities
being perhaps the most egregious example), have charged that the symptoms of
trauma can be manufactured, and such accusations of interestedness have had
a significant influence on how trauma is defined, in delimiting the parameters,
for example, of industrial disability, psychological harm, and the effects of
combat.81 In the United States, this controversy has recrudesced in debates
over “Gulf War syndrome” and, with redoubtable force, over “false memory
syndrome,” the contention that certain accusations of child abuse stem from
false memories suggestively implanted by therapists.82
This crisis of understanding and representation constitutive of trauma ren-
ders it subject to risks not only of simulation and interestedness, but also of
betrayal. The scandal of interpretation, that is, is not only epistemological,
but also ethical. Claude Lanzmann, for example, has argued for resistance to
understanding as an ethical imperative, a resistance that he took as his guid-
ing principle while making the film, Shoah:
It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews

been killed?—for the question to reveal right away its obscenity. There is an
absolute obscenity in the very project of understanding. Not to understand was
my iron law during all the eleven years of the production of Shoah. I clung to
this refusal of understanding as the only possible ethical and at the same time
the only possible operative attitude.83
These reflections on a witnessing that is a disruption of sense and understand-

ing pose a number of troubling questions: what exactly does understanding
mean in this context? Would this prohibition against understanding preclude
interpretation? Does this mean that interpretation is always a betrayal? These
questions press urgently on victims of trauma who are caught in a logically
impossible situation, assailed by an event that demands both honor (it is part
of my experience and being) and shame (it is hideous, indecent, offensive,
unacceptable). “The transformation of the trauma into a narrative memory
that allows the story to be verbalized and communicated, to be integrated
into one’s own, and others’, knowledge of the past,” writes Caruth, “may
lose both the precision and the force that characterizes traumatic recall.” The
threat of losing the event’s “essential incomprehensibility, the force of its
affront to understanding” is the “dilemma that underlies many survivors’
reluctance to translate their experience into speech.”84 But Caruth’s articula-
tion of this dilemma, which hovers indeterminately between the descriptive
and the prescriptive, runs the risk of suggesting that any attempt at interpre-
tation or understanding is necessarily a betrayal.85 And it rests on the by no
means incontestable assumptions that translation and narration are forms of
infidelity to a greater degree than they are a mode of respect, and that faith-
fulness consists in preserving an undiluted experience of the traumatic
event—the therapeutic benefit, and indeed the very possibility, of which are
dubious. Such an insistence on the inviolability of the traumatic event places
it squarely (and problematically, in my view) under the governance of the
metaphysics of the proper: unambiguously possessed, pure, literal, irre-
proachably appropriate.86 If, for Caruth, “the impossibility of a comprehen-
sible story . . . does not necessarily mean the denial of a transmissible truth,”87
it is also necessary, I believe, to ask whether it is just truth that is at stake.
What if, contrary to Platonic hopes, truth and the good life do not entirely
coincide? Which should be privileged? What if witnessing and healing do
not coincide? Which should take precedence?
The Nature of Memory
These questions of understanding and interpretation are embedded, in turn,

in questions about how trauma is remembered. We have seen that descrip-
tions of PTSD conceive of traumatic experience as characterized by dissocia-
tion and by destruction of the mind’s ordinary recording mechanisms. We
have also seen that, in Caruth’s view, “the literal registration of an event . . .
appears to be connected, in traumatic experience, precisely with the way it
escapes full consciousness as it occurs.”88 Both of these descriptions evince the
prevalent influence of dual-memory hypotheses in understanding traumatic
experience. It was Janet who, in the 1890s, first proposed that “traumatic mem-
ory” might be distinguished from “narrative memory,” the former being char-
acterized by a repetition of the past as present, the latter by a narrativization of
the past as past.89 Kardiner subsequently proposed that trauma produced a

dissociation between affect and representation, that affective responses to,
and factical memories of, traumatic experience were stored in discrete mem-
ory systems, and that traumatic dreams functioned as a kind of mechanical
replay of the traumatic experience.90 Based on these theories, as well as
empirical studies of traumatic dreams, Bessel van der Kolk has elaborated a
distinction between “declarative” memory, which involves conscious aware-
ness and the subsequent ability to narrate events, and “nondeclarative”
memory, which is more “like the memories of skills and habits, emotional
responses, reflex actions, and classically conditioned responses.”91 These
nondeclarative traumatic memories, dissociated from consciousness, are not
accessible to normal recollection, he argues, yet are recorded with incontro-
vertible accuracy and precision, engraved in the mind in a mechanical, corpo-
real manner which cannot be simulated or implanted by a therapist. The
traumatic experience, suggest van der Kolk and his colleague Mark Greenberg,
“does not get processed in symbolic/linguistic forms, but tends to be organ-
ized on a sensorimotor or iconic level” and hence does not submit well to
verbal or narrative representation.92
Leys has argued at length that this position “remains inadequately formu-
lated and weakly supported by the scientific evidence.”93 While I leave clini-
cal and scientific evaluation to others, I want to emphasize the importance of
situating this theory within a specific social history and of attending to the
theoretical difficulties it poses; both bear on analyses of modernity. Dual-
memory hypotheses need to be read as emerging in response to libidinal
theory (and its excessive emphases on childhood experiences, unconscious
desires, and psychical transformations of life events), to compensation demands
made by concentration camp victims, to the struggle for recognition of the
traumas of rape and domestic abuse, and, most recently, to charges of “false
memory syndrome.” From one point of view, then, dual-memory theory can
be read as a brake on runaway psychoanalytic speculation; from another, it
can be read as a kind of insurance for victims, for whom recognition, as well
as legal and medical redress, rest on accurately establishing traumatic events.
Both seem like laudable goals. But can we assume—as if theories with laud-
able goals were thereby confirmed—that the juridically warranted (the
“just”), the theoretically sound (the “true”), and the therapeutically effica-
cious (the “good”) will always conveniently coincide? A number of crucial
theoretical problems left in the wake of dual-memory theory would seem to
suggest a more complicated picture: first, it is a theory that does not allow for
any unconscious symptom elaboration and disregards both the history of
theorization about dream analysis and the existence of psychosocial factors in
symptom formation; second, it simply evades the threats of simulation and
interestedness, rather than engaging and theorizing them, functioning as a
kind of easy refuge from the uncertainties of interpretation; third, it makes
no distinction between kinds of trauma (between, for example, a sudden
accident, an experience of torture, or a prolonged history of isolation) and
indeed tends to focus on scenes of terror; and fourth, in positing two distinct
memory systems, it insists on a clear break between traumatic and non-
traumatic experience, between pathology and normalcy. In the context of
modernity, positing such a separate memory system—one that is literal, infal-
lible, and “absolutely true to the event”94—is also to set up a domain of lit-
erality that cannot be analyzed or critiqued (the ideological usefulness of
which is not difficult to imagine); that dodges the fate of knowledge in mod-
ern societies; that, guarded by the metaphysics of the proper, escapes moder-
nity’s reflexivity and uncertainty; and that eludes the reach of power, skirting
the disciplinary regime of modernity and its effects. A domain, in short, that
would bear the awful power of the sacred.95
Trauma as Regression
Recognition of the degree to which cognitive functions are destroyed by

trauma has led a long line of theorists to conceive trauma as a kind of regres-
sion to an infantile state, as equivalent to the pre-libidinal position of primary
identification prior to ego separation and subject-object relationships, gov-
erned by an ambivalent, incorporative binding to the mother.96 Destroying
the structure of the subject, trauma returns it to its point of earliest forma-
tion. This is a position that Ferenzci was central in proposing, “imagining the
horror-struck adult confronted with danger as reverting to the condition of
the helpless infant having to come to terms with the existence of other
objects or persons.”97 This position implies, then, that trauma returns the
victim to a moment of dependency on the mother, a state of passive subjec-
tion to the feminine which, as we have already seen, has been particularly
threatening to militarized versions of masculinity: those who succumb to
combat trauma are afflicted with an infantile weakness; they are associated
metonymically with the feminine and its hysteria.
Perhaps the most disturbing suggestion embedded in this account is the
association implied between trauma and the ambivalent processes of primary
identification. For Freud, these processes are at once a cannibalistic incorpo-
ration of the (m)other and the hostile wish to rid oneself of her. This ambiva-
lent incorporation, which involves pleasure, destruction, and appropriation,
functions as the bodily prototype for the series of psychical identifications
that will constitute personality and is the condition of possibility for all sub-
sequent object relations. In “Mourning and Melancholy,” Freud hypothe-
sizes that the pathological factor that transforms the normal work of
mourning into melancholia is a regression to primal narcissism and the con-
flict of ambivalence.98 Regression to such a stage of dependency may mean
that one comes at once to love and hate, identify with while violently reject-
ing, an aggressor, and may be particularly applicable to instances in which
there is a prior relation between a victim and perpetrator or when a victim
passes long and isolated periods of time with a perpetrator. This is a defense
mechanism identified by Anna Freud, who described subjects under threat

appropriating the aggression of the perpetrator (or other of his/her physical,
moral, or symbolic characteristics), and further developed by Ferenzci, who
proposed that “in the traumatic moment the victim’s best solution to the cri-
sis [is] not to resist but to give in to the threatening person by imitating or
identifying with him (or her).”99
The regression theory also suggests that trauma returns the victim to a
pre-linguistic stage, to barbarism in its most literal sense. This position is cor-
roborated by the functional disorganization of speech characteristic of trau-
matic neurosis and melancholy. The contemporary cognitive interpretation
of this regression is that there exist three modes of information encoding in
the central nervous system—inactive, iconic, and symbolic/linguistic—which
correspond to stages of development. As van der Kolk and van der Hart write,
“when people are exposed to trauma . . . the experience cannot be organized
on a linguistic level, and this failure to arrange the memory in words and sym-
bols leaves it to be organized on a somatosensory or iconic level: as somatic
sensations, behavioral reenactments, nightmares, and flashbacks.”100 Janet’s
earlier and more assimilative description associated the inability to narrate
characteristic of trauma not only with the infantile, but with women, primitive
peoples, and animals. He called the process of narration “presentification”
and contended that it is precisely what “animals, primitive people, young
children, and hysterics are characteristically unable to perform—animals,
because they are incapable of self-knowledge and self-representation; and
primitive people, young children, and hysterics because, owing to their unde-
veloped or degenerate or weakened mental condition, they lack the mental
synthesis necessary for paying attention to present reality and hence for locat-
ing their narratives in an appropriate temporal order.”101 We should not
overlook Janet’s suggestion that trauma entails a kind of confrontation with
the primitive; we will have cause to return to it frequently. Nor should we
overlook the degree to which European modernity and aesthetic modernism
both sought out the “primitive” as a site susceptible of exploitation or as a
refuge from modernity and its ills. Indeed, it is not difficult to hear in Janet
an echo of paternalistic colonialism—the contrast between the Enlightened,
civilized, and reasonable subject and irrational, deviant, and backward ones,
the former caring for the latter as would a diligent doctor his patient. We can
also hear the resonance of the temporal disjunctions that structure modernity:
trauma is a regression not only in individual, but in historical time, from a
Euro-modern present to an “undeveloped,” backward, ostensibly non-
Western past. It is also, significantly, a lack of presence, of the ability to present
or, in Heideggerian terms, to presence. This lack in presence, as I have argued
at length elsewhere, is one way of describing the foreign.102 Below I will
describe the moment of lamentation as a confrontation with the foreign, and
we should hear these nuances in the term: regression, the undoing of moder-
nity, a terrifying, death-like gap in presence.
But this is only part of the picture, for the “primitive” took on a double
valuation in modernity, and Janet’s depiction of trauma begins to evince
how ostensibly negative experiences (trauma, crisis, loss) might be useful
precisely to induce regression: to transport moderns to a place more inno-
cent, more authentic and “human,” to a reality less artificial and alienating,
unencumbered with civilization and its discontents. As Fanon points out,
Africa and Africans have long been called upon to provide just this service:
“now and then when we are worn out by our lives in big buildings, we will
turn to you as we do to our children—to the innocent, the ingenuous, the
spontaneous. We will turn to you as to the childhood of the world.”103
Modernism also took up this task of imparting the “primitive,” under the
inspiration of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, for example, and with the primi-
tivist experiments of Gauguin, Picasso, Modigliani, Miró, and Klee, but
also in some more subtle ways. Indeed Janet’s description of traumatic symp-
toms—of regression to a primitive state—might also describe a number of
modernist literary texts: linguistic disorder, crises of self-knowledge and rep-
resentation, lack of synthesis, disruption of a linear and progressive sense of
time. If such symptoms express regression in trauma victims, perhaps they
effect it in art. We should also bear in mind that both of these “primitive”
sanctuaries from modernity—Africans and art—also produced significant
counter-cultures within modernity. Another way of articulating this recogni-
tion would be to say that trauma is associated with the primitive, and
“primitivism,” though often judged negatively and used as a pretext for
domination, is also a vital source of critique and possibility.
Trauma as Negotiation of Normalcy
From a number of different perspectives we have prefigured the principle

that trauma is defined in opposition to the “normal,” that what is recognized
as traumatic is everywhere implicated in negotiating the borders of normalcy.
We have noted, for example, the degree to which “recovery” is seen as syn-
onymous with (a return to) normalcy, the way in which dual-memory
hypotheses must distinguish between traumatic and normal experience, and
the tenacity of debates over the normalcy of combat symptoms, as well as
over who does and does not deserve treatment or compensation. We have
also marked the way in which traumatic symptoms are perceived to share
semantic territory with the anomalous or “abnormal”: with foreigners, prim-
itive peoples, infants, women, and animals. These are all fragments of the
recognition that how we define “normal experience” excludes certain kinds
of distressing occurrences from being acknowledged as trauma and that it
legitimates, lays out the boundaries of, and creates tolerance for, “accept-
able” forms of violence or suffering. This is a formation that Fanon identified
in Algeria. Signaling the degree to which the medical establishment had, in
treating the psychoaffective consequences of torture, concentrated on the
effects on the torturer, Fanon deemed it necessary to insist (astonishingly)

that torture “upsets most profoundly the personality of the person who is
tortured.”104 Not only had the medical establishment largely ignored the
trauma of the tortured and colonized, but it was also called upon to legiti-
mate the practice of torture itself—to establish it as a tolerable, even “nor-
mal,” form of violence.105 To “cure” a native, he further recognized, meant
primarily to habituate him to the oppression of colonization, to disregard her
distress, and to legitimate the colonial system of domination. This principle
of a normalization that both excludes (from the classification of trauma) and
includes (within the tolerable) also subtends Herman’s more recent insights
that “political captivity is generally recognized, whereas the domestic captiv-
ity of women and children is often unseen” and that war trauma in men may
be normalized by “broad social tolerance for emotional disengagement and
uncontrolled aggression in men.”106 Whether such traumas can be acknowl-
edged and examined at all, she argues, depends on a broader social and polit-
ical context: “The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context
that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war. The study of trauma in
sexual and domestic life becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges
the subordination of women and children.”107
Laura Brown lays out this problem in an important critique of the lan-
guage of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM),
which, until 1994, described PTSD as originating in an event “outside the
normal range of human experience.” Recognizing, quite rightly, that such a
definition begs the question of what exactly delineates “normal human expe-
rience,” Brown stresses that
“human experience” as referred to in our diagnostic manuals, and as the sub-

ject for much of the important writing on trauma, often means “male human
experience.” Or, at the least, an experience common to both women and men.
The range of human experience becomes the range of what is normal and usual
in the lives of men of the dominant class; white, young, able-bodied, educated,
middle-class, Christian men. Trauma is thus that which disrupts these particu-
lar human lives, but no other.108
Brown’s essay asks us to consider how we constitute a traumatic event and to

acknowledge how our conceptions of trauma have been “constructed within
the experiences and realities of dominant groups in cultures. The dominant,
after all,” she argues, “writes the diagnostic manuals and informs the public
discourse, on which we have built our images of ‘real’ trauma. ‘Real’ trauma
is often only that form of trauma in which the dominant group can partici-
pate as a victim rather than as the perpetrator or etiologist of the trauma.”109
In short, when we define traumatogenic events as “outside of normal human
experience,” we exclude experiences, such as domestic abuse or racial terror,
that “occur at a high enough base rate in the lives of certain groups that such
events are, in fact, normative, ‘normal’ in a statistical sense.”110 Such a defini-
tion of trauma not only results in inadequate attention to forms of suffering
in more marginalized groups and contexts, but “sends a message that oppres-
sion, be it based on gender, class, race, or other variables, is to be tolerated;
that psychic pain in response to oppression is pathological, not a normal
response to abnormal events.”111
Dominant constructions of the traumatic have frequently been sanctioned,
as Brown’s essay suggests, by attributing some individuals’ traumatic symp-
toms to pathology, such that the fault is with the subject, rather than what
befalls him or her: with Algerians rather than colonization or torture, with
women rather than patriarchy or domestic violence, with irresolute soldiers
rather than war. Fanon notes this mechanism at work in the pathologization
of traumatic symptoms produced by colonialism. One widespread symptom
(a generalized muscular contraction) was explained as “a congenital stigma
of the native, an ‘original’ part of his nervous system” that was simply lower
on the neurological plane than the European’s.112 Likewise, resistance to
colonial domination and to brutally inequitable material circumstances were
theorized as innate criminality, a premise forged in the 1930s by Professor
Porot of the faculty of Algiers and “the subject of authoritative lectures from
the Chair of Psychiatry” for over twenty years.113 And lest we think such big-
otry belongs to a bygone age, both Herman and Brown remind us of the
degree to which the symptoms of domestic abuse have been dismissed as
characterological disorders of “willing victims.” In the 1980s, a group of psy-
choanalysts proposed that the classification “masochistic personality disor-
der” or “self-defeating personality disorder” be added to the DSM to account
for scenes of sustained abuse.114 The parameters through which we construct
trauma contribute to a discourse on “normal” life that, as Brown points out,
“imputes psychopathology to the everyday lives of those who cannot protect
themselves” from distress.115
When we reflect on this principle in the context of modernity and its dis-
courses of loss, it becomes clear that we need to examine how such discourses
acknowledge certain kinds of experience as traumatic and accept others as
“normal.” How do the traumas validated by theories and artifacts of moder-
nity delineate “normal experience”? What is excluded from their range of
concern? What kinds of distress do they tolerate? While it is evident that trau-
matic experiences are disruptive—to people, epistemologies, social orders—
we must also attend to the ways in which trauma may be useful to, and even
constitutive of, institutions of modernity such as the nation-state, capitalism,
democracy, the division of labor, social class, gender relations, or racial poli-
tics. We must attend not only to the ways in which trauma upsets
Enlightenment reason, but to the ways in which the processes that constitute
trauma are obsequiously cooperative with it, to the ways in which they par-
ticipate in those disciplinary processes described by Foucault that must, “if
necessary, disqualify and invalidate.”116 We must also ask what forms of dis-
tress are legitimated and delegitimated by late modern celebrants of upheaval,
by the aesthetic practices of modernism, or by the oppositional alarm sought
out by other épateurs de la bourgeoisie.
Disastrous Philosophy
I wish to visit, however fleetingly, three figures in modern philosophy—

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida—in part as a way of acknowledging how
they inflect my own thought, but also because they are major theorists of
modernity, all of whom regularly deploy figures of loss.
Nietzsche
Let us begin with a scene from Nietzsche, that laughing prophet of late
modernity. Coming into a town on the edge of the forest, Zarathustra finds
a crowd gathered in the marketplace; they are awaiting a tightrope walker,
and he takes the opportunity to speak to them of the overman:
What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in
man is that he is an overture [Übergang] and a going under [Untergang].
I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under [unterge-
hen], for they are those who cross over [hinübergehen]. . . .
I love him who works and invents to build a house for the overman [Über-
mensch] and to prepare earth, animal, and plant for him: for thus he wants to
go under [untergehen]. . . .
I love him whose soul is overfull [übervoll] so that he forgets himself, and all
things are in him: thus all things spell his going under [Untergang].117
Seducing into play the German prefixes unter (under, below, less than) and
über (over, above, across), this playful passage from the prologue inaugurates
the figure that runs throughout Zarathustra of destruction as a crossing
over—an overcoming. Untergang (here translated as “going under”) signi-
fies a sinking, decline, destruction, downfall, or end; the verb untergehen also
means to perish or come to an end. It is a common word for the setting of
the sun; it is the mirror of Zarathustra’s own polysemic descent from the
mountain and is both contrasted with, and the parent of, a series of “über”
terms: here, notably, Übergang (a crossing, footbridge, transition, interim),
which clearly prefigures the central role to be played by Überwindung (over-
coming, surmounting, conquering, getting over or past), as well as the
advent of the Übermensch. This deathly overture, this Untergang and Über-
gang, prepares the way for Zarathustra’s teachings on destroyers and cre-
ators. It also interrupts the parable that is its illustration: when Zarathustra’s
address ends, the tightrope walker’s performance begins, which in turn is
interrupted by a jester who, taunting the tightrope walker, admonishes him
to make way for one better than himself, leaps over him, and causes him to
fall. While Zarathustra pays tribute to the fallen tightrope walker—“You have
made danger your vocation,” he says. “There is nothing contemptible in
that. Now you perish of your vocation: for that I will bury you with my own
hands” (Zarathustra, 20)—it is with the leaping, death-causing jester that
Zarathustra identifies, an identification he affirms at the end of the prologue

with a reprise of the tropes of Untergang and Übergang: “To my goal I will
go—on my own way; over those who hesitate and lag behind I shall leap.
Thus let my going [Übergang] be their going under [Untergang]”
(Zarathustra, 24).
These puckish figures are the opening act of Zarathustra’s celebration of
destroyers and creators, which insists on the necessity of destruction and loss
to creation, to newness and authentic modernity. “Whoever must be a cre-
ator always annihilates,” says Zarathustra (Zarathustra, 59), and the text of
Zarathustra is largely an invitation to this destructive creativity. In bidding
moderns to become (law)breakers, Zarathustra seeks fellow creators, “those
who write new values on new tablets” though “destroyers they will be called,
and despisers of good and evil” (Zarathustra, 24). Not unlike the dynamism
characteristic of modernity, or the constant revolutionizing of production
described by Marx—“There must be much bitter dying in your life, you cre-
ators. Thus are you advocates and justifiers of all impermanence”
(Zarathustra, 87)—this relentlessly destructive creation is, for Nietzsche, the
very principle of life itself.
And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which
must always overcome itself. . . . [W]here there is perishing and a falling of
leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for power. That I must be struggle
and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends—alas, whoever guesses
what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed.
“Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and
my love; thus my will wills it.” (Zarathustra, 115)
The perpetual overcoming (Überwindung), which is the work of the will to

power, is also, as Nietzsche spells out in Beyond Good and Evil, the vocation
to which the philosophers of the future are called: “With a creative hand they
reach for the future, and all that is and has been becomes a means for them,
an instrument, a hammer. Their ‘knowing’ is creating, their creating is a leg-
islation, their will to truth is—will to power.”118
Also implicit in Nietzsche’s descriptions of Überwindung is a valorization
of struggle and suffering not unlike what we have witnessed in soldierly vari-
ants of masculinity, nor unlike what we will find in classical theories of nation-
alism. Indeed suffering is not to be despised, as Nietzsche elucidates in his
own version of the split subject of modernity, but, rather, creatively cultivated:
This discipline of suffering, of great suffering—do you not know that only this
discipline has created all enhancements of man so far? . . . In man creature and
creator are united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, non-
sense, chaos; but in man there is also creator, formgiver, hammer hardness,
spectator divinity, and seventh day: do you understand this contrast? And that
your pity is for the “creature in man,” for what must be formed, broken,
forged, torn, burnt, made incandescent, and purified—that which necessarily
must and should suffer? And our pity—do you not comprehend for whom our
converse pity is when it resists your pity as the worst of all pamperings and
weaknesses? (BGE, 343–44)
Aimed at a certain self-satisfied and complacently pitying bourgeois ideology,

this section of Beyond Good and Evil advocates a suffering in which the cre-
ative will dominates and activates the comfortably inert “raw material” of the
human, all too human. Nietzsche wants the dynamism of modern societies to
take hold in individuals; he wants modern man to make of himself the princi-
ple of modernity.119
But this principle of modernity is by no means to be confused with the
actuality of the sickly present. Nothing could be farther from this vision than
that small “almost ridiculous type,” that “herd animal . . . eager to please,
sickly, and mediocre” that is the European of today (BGE, 266). Indeed, for
Nietzsche, the term modern is almost always pejorative, not because moder-
nity destroys traditional values (as per Durkheim), but because it so cowardly
and deceptively clings to them. All its fuss about upheaval and transformation
is just noisy spinning in the old wheel marks of Platonic Christianity. And
what is most debilitating in this exhausted spinning is that it is a renunciation
of life, a craven betrayal of the present in exchange for an elsewhere and an
afterward. “I beseech you, my brothers,” says Zarathustra, “remain faithful
to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of otherwordly hopes!
Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are
they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary”
(Zarathustra, 13). Put otherwise, Nietzsche is less concerned with the loss of
something possessed in the past than with the loss of the present itself. The
destruction to which he commits himself is of those values that defraud
humanity of the present.
Yet however contemptuous of the denizens of modernity, Nietzsche sees
possibility in their broken condition: “Verily, my friends, I walk among men
as among the fragments and limbs of men,” says Zarathustra. “This is what
is terrible for my eyes, that I find man in ruins and scattered as over a battle-
field or a butcher-field” (Zarathustra, 138). Yet Zarathustra interprets these
“ruins” not as the wreckage of a devastated past, but as the pieces of a possi-
ble future: “I walk among men as among the fragments of the future—that
future which I envisage. And this is all my creating and striving, that I recre-
ate and carry together into One what is fragment and riddle and dreadful
accident” (Zarathustra, 139). Nietzsche’s favorite image for this uneasy
moment of possibility is the tensed bow, the “magnificent tension” (BGE,
193) of which is experienced as distress.120 This tension, the creative cultiva-
tion of distress at the heart of modernity, is, in Nietzsche’s view, infinitely
preferable to the smug moral certainty that dominates contemporary
European society. Zarathustra puts it this way:
When I came to men I found them sitting on an old conceit: the conceit that
they have long known what is good and evil for man. All talk of virtue seemed
an old and weary matter to man; and whoever wanted to sleep well still talked
of good and evil before going to sleep.
I disturbed this sleepiness when I taught: what is good and evil no one
knows yet, unless it be he who creates. (Zarathustra, 196)
This disruption of the somnolent morality of modernity is one manifestation

of the larger project of revaluating uncertainty that is central to Nietzschean
thought. “And only on this now solid, granite foundation of ignorance,”
Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil, “could knowledge rise so far—the
will to knowledge on the foundation of a far more powerful will: the will to
ignorance, to the uncertain, to the untrue! Not as its opposite, but—as its
refinement!” (BGE, 225). Might not untruth, he asks us to consider, be a
condition of life? (BGE, 202). Might not the most urgent question moder-
nity poses be the problem of the value of truth? Might not modernity be the
moment that “the will to truth becomes conscious of itself as a problem?”121
This will to uncertainty, illustrated by Zarathustra’s insistence on an over-
coming that promptly opposes whatever it creates, is also a risk, what
Nietzsche names “the dangerous perhaps”—a phrase elaborated by Derrida
as the “unheard-of, totally new, that very experience which no metaphysician
might yet have dared to think,” an inassurance suspended between decision
and the future, which “can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos . . .
in any case, the risk of an instability.”122 Such a destabilization is at the heart
of the genealogical method, which, as Nietzsche well recognizes, is likely to
be perceived as a destruction of knowledge: “Let us articulate this new
demand: we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves
must first be called in question—and for that there is needed a knowledge of
the conditions and circumstances in which they grew, under which they
evolved and changed . . . a kind of knowledge that has never yet existed or
even been desired. One has taken the value of these ‘values’ as given, as fac-
tual, as beyond all question” (Genealogy, 456). Genealogical understanding
will inevitably entail undoing the truths of moral knowledge, common sense,
and the allegedly self-evident. Genealogy will, in this sense, be destructive; it
may well be experienced as traumatic.123
Nietzsche characterizes this intractably uncertain knowledge in terms that
frequently recall our descriptions of both modernity and trauma, and that fore-
shadow our discussion of lamentation. It bears a clear similarity, for example,
to Giddens’s description of the modern “principle of radical doubt [that]
insists that all knowledge takes the form of hypotheses.”124 It entails a col-
lapse of distinctions that is not alien to scenes of trauma: “what forces us at
all to suppose that there is an essential opposition of ‘true’ and ‘false’?”
(BGE, 236). It aspires to the regressive status of the prelinguistic that char-
acterizes both trauma and the faltering language of lamentation: “May your
virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names,” says Zarathustra, “and if
you must speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her”
(Zarathustra, 36). Like lamentation, it is largely composed of questions:
“there might be a more laudable truthfulness in every little question mark
that you place after your special words and favorite doctrines (and occasion-
ally after yourselves) than in all the solemn gestures and trumps before accus-
ers and law courts” (BGE, 226). It is a song for “whoever still has ears for the
unheard-of” (Zarathustra, 24)—for, perhaps, the “unspeakable” through
which Herman analyzes trauma or the voice of lamentation arriving from the
far boundary of the real.
This anti-knowledge (to resort to a crudely utilitarian formulation) is also
a disruption of the balance of justice that bears on our analyses both of
trauma (above) and of lamentation (in the following chapter). First, as we
have seen, trauma is often metaphorized as an imbalance and hence, implic-
itly, as injustice. Recovery, concomitantly, is often conceived as a re-equilibra-
tion, a restoration of loss calculated through a quasi-juridical equation of
commensurability and adequation. Both a cause and an effect of therapeutic
notions of adequation, the parameters of trauma are often adjudicated by
courts of law, and recovery is arrived at as much by juridical as by medical
means. Second, questions of justice, as we will explore in the following chap-
ter, play a central role within the lamentation. Yet while lamentation, like a
courtroom, is largely interrogatory in structure, it poses questions it cannot
answer (which no competent advocate would). While it often demands retri-
bution, it lances judgments that remain tentative, paradoxical, invocatory. It
presents evidence and calls for witnesses, but resolutely refuses resolution.
At the heart of Nietzsche’s critique is the economic basis of justice,
which, since Aristotle, has been conceived as a species of the proportionate.
The unjust, like the untrue or the traumatic, is that which violates the prin-
ciple of proportionality, of the analogos. As Wai Chee Dimmock puts it, jus-
tice relies on “converting the world into a common measure, a common
evaluative currency, grounding the very possibility for adjudication on the
possibility of such a currency, assigning due weight to disparate things.”125
For Nietzsche, the problem is not that justice is imperfectly exercised, but
that the principle itself—which treats guilt as a dischargeable debt and ulti-
mately presumes that “everything has its price [and] all things can be paid
for”—is untenable: “the oldest and naïvest moral canon of justice”
(Genealogy, 506). The problem is with the very idiom of equalizing that
assumes that “what is right for one is fair for the other” (BGE, 339).
Zarathustra, indeed, teaches the contrary: “For me justice speaks thus: Men
are not equal” (Zarathustra, 101). Nietzsche demands—and the signifi-
cance of this demand vastly exceeds the petty chauvinisms to which his (rou-
tinely decontextualized) remarks on rank, nobility, and slave morality have
been ascribed—that we consider more rigorously in what sense(s) humans
can and should be conceived as “equal.” Should humans be taken as inter-
changeable values? Should justice be a branch of accounting? To what must
justice be blind in order to operate in such a manner? From what economic,
cultural, racial, sexual, political, educational, or corporal dynamics must its
eyes be shielded? Whom must it exempt from its measure—foreigners?
Children? The insane? Creators? Philosophers? Would it not be precisely the
incalculable or incommensurate—that is to say, the traumatic—that would be

ineligible for this justice? A justice based on “equality of rights,” Nietzsche
cautions, “could all too easily be changed into equality in violating rights . . .
into a common war on all that is rare, strange, privileged, the higher man, the
higher soul, the higher duty, the higher responsibility, and the abundance of
creative power and masterfulness,” into little more than an obliging comrade
to the delineation and enforcement of normalcy (BGE, 328–29).
The relation between (un)truth and (in)justice we have brushed by above
is also far from inconsequential. As Nietzsche gives us to understand, the
economic basis of justice is implicated in thinking as such. Conceived as
measuring or evaluating, both are based in the “most primitive personal rela-
tionship, that between buyer and seller, creditor and debtor. Setting prices,
determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied
the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a certain sense they
constitute thinking as such” (Genealogy, 506). The redoubtable force of this
cooperation between the just and the true can hardly be overstated. It is
one reason why trauma and lamentation are perceived as so threatening:
they are not only a crisis in justice, but in the equilibrium of thought itself.
Nietzsche’s critique of the economies of justice and reason, of the calculabil-
ity of loss and recovery, also returns us to a recognition with which we began
this book: that loss, which may entail destruction, obstruction, conceptual
transfer, or defeat, is rarely commensurate with itself; it can not stand as its
own equivalent. If loss serves ideological purposes, moreover, it is quite pos-
sible that this desire for equivalence, this dream of just adequation that
Nietzsche so pitilessly assaults, is also an open invitation to sleight of hand, a
golden opportunity for exchanging one (kind of) loss for another.
If the lamentation can be read as a critique of justice that intersects at key
points with Nietzsche’s, among the most significant of these points is the
refusal of this economic model of justice. While the moment of lamentation
(as I will argue below) is often characterized by the redistribution of posses-
sions both material and ideological, this redistribution is decidedly not based
on mutually determined values; it is not an “exchange.” For the lamenta-
tion there is no equivalent for the loss that it mourns; there is nothing that
can compensate for the pain it expresses. Another of these points of intersec-
tion is a denunciation of justice as a sublimation of affect—of hatred, envy,
mistrust, rancor, and revenge. Justice, Nietzsche contends, is essentially a
compromise with the anger of those directly injured. It “treats violence and
capricious acts on the part of individuals or entire groups as offenses against
the law . . . and thus leads the feelings of its subjects away from the direct
injury caused by such offenses” (Genealogy, 512). This is just the sort of sub-
limation, displacement, and abstraction that the lamentation refuses; it will
not allow its pain to be transformed into socially useful judgments, will not
allow it to be distanciated from personal relationships. On the contrary,
lamentations routinely express—though it is far too decorous a word in this
context—fury, bitterness, and hatred. They claim these affects as their own;
they are among the few possessions left in the moment of lamentation. The
lamentation clings to them, will not give them over to law.126
It is for these reasons—the philosophical poverty and vindictive silliness of
justice conceived as economic adequation (the good as conceived by the man
of ressentiment), and the well-publicized relation of justice with “truth” that
only thinly disguises its backstreet dealings with all manner of ideology—
that Nietzsche aligns himself not with projects of recovery, but with the
unbalancing gesture of trauma.
Heidegger
In Being and Time, Heidegger depicts Dasein residing in a useful, integrated,

and meaningful world where equipment is Zuhandenheit (ready-to-hand) and
Dasein is concernfully absorbed in work. But sometimes this world breaks
down, and Dasein’s everyday understanding, which largely consists in using
things, is disrupted. Heidegger theorizes three such instances—when a tool
is damaged, a tool is missing, or a foreign object appears. These conditions
interest me not only because they distinguish between different kinds of
crises, but because, unlike the theory-disturbing scenes of trauma we have
explored above, they enable a certain mode of reflection.127 All, however,
represent a breakdown of the meaningful totality of references and assign-
ments that makes the world intelligible.128 The cohesive relationality of the
world is fractured: things fall apart. This account, which is not far from cer-
tain descriptions of modernity and widely applicable to trauma, is equally
descriptive of the moment of lamentation. For, as I elaborate below, lamen-
tation customarily marks a moment in which structures of significance have
been destroyed, the materials of meaning are divested of the principle that
organizes them, and the world, suddenly foreign, demands a new kind of
attention. All are also a turn away from everyday concernful absorption in
work to deliberate reflection and analysis. For Heidegger, who presumes that
our primary life activity is hammering or chopping wood or some other form
of robust labor, this analytical stance, though disclosive, is always derived or
secondary and “operates by depriving the world of its worldliness in a defi-
nite way” (BT, 94).129 As this latter phrase suggests, decontextualized theo-
retical reflection—which Heidegger associates with metaphysics and scientific
inquiry—is itself a species of trauma; it is a privation, a disruption of one’s
familiar way of being in the world.
The happy picture of absorbed coping that, such breakdowns notwith-
standing, dominates the opening of Being and Time becomes, in Part IV,
paled o’er with the sickly hue of inauthenticity. Here Heidegger shifts from
analyzing Dasein’s encounters with an equipmental world to Dasein’s Being-
with Others and puts forward the unsettling possibility that “the ‘who’ of
everyday Dasein just is not the ‘I myself’” (BT, 150). The others that inter-
est Heidegger, and that he collectively names das Man, are, rather than the
others against which one defines oneself, “those for whom, for the most part,
one does not distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too” (BT,
154). These are the others that drain Dasein of its authenticity: “when
Dasein is absorbed in the world of its concern—that is, at the same time, in
its Being-with towards Others—it is not itself” (BT, 163). “Its Being has
been taken away by the Others” (BT, 164). This non-identity with the self
(which Heidegger, in a river of negative images, describes as loss, turning
away, cutting off, uprooting, distraction, covering up, and fleeing) bears
resemblances to the psychic alienation and loss of self characteristic of trauma.
It is also the ontological echo of the fractured, alienated subject of moder-
nity. Indeed, although Heidegger is ostensibly describing a transhistorical
ontological structure, his evidence is located unambiguously in the experi-
ence of modernity, in the context of industrialization, urbanization, mass
media, and the large-scale production of goods and tastes:
In utilizing public means of transport and in making use of information serv-

ices such as the newspaper, every Other is like the next. This Being-with-one-
another dissolves one’s own Dasein completely into the kind of Being of ‘the
Others’, in such a way, indeed, that the Others, as distinguishable and explicit,
vanish more and more. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the
real dictatorship of the “they” [das Man] is unfolded. We take pleasure and
enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature
and art as they see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the great mass as
they shrink back; we find shocking what they find shocking. (BT, 164)
Three consequences of das Man’s hold on modern individuals are particu-

larly relevant to our inquiry. First, “Dasein, tranquilized, and ‘understand-
ing’ everything . . . drifts along towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in
which its ownmost potentiality for Being is hidden from it” (BT, 222). This
tranquility, which closes Dasein off from its authenticity and possibility, bears
conspicuous resemblances both to the “sequestration of experience” that
Giddens identifies in modernity and to the banal conformities of bourgeois
modernity against which modernism reacted. Second, Heidegger, following
Kierkegaard, describes the effect of das Man as a “leveling” of the possibili-
ties of Being; this leveling plays a central role in maintaining averageness and
disciplining the extraordinary: das Man “keeps watch over everything excep-
tional that thrusts itself to the fore” (BT, 165). Here we are neither far from
Nietzschean ressentiment nor from Foucauldian discipline. Third, the every-
day self is an occlusion, absorbed in and by das Man; it will take a certain kind
of removal, a necessary loss, to unveil authentic being. The disclosure of
authentic Dasein is “always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments
and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its
own way” (BT, 167). Being (authentically) demands destruction.
Such destruction, as Heidegger elaborates over a number of texts, is enabled
by the mood of anxiety, and his analyses of both mood (in general) and of
anxiety (in particular) also illuminate the functioning of lamentation in
modernity. Dasein reveals itself in, and all understanding is accompanied by,
mood, Heidegger says, and the disclosive power of mood exceeds that of the-
ory or reflection: “the possibilities of disclosure which belong to cognition
reach far too short a way compared with the primordial disclosure belonging
to moods” (BT, 173). This is the philosophical acknowledgement of a dis-
cernment that escapes philosophy, that is often dismissed as irrational, irrele-
vant, or subjective. But in Heidegger’s analysis, mood is not only distinguished
from individual experience or feeling—it is a publicness that invades the pri-
vate; it is both external and internal—but its power is augmented by its
refusal to submit to reflection. “[Moods] are so far from being reflected
upon, that precisely what they do is to assail Dasein in its unreflecting devo-
tion to the ‘world’ with which it is concerned and on which it expends
itself” (BT, 175).
Most significant to Heidegger’s ontological project and also persistent
within the lamentation is the mood of anxiety. It arises at two crucial
moments in Being and Time—in Section 40 (the turning point of Being and
Time, where Heidegger devastates the significant world he has thus far laid
out), and at the beginning of Division II (where his transition from thinking
of Dasein as care to theorizing Dasein’s temporality pivots on “being-
towards-death”). We noted above that the disclosure of authentic Dasein
necessitates a clearing away of concealments and that this task is carried out
by anxiety. Elaborating this point in Section 40, Heidegger shows that anxi-
ety collapses the referential structure that produces significance and that
grounds the intelligibility of Dasein’s being-in-the-world. Absorbed in its
world of everyday significance, Dasein understands a doorknob as an object
with which to open a door, but anxiety reveals the doorknob as simply a
doorknob, an unrelated thing, an as such without significance. This is what
Heidegger means when he writes that “Being-anxious discloses, primordially
and directly, the world as world” (BT, 232), that this disclosure is a kind of
collapse of the world into itself in which it takes on “the character of com-
pletely lacking significance” (BT, 231). Because Dasein understands itself as
part of this world, anxiety “takes away from Dasein the possibility of under-
standing itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been
publicly interpreted. Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anx-
ious about—its authentic potentiality-for-being-in-the-world”(BT, 232).
The latter phrase should not be overlooked. If, in anxiety, Dasein loses its
everyday way of understanding, what it gains is authentic potentiality, possi-
bility, freedom: “Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for
(propensio in . . .) the authenticity of its Being” (BT, 232). Heidegger thus
prepares us for the discovery that the anxiety of lamentations is routinely
implicated in disrupting habitual modes of understanding and in disclosing
an awful freedom.
But such freedom is rarely seized; Dasein flees from the anxiety it entails,
from its indefiniteness and foreignness. For as Heidegger emphasizes, the col-
lapse of significance that accompanies anxiety is characterized by a pressing
indefiniteness that is not a stagnant nihilism, that is not, indeed, without its
resemblances to Nietzschean uncertainty. Dasein flees from this indefinite-
ness and is encouraged in its flight by a metaphysical tradition that labels such
indefiniteness foreign, insignificant, irrelevant, impure. The collapse of the
referential significance of the world is also an erasure of its familiarity, a con-
frontation with a world that has become foreign. But, as Heidegger insists,
this confrontation with the foreign is less an encounter with an “other” than
with the self, with Dasein’s essential uncanniness, its character as fundamen-
tally not-at-home in the world: “anxiety brings it back from its absorption
in the ‘world.’ Everyday familiarity collapses. . . . Being-in enters into the
existential ‘mode’ of the ‘not-at-home.’. . . From an existential-ontological
point of view, the ‘not-at-home’ must be conceived as the more primordial phe-
nomenon” (BT, 233–34). In the following chapter, I describe lamentation as
a confrontation with the foreign. We have already noted the regression, non-
presence, and threat to modernity this term signifies. Heidegger has a differ-
ent idea: the not-at-homeness with which the lamentation is preoccupied is
potentially a disclosure of authentic Being. Rather than a form of loss, the
lamentation’s unsettledness would, from this perspective, be a form of recov-
ery (of Dasein’s lostness in das Man, of authentic possibility). And authentic
being, in its unsettled, uncanny foreignness, would be a form of trauma.
In Division II of Being and Time, anxiety returns, thickened into “being-
towards-death,” from which Dasein constantly flees. Several parts of this argu-
ment are particularly pertinent to our inquiry into lamentation and modernity.
First, coming to an end, Heidegger says, can not be represented by another;
“the authentic Being-come-to-an-end [Zuendegekommensein] of the deceased
is precisely the sort of thing which we do not experience . . . we have no way
of access to the loss-of-Being as such which the dying man ‘suffers’” (BT,
282). The other’s death remains that part of being that cannot be ex-posed
or ex-pressed, the absolutely, wholly foreign, as much a scandal for ethics as
an impasse for language. Thus it is that death becomes a figure—in literature,
philosophy, and social discourse—for the unknowable or inaccessible. This is
one of the most well traveled intersections between the lamentation, which
frequently thematizes this crisis, and discursive constructions of modernity.
Second, Heidegger describes death as a possibility that is certain and at the
same time indefinite, and this depiction is, in many instances, equally appro-
priate to the circumstances to which lamentations respond. It is also among
the most metaphysically unacceptable of the lamentation’s obsessions, this
focus on a certainty that does not coincide with clarity, this proposition that
one might be perfectly sure of what one cannot comprehend. Third, “with
death, Dasein stands before itself in its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (BT,
294). This standing before death opens up a singular potentiality, one that
retrieves Dasein from the clutches of das Man and functions as the uttermost
clearing away of those concealments behind which Dasein hides from itself.
Fourth, anxiety is anticipatory; it awaits. But this waiting is neither a passiv-
ity nor a temporal emptiness; rather, it is a dynamic anticipation that opens
and reveals. The anxiety that imbues the lamentation is thus not only the mark
that lamentation is as much anticipatory as commemorative, but an indication
of the way in which lamentation may unlock the future, function as a sign of
authenticity, or elicit a passionate freedom.
When Heidegger revisits anxiety in his later work, he increasingly histori-
cizes it as a specific response to technological modernity and to the unsettled
experience modernity produces. He also increasingly associates anxiety with
an ontological stance of openness and a conception of truth as unconceal-
ment. He reinterprets, with the help of a hyphen, the resoluteness posited in
Being and Time as Ent-schlossenheit, a stance of un-closedness and, later (bor-
rowing from Meister Eckhart to dispute Nietzsche), as Gelassenheit: letting
be, an emptying out of will. He develops a notion of presencing that is
dependent upon a clearing (Lichtung). And he claims to revive a forgotten
formulation of truth—as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit), disclosedness
(Erschlossenheit), or unforgetting (aletheia). In all these notions resides a fig-
ure of loss or elimination—of concealment, closure, or forgetting—that is
both revelatory and liberating rather than harmful. In “On the Essence of
Truth,” for example, disputing the notion of truth as homoiosis, adaequatio,
or Richtigkeit (correctness), Heidegger contends that necessary and prior to
any adequation is “an openness of comportment,” a freeing up of oneself
“for what is opened up in an open region.”130 This (re)new(ed) conception
of truth entails, rather than a task of evaluating and measuring, a standing
out into the open region (an ek-sistence) that, in its essence, is freedom.
Along similar lines, in “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,”
Heidegger attempts to uncover a kind of thinking that, neither scientific nor
metaphysical, is non-calculative, that does not conceal what is with what is
demonstratable. This thinking signals both the end of philosophy (its evolu-
tion into the sciences) and a new beginning for thought: “We are thinking of
the possibility that the world civilization that is just now beginning might
one day overcome its technological-scientific-industrial character as the sole
criterion of man’s world sojourn” and recuperate the concept of truth aban-
doned at the beginning of philosophy: aletheia, an unconcealment or clear-
ing “that first grants Being and thinking and their presencing to and for
each other.”131
A breakdown that disrupts the familiar and demands a new kind of atten-
tion, a being alienated in publicness and modernity, an authenticity that
requires destruction, a mood of anxiety that also harbors freedom and possi-
bility, a notion of truth as removal: these are the contours that Heidegger
intensifies in modernity’s lamentations.
Derrida
Among the several epigraphs with which Derrida begins Speech and Phenomena
is a citation from Poe:
M. Valdemar spoke, obviously in reply to the question. . . . He now said:

“Yes; —no; —I have been sleeping—and now—now—I am dead.”132
Why this impossible, deathly voice to instigate an essay on Husserl and signs?
Derrida will spend much of his early career elaborating this idiom: demon-
strating that death—an irreducible non-presence—inheres in signification
and that this death haunts the entire philosophical tradition that has taken
presence as equivalent to being. Perhaps the most straightforward explica-
tion of this principle is to be found in his analysis of first person pronouns:
When I say I, even in solitary speech, can I give my statement meaning without
implying, there as always, the possible absence of the object of speech—in this
case, myself? When I tell myself “I am,” this expression, like any other according
to Husserl, has the status of speech only if it is intelligible in the absence of its
object, in the absence of intuitive presence—here, in the absence of myself. . . .
Whether or not I have a present intuition of myself, “I” expresses someth-
ing; whether or not I am alive, I am “means something.” (SP, 95)
Signification means without us, without our presence, without the presence
of its referent, and these absences are not only possible, but structurally nec-
essary to the functioning of language.133 Signs must continue to carry mean-
ing independently of both the intention that animates them and the objects
or events to which they refer. By choosing the example of the pronoun “I,”
which subsumes both intention and referent, Derrida not only dramat-
izes the outrageousness to which this non-presence is available, but broaches
the theme of self-presence which Husserl, and much of the philosophical tra-
dition, takes as equivalent to consciousness itself. Derrida continues:
[W]e understand the word I not only when its “author” is unknown but when
he is quite fictitious. And when he is dead. The ideality of the Bedeutung
[meaning] here has by virtue of its structure the value of a testament. . . .
Whether or not perception accompanies the statement about perception,
whether or not life as self-presence accompanies the uttering of the I, is quite
indifferent with regard to the functioning of meaning. My death is structurally
necessary to the pronouncing of the I. That I am also “alive” and certain about
it figures as something that comes over and above the appearance of the mean-
ing. (SP, 96–97)
But can this story of language really be taken to have anything in common
with death? With the loss of a loved one, the object of lamentations, or the
tragedies of modern wars? Isn’t this simply a category error that avails itself
of a metaphorical death to do the affective work of shock, of creating philo-
sophical rupture, and sensationalizing its import—the sort of conflation of
loss with absence against which LaCapra has warned? Perhaps. Derrida, to be
sure, has rarely shied away from the exorbitant. Yet to understand the stakes
of his language, to assess this warrant on death, we must, I think, fully appre-
ciate the significance of presence to the history of metaphysics. It is a history,
as Derrida shows, consistently and constitutively committed to self-presence,

which it takes as the locus of life, being, and sense. Not only are signs foreign
to this region of pure self-identity, a defiling mediation and delay, but the
non-presence that lurks in signs is the inverse of, and a threat to, the sense
and consciousness that self-presence secures—in short, an interruption of
what philosophy takes to be life itself. Whether or not we interpret the death
within signification as “real death” depends on what we take to be “real life”
and what Derrida sets out to expose is the degree to which philosophy has
taken life to be identical to self-presence.
Though ultimately carried out across a vast textual corpus, Derrida’s
deconstruction of philosophy’s faith in self-presence begins with Husserl,
who maintains the existence of a prelinguistic sense or intuition and “will
ceaselessly strive to keep signification outside the self-presence of transcen-
dental life” (SP, 31). To do so, he relies on the convention of “solitary
speech” or “solitary mental life”—an inward communication that is nondif-
ferent, identical to itself, unadulterated by alterity. But even if one speaks to
oneself, Derrida asks, isn’t one involved in an act of re-presentation, of repe-
tition and substitution that is as much an absence (of original presence) as an
object available to presence? Isn’t the idea itself—the Platonic ideal or eidos—
the “mastery of presence in repetition” (SP, 9)? “In its pure form,” Derrida
writes, “this presence is the presence of nothing existing in the world; it is a
correlation with the acts of repetition, themselves ideal” (SP, 10). And it is this
“nothing existing,” this constitutive non-presence within self-consciousness,
that underwrites Derrida’s language of death: “The relationship with my
death (my disappearance in general) thus lurks in this determination of being
as presence, ideality, the absolute possibility of repetition. The possibility of
the sign is this relationship with death” (SP, 55).
Derrida proposes, then, that “since self-consciousness appears only in its
relation to an object, whose present it can keep and repeat, it is never per-
fectly foreign or anterior to the possibility of language . . . that nonpresence
and difference (mediation, signs, referral back, etc.) [are lodged] in the heart
of self-presence” (SP, 15). “I must from the outset,” Derrida writes, “oper-
ate (within) a structure of repetition whose basic element can only be repre-
sentative. A sign is never an event, if by event we mean an irreplaceable and
irreversible empirical particular. A sign which would take place but ‘once’
would not be a sign; a purely idiomatic sign would not be a sign” (SP, 50).
From the Derridean perspective, the “irreplaceable and irreversible empirical
particular[ity]” of trauma—the exemplar of the “event”—is of a structurally,
ontologically different order from signification. An event cannot be a sign;
when it is made into a sign, through, for example, the repetitions of lamen-
tation, recovery, or justice, it has undergone an irreducible surrogacy. This
substitution is at the core of the problem of representing traumatic experi-
ence, of the threats of simulation, inauthenticity, and betrayal. It is, indeed,
little wonder that trauma is experienced as a breakdown of language, as a
moment when signs cease to function in the ordinary manner. For if we
regularly accept the substitutions proffered by language, recognizing them as

the very possibility and bearer of meaning, trauma is the moment in which
that substitution becomes unacceptable, unbearable, when experience resists
resolution into meaning.
In other words, there remains in traumatic experience, as the lamentation
will repeatedly remind us, something that is (juridically, clinically, economi-
cally, and hermeneutically) irrecoverable. It is a similar irrecoverability, an
uneven exchange in signification, that Derrida famously baptizes dif-
férance: “the economic character of différance in no way implies that the
deferred presence can always be recovered, that it simply amounts to a tem-
porary investment without loss.”134 The “deferred presence” that différance
names—“the movement of signs [that] defers the moment of encounter with
the thing itself”135—is not, then, without a significant resemblance to the
way in which traumatic events, unavailable to immediate experience, must
be belatedly constructed, or to the epistemological, temporal, and affective
disjunctures that inhere in both cathartic and narrative treatments. Indeed,
it is to Freud’s descriptions of psychic responses to trauma—the “effort of
life to protect itself by deferring the dangerous investment”—that Derrida
turns to elaborate the notion of différance, specifically, to the theory of
Nachträglichkeit that prefigures modern descriptions of PTSD as alienated
memory.136 When we recognize différance in self-presence, it also comes to
resemble other descriptors of PTSD, such as the splitting or shattering of the
ego, mental dissociation, or loss of psychic integrity. This primordial non-
plenitude within presence, this “space of repetition and splitting of the
self”—reminiscent of the interferences in self-knowledge and representation
that Janet identified in trauma victims—is for Derrida characteristic of reflec-
tive consciousness as such.137
This thought is philosophically catastrophic, and indeed Derrida often
affirms the calamitousness of his own project, warning us, for example, in
Speech and Phenomena that he is aiming at “the core of consciousness itself
from a region that lies elsewhere than philosophy, a procedure that would
remove every possible security and ground from discourse” (SP, 62). In
Grammatology, catastrophe is the trope that governs his description of the
historical irruption of writing into present speech.138 Yet in an intriguing pas-
sage, Derrida prescribes a mood for engaging this catastrophe: it is to be one
not of lamentation but of Nietzschean celebration: “It must be conceived
without nostalgia; that is, it must be conceived outside the myth of the
purely maternal or paternal language belonging to the lost fatherland of
thought. On the contrary, we must affirm it—in the sense that Nietzsche
brings affirmation into play—with a certain laughter and with a certain
dance.”139 Why the prohibition on a sense of loss in an oeuvre crowded with
images of catastrophe? Would it entail a fixation on or in the past, an unpro-
ductive melancholy, or an effeminacy? Would it exclude one from the com-
pany of Nietzsche’s “philosophers of the future”? Or does the interdiction
enforce a distinction from discourses of modernity, construct an anti- or

post-modernity?
If such questions cannot be resolved with complete certainty, what is more
certain is that Derrida’s catastrophic argument is also an epochal one—an
argument about modernity. The notion of différance, for example, is pre-
sented as “the strategically most proper theme to think out . . . what is most
characteristic of our ‘epoch.’”140 And the project of Grammatology is
described as “a question of a reading of what may perhaps be called the ‘age’
of Rousseau,” of “an historico-metaphysical epoch of which we merely
glimpse the closure” (Grammatology, lxxxix, 4). Derrida’s temporal demarca-
tions largely correspond to those we have sketched above: a modernity
beginning with “the moment of the great rationalisms of the seventeenth
century,” an era, for Derrida, in which “the determination of absolute pres-
ence is constituted as self-presence, as subjectivity” (Grammatology, 16), and
coming to a close with those seminal thinkers of late modernity—Freud,
Nietzsche, Heidegger—who undermine that self-presence and heavily inflect
Derrida’s thinking.
Now, in Grammatology, the deathliness in signs evoked above, the rhetoric
of catastrophe, and these epochal shifts converge on the theme of writing.
Writing is the site where the non-presence in signification is most acute, where
the distance from an animating intention is greatest, and where the operations
of language are thus most hazardous. Both Husserl and Saussure, Derrida
shows, retreat from this severance of signification from intuition; they script it
as crisis, as an exile “far from the clear evidence of the sense” and the “full pres-
ence of the signified,” and hence from truth (Grammatology, 40). Both privi-
lege instead the living voice, and in this they are representative of an entire
metaphysical tradition for which “the privilege of presence as consciousness can
be established only by virtue of the voice” (SP, 16). This privilege results from
the fact that, in speech, the signified seems to be immediately present in the act
of expression, to be in absolute proximity to the signifier. The prestige of the
voice is augmented, moreover, by an associative web that links it to origin, con-
science, the heart, sentiment, and the metaphorical nuances of “breath” and
“spirit,” as well as by a series of philosophically weighty oppositions in which
the voice is aligned with the temporal over the spatial, the spiritual over the
material, the natural over the artificial, the direct over the devious. “The voice
is heard (understood)—that undoubtedly is what is called conscience—closest
to the self as the absolute effacement of the signifier: pure auto-affection that
necessarily has the form of time and which does not borrow from outside of
itself, in the world or in ‘reality,’ any accessory signifier, any substance of
expression foreign to its own spontaneity” (Grammatology, 20). This interior
voice, as Derrida’s language suggests, has routinely been conceived of as pos-
sessing a singular purity; as untainted by the external, the material, the contin-
gent, and the empirical; and, indeed, as a safeguard against difference, against
all that is exterior, unnatural, or foreign.
From this perspective—and it is one that dominates an entire epoch,
beginning with metaphysics itself, but reinvigorated in early modernity when
the science of writing appears—writing is an intrusion into the intimate

union of signifier and signified, of voice and consciousness. The written
word, Derrida demonstrates, is conceived as secondary and supplementary to
the logos, to present meaning centered in the voice; if spoken language is
already a mediation of consciousness, written language, which is a transcrip-
tion of speech, is the mediation of mediation. It is fallen, cut off from self-
presence, from consciousness, from the animating intention of the live voice.
This is what Rousseau infers when he writes that “to judge genius from
books is like painting a man’s portrait from his corpse” (qtd. Grammatology,
17). It is also what undergirds Lévi-Strauss’s depiction of the entrance of
written forms into oral societies as violent and alienating. In this logocentric
tradition, writing—severed from presence and consciousness—is at once
unnatural, dangerously dissimulative, and deathly: “it is the carrier of death;
it exhausts life” (Grammatology, 17).141
While the substance of the lamentation is the living voice—it is a princi-
pally oral form—and while lamentations (through both metaphor and regu-
lated breathing techniques) draw directly on those associations of the voice
with breath, life, speech, and sentiment that Derrida marks, lamentations, as
we will see, rarely indulge the fantasy of a harmonious union between signifier
and signified. On the contrary, they often thematize the radical and ineradica-
ble distance between signifier (the name of a homeland, an emotion, the
dead) and signified, as well as the contingency, materiality, and foreignness
that Derrida associates with writing. Like writing, lamentations themselves are
often considered unnatural, dangerous, precariously close to death.
Bolstering the privilege of the voice over writing is also a well-entrenched
hierarchy of the soul over the body, one that distinguishes between the pure,
animating, spirit of expression (its “interior”) and the physical, sensible and
defiled mechanism of signification (its “exterior”):
[W]hat governs here is the absolute difference between body and soul. . . . The
word is a body that means something only if an actual intention animates it and
makes it pass from the state of inner sonority to that of an animated body. This
body proper to words expresses something only if it is animated by an act of
meaning which transforms it into a spiritual flesh. (Grammatology, 81)142
This opposition also bears on the embodiment of lament performance, and

on the lament’s defiling involvement with material matters and dead bod-
ies. It is implicated in the dense semantic web of terms derived from Latin
proprius—purity, propriety, property, identity, literality—and “the meta-
physics of the proper” that for Derrida is subtended by the logocentric
conception of the unadulterated “internal voice” of consciousness,
absolutely identical to itself.143 We have already noted these notions as cen-
tral to the lamentation, but it is a tangled web they weave: bewailing loss,
defilement, and the shattering of identity, lamentations are nonetheless
regularly implicated in the demarcation of property, processes of purifica-
tion, and the establishment of identity.
Chapter 2

“A n d t h e Wo m e n Wa i l e d i n A n s w e r” * :
Th e L a m e n t Tr a d i t i o n
Women shriek. They tear their hair and clothing, scratch at their faces and
beat their chests. They sway hypnotically and sometimes dance wildly, as if
possessed. They scream out questions without answers, repeat themselves,
call for vengeance. They will not be consoled. At times, their sobs, moans, and
sighs compose themselves into song, into a searing melody or a mournful
antiphony. They summon us to witness, but they seem mad. Unwashed and
unadorned, they rub grime on their faces; they are alternately despondent
and angry; they breathe unnaturally. They seem caught up in something both
intensely sacred and dreadfully pagan, in an obscene exposure of women, their
bodies, emotion: of the private in a public place. One is tempted to recoil, as
if from contamination; one senses that the anguish will spread.
How, then, do we respond to such a scene of lamentation, which invokes
us as insistently from the margins of modernity as from the distance of
Athenian tragedy? It is, to be sure, a rich and diverse tradition, incessantly
reinvented in various times and places.1 In much of the modern world—and,
conspicuously, in that part of the world that presumes to dictate the meaning
of modernity—such practices have been left in the dustbin of history, disdain-
fully discarded with other forms of superstition and residues of the primitive,
replaced by medicalized and professionalized responses to death—by
Giddens’s “expert systems,” discreetly sequestered from everyday experi-
ence.2 There are, however, a number of regions where women’s lament prac-
tices have remained strong into modernity—Greece and North Africa,
Ireland, Eastern Europe, Finland, and the Baltic region, as well as in some
immigrant communities in Europe and the Americas. But these practices
* “Epiv dev stevnaconto gunaivke~”: the customary Homeric phrase marking lament.
remain in the margins of modernity both geographically and temporally; they

are primarily rural rather than urban and often disparaged within the com-
munities where they exist, considered an embarrassing anachronism in the
pursuit of modernity, a manifestation of ignorance, an impious indulgence in
pagan rites.3 Rather than attempt to enclose the richness and diversity of the
lament tradition in strict generic terms, I wish to suggest a series of descrip-
tive propositions that seek to identify where lamentation emerges and how it
functions as (among other things) a counterculture of modernity, an extrain-
stitutional meditation on trauma, and a disruption in and of philosophy.
Lamentation is a ritual performance.
To say that the lamentation is a ritual performance is, on the one hand, to say
that it is a public, communal form, that it depends on collective participation,
and that it performs certain tasks within a community. “The lament for the
dead is essentially functional,” writes Margaret Alexiou.4 It is necessary for car-
rying out certain fundamental tasks of dealing with the dead: aiding the psy-
che in leaving the body and journeying to the underworld, attracting the
attention of the dead and communicating with them effectively, assuring that
the dead are satisfied and will not inflict harm on the living. Women adept at
performing laments are, in many societies, perceived to have the ability to
communicate directly with the deceased and to function as mediators between
the dead and the living.5 Angela Bourke, in her study of Irish laments,
casts the lamenter as a grief therapist, leading the community through the
stages of grief described by Kübler-Ross.6 Considered within the history of
trauma we have sketched above, lamentation might be said to incorporate
both cathartic and integrative methods of healing, moving between hypnotic
emotional release that functions as abreaction and fractured narrations that
endeavor to integrate the traumatic event into a larger interpretative frame-
work. Like responses to treatment, lamentations are often judged by a com-
munity in terms of (emotional and narrative) adequation, on an informal
calculation of the true and the just. 7
On the other hand, to say that the lamentation is a ritual performance is
to say that it may or may not be coincident with personal grief. While the lan-
guage of lamentation expresses the cognitive upheaval of crisis and the confu-
sion of world-shattering grief, the degree to which that expression represents
the feelings of individual performers will necessarily vary. Professional mourn-
ers—women skilled at lament performance and at evoking grief responses in
others—have been employed since antiquity. And many women readily tes-
tify to the necessity of focusing on personal pain in order to acquire the req-
uisite emotion for performance, a deliberative concentration not unlike that
deployed clinically to induce re-enactment of a traumatic scene, disclose
repressed memories, and effect abreaction.8 Experience of loss, such scenes
seem to teach us, is not necessarily spontaneous, may, indeed, preclude
“A n d t h e W o m e n W a i l e d i n A n s w e r ” 47
spontaneity. Ritual lamentation, further, not only expresses grief, but is an

expression intended to produce grief. A well-performed lament, even when
recited long after the event of loss or performed by hired mourners, should
evoke grief in participants and observers alike. The lamentation is performa-
tive, then, not only in the sense of creating a spectacle but also in the linguis-
tic sense of performativity as it has been developed by theorists such as Butler
and Bhabha to include “the reiterative and citational practice by which dis-
course produces the effects that it names.”9
It is quite possible that performativity in this latter sense is conditioned by
the nature of trauma itself. Marked by confusion, shock, and unawareness, a
traumatic moment is necessarily apprehended speculatively and belatedly.
“Massive trauma precludes its registration,” writes Dori Laub; “the observ-
ing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked
out.”10 Indeed we have seen this depiction of psychic fragmentation, of shat-
tered cognitive and perceptual categories, throughout the history of trauma.
That apparently simplest of questions—what happened?—turns out to be the
most difficult; attempting to answer it is a task as central to the lamentation
as it is to trauma therapists. But the “knowledge” thereby established, as
Laub avers, “is not simply a factual given that is reproduced and replicated by
the testifier, but a genuine advent, an event in its own right.”11 The traumatic
event and a language, like lamentation, that responds to it are thus not easily
distinguished, for the language of lamentation cannot simply record catastro-
phe, but must also speculatively construct it. The traumatic moment is thus
simultaneously phenomenal and rhetorical, recorded and produced by the
language of lamentation; and the language of lamentation is simultaneously
representational and performative, both a record, and the creation, of the
traumatic moment. It is quite possible, then, that by miming the gestures of
lamentation—and thereby reproducing the symptoms of trauma—that social
or literary texts may fabricate trauma: the gestures of a language that represents
trauma may rhetorically effect trauma, may function, that is, to construct use-
ful and interested catastrophe under the guise of merely recording it.
We cannot retreat from the fact that these recognitions place us on the
precarious terrain of the threefold threat we have sketched above: of simula-
tion, interestedness, and betrayal. Much like the authorities who have sus-
pected trauma victims of interested confabulation, anthropological culture
collectors have questioned the authenticity of the emotions expressed in
lamentations. Aili Nenola-Kallio, in his study of Ingrian laments, suggests
that “the descriptions of grief, ill fortune, and anxiety” tend to be extended
and exaggerated in the manner of lyrical poetry, “so that it is sometimes dif-
ficult to determine from the text itself of the lament how serious or concerete
the pain is which the lament sets out to interpret”;12 and the formulaic lan-
guage of the laments (which I explore below) lead him to ask, “How genuine
are these laments, therefore? Are they in fact a form of rhetoric, demonstra-
tions of lamenting skill for some ready audience?”13 But it is crucial to appre-
ciate, I would argue, that it is precisely because lamentation is the site of
devastating and very real bewilderment that it is susceptible to ideological

appropriation; because its pain can never be disinterested that it lends itself to
use; because it carries an imperative of fidelity that it is ideologically potent.
Lamentation can, on the one hand, be simulated and genuine; it can also be
interested and genuine. On the other hand, it may be simulated and com-
pletely disingenuous, interested and entirely contrived. In short, simulation,
interestedness, and betrayal are no more certain signs of falisty than sincerity
is a guarantor of truth. Genuineness and authenticity cannot shake off ideo-
logical interest, any more than ideology can function without constructing
authentic experience.
In addition to expressing and producing grief, lamentations perform
other social functions: they are, for example, instrumental in the construc-
tion of oral history and of the identity of the deceased person or lost object.
These are tasks that, particularly in smaller communities, may carry large sig-
nificance; they may contest written records or refuse the official story prof-
fered by governments or other institutions. Lamentations are also expressions
of social status: the greater the number of people gathered for mourning, the
greater the dignity and status bestowed on the dead and on his or her family.
Maniat women (in mainland Greece) distinguish between the “silent” or
“naked” death when few mourners appear and the good death characterized
by “fanerosi”—the appearance of kin and community members.14 In North
Africa and the Arab world, the more beloved or more socially important the
deceased, the higher the pitch of wailing. In his 1926 ethnography of
Morocco, Edward Westermark recorded that “when a person mourns for a
superior, he howls with all his might; for an equal, his noise is not quite so
loud. Chiefs give vent only to a few sighs, unless it be for another chief.”15
Lamentations are also widely linked to the right to inherit. In Greek tradi-
tion, participation in mourning was expected of all who would inherit and
could be used as an argument for inheritance; laws passed in fifth-century
Crete and Athens restricted lamentation to immediate kin, ostensibly to limit
property claims.16
While laments are first and foremost a ritual performance honoring the
dead, they are also sung for weddings and for the departures attendant upon
migration, exile, or military service. Indeed, in the idiom of lamentation,
these events often metaphorically participate in, and are apprehended
through, each other: death as a marriage, marriage as exile, exile as death.17
Consider, for example, the following lament from Arkadi, recorded by
Sotirios Chianis:
Who doesn’t know death, doesn’t cry for the dead, my Vasso
And who doesn’t know foreign lands doesn’t cry for those abroad, my little
Vasso . . .
Ah! I know about death and I cry for the dead, my little Vasso,
Ah! I know foreign lands and cry for those abroad, Vasso, my Vasso.18
Or the following lines from a Palestinian lament:

Why does the maiden depart so sadly?

They walked with a wedding canopy past the graveyard.19
Laments are also composed for the fall of cities or for national tragedies, and
here too one finds a remarkable figural intersection: the loss of a loved one
expressed as the destruction of an entire universe—a “cosmos shaken and
restructured by death” as Caraveli-Chavez puts it20—as in this lament for
Druze leader Sultan Basha:
The hero has died, darkening our hope and likewise the moon
The east has lost one of its foundations.21
Or in this Maniat woman’s lament for her brother and parents:
Yesterday at night,
The earth was shaking,
The winds blew and things were overturned
in my father’s house.
The foundations had been shaken,
but now the roof is gone too,
and the bad fate is fulfilled.22
A city or nation, concomitantly, may be addressed as an intimate loved one,

as in the Hebrew “Lamentations of Jeremiah”:
O wall of the daughter of Zion,

Let tears run down like a river day and night:
Give thyself no rest;
Let not the apple of thine eye cease.23
If, moreover, the lamentation is primarily an oral and performative mode, it

is also the site of a long and mutually enriching relationship with written
texts. Greek tragedy, Arabic poetry, and Irish narrative, for example, all draw
on the lament tradition and influence it in turn. Certain lamentations com-
mitted to writing—the Biblical Hebrew lamentations, the laments found in
Greek epic and tragedy, or the Shi‘ite lamentations of Zaynab for the prophet
Hussein—have had a particularly widespread influence on oral performances,
and orally composed laments may take phrases or imagery directly from
them. This dialogue between oral and written forms is also a dynamic inter-
section between popular and learned art forms. Indeed, lamentations are
often characterized by a singular mixture of archaic and vernacular expres-
sions, of elaborate classical locutions with disarmingly simple demotic decla-
rations.24 Both Hifni (in the Arab context) and Tolbert (in Finland and
Soviet Karelia) have noted women’s ability to skillfully deploy classical
expressions whose literal meaning they do not know. This productive entan-
glement with written forms means that lamentation has wended its way
through a number of genres: it is appropriated by epic and tragedy, and
appears intermittently throughout the history of narrative and lyric poetry.25

It is perhaps thus best conceived as a mode—a manner, a disposition, a red
thread woven through other texts and discourses—rather than a discrete
genre unto itself.
Yet despite its itinerancy, the lamentation diverges distinctly from other
mortuary forms such as the elegy or funeral oration. The most fundamental
difference between lamentation and elegy is that between ritual performance
and written text, between a communally constructed expression and an indi-
vidual elegaic voice. But there are other striking differences as well. The
classical elegy, for example, often takes the form of a consolatory or compen-
satory structure; it is often set in pastoral surroundings that promise seasonal
rebirth; it focuses on the deceased, usually valorizing him/her, replacing
him/her with an ideal image. The lamentation, by contrast, refuses consola-
tion; it judges recovery impossible and compensation obscene; it will not let
the horror of death be permuted into aesthetic value or political glory; it is
imbued with an unresolved melancholy and dread. “O loved one, what
you’ve broken in me, sixty thousand years will not mend,” cries one lament
from bedouin Egypt.26 The Hebrew lamentations, similarly, close with
unqualified despair addressed to an apparently unresponsive Yahweh:
But thou hast utterly rejected us;

Thou art very wroth against us.27
The lamentation also focuses, rather than on praise of the deceased, on the
anguish of those who lament; it addresses the dead directly, sometimes with
as much anger as sorrow. A widowed Palestinian woman laments:
Your cousins turn against me; perhaps they never loved you
Where should I stand; from whence should I call you and from whence will you
answer
He who said my beloved is like my father
Is lying and should be mistrusted . . .
Your death left us without a wall to lean upon
Nor even a ladder.28
Another cries:
Because of you I lost my heart

And my raven hair eclipsed to white
Our sooty clothes don’t suit anyone . . .
My family has forsaken me and my friends abandoned me
I wander between loneliness and my neighbor’s wall
My evil neighbor has deserted me.29
Lament often emphasizes not only the mourner’s distress, but how that dis-
tress will be unremittingly preserved:
And if my teeth should desire to smile, I will break them on stones of basalt
If my hair needs combing, I will comb it with thorns.30
Indeed, laments may be used to express longstanding bitterness and anger,

to settle old scores, as in the following example from Greece:
The old bitch used me up

Fotos’ mother and grandma
and Fotakos’ mother-in-law.
And half-brother Fitilianikos
hung me over the cliff
by a length of cheap string
at Pounta on Makyrna shore
that cuts the boat ropes up.
He left me to eat dry weeds
And drink the brackish water.31
The elegy is historically a form written by men and about men, the lamen-
tation composed by women and expressive of their experience. Alexiou
notes that “early extant elegies range from sympotic to political and military
in content, but none is addressed to the dead or even remotely mournful in
tone”; elegiac inscriptions, she writes, bear a tone that “is detached and
impersonal, almost serene, and in no sense like a lament.”32
This division associating women with a popular tradition and men with a
literary one also holds for the funeral oration. “Both the epitaphios logos
(funeral oration) and the epikedeion,” writes Alexiou, “have their origins in
the literary rather than the popular tradition of the classical period. . . . Both
composition and delivery belonged to the men.”33 A fifth-century invention,
of which Pericles remains the standard, the epitaphios logos is an encomium
traditionally delivered after burial and is largely concerned with making death
useful for the state—with “telling the living how to remember the dead,” as
Holst-Warhaft puts it.34 She also notes that “by avoiding the common verb
apothanein (to die), and replacing it by the formula andres agathoi genome-
noi,” the funeral speeches “placed the citizen soldiers that fell in combat in a
realm of glory beyond the reach of death.”35 This expedient conversion of
loss into gain “is in direct opposition to the lament of the female relatives,
who . . . mourn their personal loss in terms of emotional, economic, and
social deprivation, and look on death as an enemy,”36 as does this Ingrian
lament:
I cannot bear seeing

how deserted my fireplace is
how quiet my fields are
because the elder has gone from my fields
because there is no one to hurry on with the summer jobs.37
It is evident from these examples that some responses to death and catastro-
phe are more socially acceptable than others. And indeed, where lamentation
practices exist in modernity, they have survived a long history of repression

and discipline by religious prohibition and state laws, as well as by domesti-
cation into rituals amenable to the purposes of religions and states. It is not
difficult to understand why lamentation rituals might be viewed as threaten-
ing to patriarchy, social order, or religious belief. They are, after all, a dis-
turbing and disruptive spectacle; they indulge in an irrationality that borders
on madness; they mess with the paranormal, if not outright sorcery, refuse to
resolve into useful knowledge, spread grief, anger, and dread. Islam and
Christianity both have imposed restrictions on lamentation, have deemed
such performances not only contaminated by their pagan roots, but inappro-
priate to a religion that promises an afterlife. The Prophet, for example, is
recorded as saying
that he was vexed “with the person who rends hair in misfortune, and raises his
voice in crying, and rends the collar of his garment,” and that “a corpse over
which lamentations are made will be punished on account of them on the day
of resurrection.” Affliction should be borne with patience, and so far as the
dead person is concerned there is no reason to lament his fate. Though dread-
ful to an infidel, death is a favour to a Moslem, who gets rest in death from the
vexations of the world and arrives at God’s mercy.38
In Morocco, Westermarck noted that “the scribes try in vain to persuade the
women in general to give up these customs” and that men often spoke “with
much contempt of the women’s behavior at funerals,” accusing them “of not
knowing their religion; they called them heathens or Jews.”39 Abu-Lughod
notes that in Egypt lament practices are “disapproved of by learned religious
authorities,” “share an uneasy relationship to Islamic piety,” and that “peo-
ple often said that it was wrong (haram) for women who had been on the pil-
grimage to Mecca to lament.”40 She records an example of a disconsolate
mother mourning her son, who “was told by her sister-in- law to wash up
and return to her religion.”41
“Excessive” lamentation was also deemed blasphemous by Christian church
fathers such as St. John Chrysostom, who condemned the practices of hyp-
notic dancing and of tearing hair and clothes, as well as the “self-centeredness”
of the language of lamentation. In a phrase that uncannily anticipates clinical
depictions of trauma 1500 years later, he refers to lamentation as a “female
disease.” In the seventeenth century, the Church of Ireland passed a number
of laws aimed at limiting lamentation and threatening women who keened
with excommunication.42 If the Orthodox Church has been more lenient in
tolerating lamentation rituals—which partially accounts for the geography
of survivals—it nonetheless remains officially opposed to them. A fascinat-
ing scene from Greece, described by Seremetakis, shows this ambivalence
played out in a richly significant discursive struggle over the dead. While the
priest’s “aesthetically, stylistically, and ideologically antithetical” funeral chant
initially silences the women’s lamentations during the mourning ceremony, at
the graveside the women’s lamentation begins again and culminates in an
acoustic and discursive confrontation between lamentation and Byzantine

funeral chant, women and priest—a confrontation that, according to Serem-
etakis, “reproduces the tensions and antagonisms that are present in the lives
of the mourners: the opposition between men and women, between religious
or scientific rationality and local forms of divination, between clan and exter-
nal institutions.”43
In the ancient world, philosophers added their voices to this chorus of
condemnation. Plato contends that wailing and lamentations “are useless to
decent women, let alone to men.” In tragedy, he says, they should be given
to disreputable women characters, “so that those whom we say we are bring-
ing up as guardians of our state will be ashamed to imitate them.”44 And
Plutarch, in a series of familiar oppositions, states: “mourning is something
feminine, weak, ignoble: women are more inclined to it than men, barbarians
more than Greeks, commoners more than aristocrats.”45 Laws in ancient
Athens intervened in lamentation rituals to regulate inheritance and, ostensi-
bly, limit women’s informal influence on property decisions.46 Solon’s laws
also attempted (fairly unsuccessfully it would appear) to regulate women’s
lamentations by prohibiting the practices of self-laceration and soiling the
clothing, of reciting dirges (threnoi), and of lamenting anyone other than the
immediately deceased. A fear that lamentation might spread? That its anguish
and disorder, its rage and uncertainty might run dangerously out of control?
Such an anxiety also seems at play in later regulations that placed time limits
on mourning and excluded women from the funeral procession, restrictions
that increasingly contained lament within the private, interior, and tempo-
rary.47 This domestication of mourning is, in Loraux’s view, “the civic way of
assigning limits to the loss of self, limits that for women are the familiar walls
of the oikos. The reasoning is that the oikeion penthos (one’s own, private
mourning) must not contaminate the city.”48 There are reasons for this:
women’s lamentations, which refuse the conversion of death into state
glory—into heroic, manly virtue and kleos—are contrary to the needs of the
state. Mothers lamenting in the streets are conducive to neither maintaining
an army nor carrying out a war. Solon’s restrictions on lament are also part
of a larger regulation of women’s festivals that increasingly assigned them to
the oikos, increasingly enforced an association of women with privacy, interi-
ority, emotion, what should properly remain unexposed.
It is not by law alone that lamentation has been disciplined, but by coop-
tation: by acquisence to forms that support the needs of religions and states.
The Christian church, for example, not only assumed control of the funeral
litany, but absorbed traditional lamentations into the Holy Week ceremony,
into the lament of the Virgin Mary for her son, some versions of which draw
directly on the Greek lamentations of Hecuba, but which are sung, deco-
rously and solitarily, by a priest. In Shi‘ite tradition, while lamentations for
Hussein have retained their spectacle of anguish, they have largely been
taken over by men who perform them in public space and as part of official
celebrations.
In the modern world, the greatest regulator of lamentation is incon-

testably modernity itself. It is increasingly difficult to find societies where
lamentations are not pathologized or otherwise disciplined by a teleological
modernity that is viewed as not only inexorable but “improved,” “efficient,”
“enlightened,” “better.” In this context, which comprises much of the con-
temporary world, lamentations are an embarrassing leakage of those “resid-
ual categories” against which modernity defines itself, a sign that one is
“backward.” Lamentation practices are, to be sure, incompatible with a cer-
tain dominant conception of secular modernity, its valorization of instrumen-
tal reason and individual agency, and its vigilance against eruptions of the
irrational or superstitious. Lamentation does not participate in that time-
space distanciation by which Giddens describes modernity, is not disembed-
ded, is a defiant refusal of the sequestration of experience. It is an overt and
discomforting admission that human knowledge has not mastered the forces
of nature. It is where modernity cannot recognize itself.
Lamentation is gendered.
It is no coincidence that the regulations we have been noting, as well as the

condemnations of Plato and Plutarch, are, without exception, gender spe-
cific; nor that formalized responses to death should have separated into rela-
tively distinct gender-specific genres. These gender markings are indicative of
the way in which mortuary labor has traditionally been divided by gender. In
many societies, women have the more physical relation with death and are
responsible for washing and preparing the body for burial.49 They are often
in charge of visiting graves, and the graveyard may be one of the few public
spaces they control or in which they are permitted to appear. The funeral
procession, by contrast, is often reserved for men; women may be prohibited
from joining it at all or be obliged to follow the men and remain silent. This
division extends into symbolic labor as well. Prescriptions on mourning
dress, for example, seem to be primarily aimed at women. Traditionally, in
North Africa it is a widow (though not a widower) who is obliged to dress
in white, refrain from wearing jewelry or cosmetics, and from washing or
bathing. This gender divergence pervades the form and content of lamenta-
tions themselves, which are markedly different for men and women: wailing
is usually less intense and of shorter duration for women and governed by
different imagery.
But the lamentation is gender marked above all by its unmanly grief, its
“hysteria”—a motif one encounters in ancient laws as well as in modern
descriptions of trauma. Violations against Athenian restrictions on mourning
were treated by the gunaikonomos, the magistrate for women’s affairs, and
this included penalizing men who mourned excessively, who were “over-
come by unmanly and effeminate passions”50—a judgment strikingly similar
to those of the World War I shell-shocked soldier’s “childish and effeminate”
behavior. Though separated by millennia, both these attempts to discourage

the expression of trauma emerge in the context of war, when it is crucial to
maintain belief in recovery: in the possibility of obtaining useful substance
from waste. But there is more to this story of femininity and the expression
of trauma than simply military demand. For as we have seen, the shattering of
cognitive and perceptual faculties attendant upon trauma, has, throughout
its history, been conceived as a kind of regression to an infantile state, a state
that is “feminine” because it is both logically immature and governed by a
scene of maternal dependency, of passive subjection to woman. During
World War I, as Leys shows, “the mother, conceived as the mesmerizing
‘object’ of the suggestible child’s first passionate identificatory tie, was scape-
goated as the source of her son’s ‘feminine’ hysteria and lack of virile courage
in actual battle.” The war neuroses were described as “a repetition of the
child’s earliest reaction to the threatened loss” of the mother.51 The lamen-
tation, moreover, dramatizes precisely those aspects of trauma that mime a
pre-linguistic state—cries, bodily expressions, a functional breakdown of
speech—characteristics that, as we have seen, Janet associated with animals,
primitive peoples, and women. Lamentation, in its femininity, is also
thereby primitive, animalistic, a threatening inversion of logos: of the speech
and reason which are the foundation of the polis and which distinguish one
from the barbarian.
The gender inflections of the lamentation are nourished by a vast and
unwieldy field of metaphoric and metonymic infection. It is a field that con-
nects women with death because they are already associated with birth,
attuned to painful separations. And this seems to assign them “naturally” to
the role of overseeing rites of passage. Just as it is woman’s place to usher one
into the world, so it is hers to guide one out, to be a mediator between being
and non-being, and to inhabit the ambiguous space between them. Women
likewise seem the natural proprietors of lamentation because they are on
familiar terms with suffering. Indeed, they often employ the lament to express
their own suffering, whether or not it has directly to do with the death or
catastrophe ostensibly being mourned. “A common category of grievances,”
writes Caraveli-Chavez of the Greek context, “is that of afflictions peculiar to
women in a male-dominated social structure: widowhood and the ensuing
loss of social status, desertion by male relatives who had acted as protectors,
either by emigration or by death, sufferings wrought by childbirth or child
raising.”52 Similar sentiments are expressed in this Ingrian lament:
I have brought up my children with great pains.

If I had a son, he would be some protection for me; but I have only daughters
My only support is a [beggar’s] staff.
I was widowed young, and thought I would suffocate of grief.
I was left with a horde of children.
With tears I have brought up my children.
I had to go into service, and my tears poured like a stream.
My children were left on the village streets, without protection.53
So bound are these notions of woman and suffering that the lament often
employs woman as a metaphor for suffering. A classic example is the first
of the Biblical Lamentations, where Zion is personified as a widow and
bereaved mother with no one to comfort her; as a defiled, “menstrous
woman”; and as a virgin “trodden . . . as in a winepress.”54
One does not have to travel far to find other well-forged links: of women
and death with the irrational, the improper, or the foreign, links that both
depend on and reinforce each other. To speak of the incomprehensibility of
disaster or death, or of the destruction of cognitive systems characteristic
of trauma, is to recognize their exteriority to logical systems. This is a place
familiar enough to women—they have often been perceived as external to
logos, rationality, science, enlightened thought, mental soundness—and the
lamentation sustains this association through its disordered and fragmented
speech, its unruly thought, and its corporal imagery of confusion. This disor-
der, fragmentation, confusion, and materiality are, as we shall see, tantamount
to philosophical impurity and regularly associated not only with women, but
with the primitive, the uncivilized, the infantile, and the barbarian. The irra-
tionality of women and their lamentations also shades readily into the seman-
tic domain of the improper. Women’s unwashed bodies and their disheveled
hair, their wild movements and screaming in the streets, their exposed and
injured flesh—what in Greek is termed the condition of anastasoi—are
socially unaceptable; they reenact the disruption of social order produced by
death or catastrophe. “It is through this imagery of bodily disorder and
movement that women not only establish their shared substance with the
dead but also establish themselves as the iconic representatives of the dead in
the world of the living,” writes Seremetakis.55
Indeed it might be argued that nothing is more im-proper than death; for it
is precisely the annihilation of the proprius: of what is one’s own, special, par-
ticular, characteristic; of what is lasting or permanent, and (uniting the prog-
eny of this potent Latin father) of identity, propriety, purity, literality, property.
These nuances pervade the lamentation, which concerns itself not with one
lost object among others, but with that which is most one’s own, most famil-
iar, most constitutive. It is precisely the semantic and phenomenal domain of
the proper on which women have historically had only a tenuous or an indi-
rect hold: on identity, straightforward speech (literal or “proper” meaning),
property ownership, philosophical or material purity (irrationality as much as
menstruation and childbirth constituting defilement). Nor are these nuances
far from the trope of the foreign; they are symptoms as much of the lamen-
tation’s contact with foreignness as of the tenacious conceptions of women
as foreign and foreigners as feminized.56
When Seremetakis speaks of lamenting women establishing their “shared
substance with the dead” she evokes not only the disorder and impropriety
they reenact, but the mysteriousness and quasi-magical power that attaches
to the lamentation. For insofar as women are perceived to share semantic
properties with death or to have privileged contact with the dead through
their lamentations, insofar as this intimacy with death incites unease, insofar
as lamentations raise the spectre of the supernatural or, simply, the inexplica-
ble, lamentations place a certain frightening power in the hands of women.
In some contexts, this power is connected to precisely formulated fears about
the kinds of retaliation the dead might take if not treated well, about the
magical potency of laments themselves or of the material tokens of death; in
others, it functions by way of the vaguest uneasiness, through unwelcome
imaginings that haunt the vicinity of death. A scandal to science and reason,
the lamentation invokes possibilities that remain unverifiable, exasperatingly
impervious to their address.
This formidable social power women have not failed to put to use. As
Seremetakis writes eloquently of Maniat women: “When the ‘whisper’ of
death comes, these bent women, creatures of the back alleys, stand up. They
stretch their upper body and throw the head back, pulling out their loosened
hair. They raise fists against the sky, beating their chests in anger, scratching
their faces, screaming. It is then that one sees Maniat women in their full
height.”57 While performing lamentations, women’s bodies are made visible,
their pain is made audible, and their labor becomes politically and culturally
transformative. We have seen indications of this cultural power in the history
of restrictions containing lamentations; there would be no need for such reg-
ulations if lamentations were politically innocuous. Indeed, as Loraux has
shown, the unforgettable grief of lament may constitute a primal enemy of
the state and may be a privileged example of those practices and emotions
against which ancient cities defined the political. Certainly, in the case of
Athens, it constituted a sufficiently significant challenge of civic order that it
required effacement. In Rome, Fabius Maximus silenced women’s laments
by confining matrons to their homes after the defeat at Cannae; Plutarch tells
us that “During civil conflicts, it even happens that women are forbidden to
mourn . . . or that mothers’ tears are likened to a crime of conspiracy against
the empire and are punishable with death.”58
We have also seen women take the expressive opportunity that lamenta-
tion affords to articulate their own concerns, to air their grievances and give
voice to their indignation and suffering—matters that often prevail over
praise of the deceased. Seremetakis has demonstrated the way Greek women’s
laments not only express such concerns, but construct historical truths and
render juridical decisions. Ratified by the affective potency of pain, such
judgments historically either reinforced or contested the verdicts of the all-
male juridical council (the “yerondiki”) on issues such as “revenge code
killings, inheritance and other property disputes, marital relations, and kin
obligations.”59 An exceptional opportunity to participate in public dialogue,
women’s lamentations sometimes resolve into direct political commentary or
calls for action. They may rebuke local or national authorities, police, physi-
cians, God, or any other party deemed accountable for a death or disaster.
Holst-Warhaft notes in the Greek context that “From the late nineteenth
century on, such laments are common, not simply blaming the government
or the king for the death of a son, but taking sides in local political struggles,
and supporting fugitives of the state against the authorities.”60 During World
War II and the German occupation of Greece, women used laments both
to express nationalist sentiments and to criticize the state for its failure to
repulse the foreign invasion. During the civil war, they employed laments not
only to take sides in the struggle but to indict the war itself. Similar examples
could be drawn from Shi‘ite lamentations for the prophet Hussein. The early
versions of these lamentations, composed by women, were deeply critical of
the Umayyad and Abbasid rulers, and though later versions have largely been
taken over by male poets, their anger and protest has often been refocused,
implicitly or explicitly, toward contemporary authorities.61 Indeed, in
numerous and resourceful ways modern women have appropriated the signs
of mourning for political purposes, often to contest states’ uses of violence
and their interpretations of death. The Black Sash of South Africa, Las
Madres of the Plaza de Mayo of Argentina, and the international network
“Women in Black” are all groups that have used public displays of grief as a
mode of resistance.
While the lamentation in many ways seems to reinforce traditional gender
roles—to sustain gendered divions of labor and nourish the vast associative
field correlating women with the irrational, primitive, animalistic, improper,
and foreign—there are also ways in which the lamentation is a provocative site
of gender non-conformity. Lamentations grant women a public presence and
social power that is often reserved for men; while lamenting, women are
allowed to play otherwise masculinized roles: they are revenge seekers,
judges, bearers of authority, writers of history. Sometimes lamentations
explicitly advocate the transgression of gender boundaries, as in this Greek
lament for a murdered brother, where such transgression appears as a wish:
If only I’d been a male

and could wear pants myself!
To have shouldered the gun myself
and chased the murderer!62
Such gender non-conformity is an (already fulfilled) command in this Greek

mother’s lament for a daughter who was killed avenging her brother’s death:
—Now, black Vyeniki

woman, become a man.
Buckle up and arm yourself . . .63
In Muslim communities, the gender transgression of lament may take the

form of throwing off the veil, which, as Grima points out in the context of
Paxtun society, “is the dominant symbol of the female sphere and all the
behavior expected to go with it. . . . Leaving one’s veil is equivalent to leav-
ing one’s womanhood. Yet again and again it is precisely what women say
they do when they are beyond themselves with emotion.”64 In North Africa,
traditional mourning entails a form of cross-dressing: In Tangier, Westermark

notes, “many widows [in mourning] wear the shirt or drawers or some other
garment belonging to their late husband’s dress.”65 Wake games, which in
Ireland traditionally followed the lamentation, “offered an unusual license to
women, who joined in the festivities on an equal footing with men, some-
times exchanging sexual roles with them for the duration of the wake.”66 If
men who lament are feminine, women who lament—in the strange logic of
impropriety added to impropriety—are masculinized.
Lamentation is a kind of time.
The opening lines of lamentations are often set in time—they memorialize

the day and the hour when time froze up; they mark the temporal fissure
between “before” and “after”:
Why this time the lanesides sorrowful, fencesides so sad?

Previously when I came the sun was shining brightly—why this time such dark
clouds have stopped above the yard?
Previously the nightingales played, the swallows sang—why this time the feet of
the nightingales are broken, the heads of the swallows crushed?
Previously dear sister-in-laws after long walk stood at the gable end drying their
skirts—why this time all drying racks are broken?67
They often narrate the lamenter’s discovery of death or disaster: “I knew

nothing of your murder,” laments “Black Eileen” for her husband, Arthur
O’Leary, “Till your horse came to the stable, / With the reins beneath her
trailing.”68 Sometimes it is time itself that is indicted as the enemy, as in this
Palestinian lament:
O Time, why have you stolen my joy

And left only pain and sorrow in its wake
O Time, bring us no more sorrow.69
This moment of lamentation, at once located in the real but strangely unreal,
is a moment perceived to be incommensurate with any other, an eruption of
the inconceivable and irremediable, a weir in the river of time. It shares prop-
erties, if it does not entirely coincide, with certain philosophical formulations
of time such as kairos or Augenblick. Insofar as kairos, for example, in its cus-
tomary (Aristotlean) opposition to chronos, designates a disruption in the
flow of time, or a moment of crisis situated outside of time, it aptly describes
the moment of lamentation. But kairos also (and more precisely) signifies the
right or proper time, in season, opportune; a point in time charged with sig-
nificance, a fullness of time or a completion that bestows meaning on an
entire history; its original meanings indeed included the notions of due meas-
ure, right proportion, and fitness. From this perspective, the lamentation
looks more like an antikairos: a disruption of chronos, but not a completion

or fulfillment; a moment of urgent significance, but without apparent mean-
ing, a time that is inopportune and improper, a fullness so overwhelming as
to seem empty.
Both Kierkegaard and Hiedegger develop another temporal notion that
bears resemblance to the moment of lamentation: Augenblick.70 For
Kierkegaard, Augenblick (or Oieblik in Danish) designates the exceptional
moment in which one’s world is pierced by an unconditional commitment; a
commitment that henceforth structures the world and necessitates a temporal
reorientation, a revised sense of past and future. For Heidegger, Augenblick
names the moment in which Dasein seizes its authentic possibility, when it is
retrieved from its everyday absorption in das Man and embraces the anticipa-
tory resoluteness of “being-towards-death.”71 Augenblick is often translated
“moment of vision,” and in both Kierkegaard and Heidegger the term signi-
fies a kind of time akin to the lamentation: a moment that is extraordinary,
dread-filled, and terrifying, when structures of significance have been
destroyed and a radical foreignness let loose, but which is also liberating and
enlightening, a moment that enables an attention and reflection ordinarily
obscured by the everyday, by the comfortable intelligibility of leveled and
public “understanding.”
To say that lamentation is a kind of time is also to restate certain recogni-
tions we have made about trauma as a temporal effect. Insofar as it is a response
to, and meditation on, trauma, lamentation bears the mark of trauma as a
memory disorder, an obsessive reexperience of a past event, and a temporal
regression. The strange time of the lamentation is also accentuated by the
melancholy that pervades it, a mood that, in Kristeva’s analysis, is character-
ized by a skewed sense of time:
It does not pass by, the before/after notion does not rule it, does not direct it
from a past toward a goal. Massive, weighty, doubtless traumatic because laden
with too much sorrow or too much joy, a moment blocks the horizon of depres-
sive temporality or rather removes any horizon, any perspective. Riveted to the
past, regressing to the paradise or inferno of an unsurpassable experience,
melancholy persons manifest a strange memory: everything has gone by, they
seem to say but I am faithful to those bygone days, I am nailed down to them,
no revolution is possible, there is no future.72
Lamentations also thematize a moment of shattered identity, of a defiling

breakdown of the boundaries between self and other; a moment character-
ized by a redistribution of possessions and remapping of territorial bound-
aries; a moment of strangeness, newness, primordiality.73
Lamentation is both formulaic and improvised.
As in most oral traditions, the lament is composed in conventional formulas

and meters complemented by improvisation to fit particular circumstances.
Improvised verses or metaphors that are particularly admired within a com-

munity may, in turn, be reused and become formulaic. In Homeric times,
these two aspects of lament were distinguished forms: the threnos was the for-
mal, musical lament performed by professional mourners, and the goos,
which included wailing and spontaneous weeping, was the improvised form
inspired by the immediate occasion, composed by women relatives or close
friends. By classical times, however, the two types had largely merged and
produced a form that inhabits a border not only between convention and
invention, but between the eloquent and the inarticulate, the spoken and the
unspeakable. Integrating both the faltering cry of anguish and a grief provi-
sionally objectified into discourse, the lamentation might be said to reenact
the infant’s entrance into language as much as the trauma victim’s regression
and exile from it.
Much of the lamentation, traversed by the language-shattering force of
trauma, is of the order of the expressively inarticulate, comprised of sobs,
moans, shrieks, and sighs, weeping and sudden intakes of breath, as well as of
elements of dance: a rythmic sway of the body, physical gestures of despair,
an ecstatic or trance-like manner of performance. But the lamentation also
entails performance elements rarely seen in dance: women tear their clothing;
beat clenched fists on their chests; scratch their cheeks or breasts, sometimes
until they bleed; tear out their hair; throw dirt on their heads; soil their cloth-
ing with dung, soot, ashes, or mud. “Women represent the violence of death
through their own bodies,” writes Seremetakis of that condition we have
referred to as anastasoi: “Their postures, gestures, and general facial expres-
sions function as corporeal texts which reaudit the experience of death as pas-
sage and disorder on behalf of the now silent and immobile dead.”74 These
gestures, the aspect of the tradition that has drawn the fiercest condemnation
from religions and governments, seem mad; they perform an insanity precip-
itated by grief.75
Yet however frenetic the scene of performance, lamentations are also a
highly formalized mode of language. The “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” for
example, are the most stringently structured of any Hebrew text. The book
contains five lamentations, which comprise a kind of double triptych: the first
two and the last two chapters (1, 2, 4, 5) are comprised of 22 verses each, and
the central chapter (3) is comprised of 66. All except the last are alphabetic
acrostics (the third is a triple acrostic); they follow a metrical pattern known as
“qinah” and are largely structured in semantic parallellisms.76 The lamenta-
tions of Greek tragedy display a number of conventions and formulae that sur-
vive into modern lament traditions, such as the reiterated statement of death
or destruction, direct dialogue with the dead, catechistic questioning, alliter-
ation and assonance, parataxis, repetitive sonic patterns, phonetic structuring
(words chosen for sound rather than meaning), highly metaphorical language,
word play, and reiterated terms of possession and kinship.77
Two central conventions of the lament tradition identified by Alexiou are
antithesis and antiphony. Antithetical structuring, an examination of loss
through a series of contrasts, is fundamental to the cognitive and philosophical
work of the lament. Antitheses are often established, for example, between
“then” and “now,” the hoped-for and the actual, the living and the dead, or
the experience of trauma and the mourner’s ability to express it. The fourth
of the Hebrew lamentations is particularly rich in such antitheses:
How is the gold become dim! . . .

The precious sons of Zion, comparable to fine gold,
How are they esteemed as earthen pitchers . . .
They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets:
They that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.78
In Greek tragedy, antitheses frequently took stychomythic form—a dialogue

in alternating and contrasting lines, which often involved an appropriation
and reinterpretation of the interlocutor’s words. Sometimes antithesis takes
the form of catechistic questions, asked and responded to by the mourners
themselves.
Half-Chorus: Hecuba, what are these cries? What news now? . . .

Hecuba: My children, the ships of the Argives will move today. The hand is at
the oar.
Half-Chorus: They will? Why? Must I take ship so soon from the land of my
fathers?
Hecuba: I know nothing. I look for disaster.79
Sometimes antitheses take the form of an unfulfilled wish—that death had

waited until old age, that the mourner or dead person had never been born,
or that the mourner had died instead of the dead—a convention that empha-
sizes the inconceivability of the present by contrast with what should have
been (possible) and is now impossible. Making use of the convention of
“lament names,” this Karelian lament is structured by impossible wishes:
If I could
were I able, weakling
I would fly and flutter
on the mouth of my comber
on the grave of my warmer.
I would lift her with ropes
supported by tarry wires
I would bring my bringer home
to give us shelter
to care for the children.
I would give her words of my mouth
I would talk warm talks.80
Antiphonal structure not only supports such antitheses, but facilitates the
communal participation central to lamentation. Antiphonal practice originates
(certainly in the Greek context and probably elsewhere) from the responsive
singing of two groups of mourners, strangers and kinswomen, each of which

would sing a verse in turn. The refrain was sung in unison and, in tragedy, is
taken up by the chorus. In modernity, lamentations are often constructed by
a soloist and chorus, the former leading or improvising, the latter, echoing,
revising, (dis)confirming. Seremetakis has cogently analyzed the antiphonal
structure of mourning practice, noting that in Greek antiphony is both an
aesthetic and juridical concept. In the laments of Maniat women, she argues,
antiphony signifies
(1) the social structure of mortuary ritual; (2) the internal acoustic organiza-
tion of lament singing; (3) a prescribed technique for witnessing, for the pro-
duction/reception of jural discourse, and for the cultural construction of
truth; and (4) a political strategy that organizes the relation of women to male-
dominated institutions.81
Some of the lamentation’s formulae and conventions seem to serve fairly

evident purposes—as mnemonic devices, enactments of traumatic response,
or assessments of loss; for marking temporal rupture or negotiating historical
truth; or for ensuring that the dead are satisfied, the psyche successful in
departing the body, and the soul unencumbered in its journey elsewhere. If
the function of other conventions—the acrostic form of the Hebrew laments,
for example—is more obscure, what is indisputable is that the lamentation is
a repetitive and reproducible language. Not only are its conventions, above
all, a mechanism for reproducibility, but many are devices that repeat: incre-
mental repetition, refrain, the reiterated statement of death, antiphony, sty-
chomythia, or parallelism, for example. Such repetitions have most often
been interpreted in terms of the work of mourning.82 From LaCapra’s view-
point, this repetition might be seen as working through, “as a homeopathic
socialization or ritualization of the repetition compulsion that attempts to
turn it against the death drive and to counteract compulsiveness—especially
the compulsive repetition of traumatic scenes of violence—by re-petitioning
in ways that allow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of
social life, ethical responsibility and renewal.”83
But the lamentation’s repetitions are also complicit with the politics of
memory and bear on questions of authenticity. The lamentation is recitable,
for example, on commemorative occasions, and such recitations are signifi-
cant to the construction of historical truths. On the one hand, this repro-
ducibility would seem to be a gesture of fidelity to the event of loss—a way
of remembering and of preserving the authenticity of a past. On the other
hand, it is quite possible that the lamentation employs a reproducible lan-
guage because the authenticity of the experience to which it responds is
unbearable. We have noted above, by way of Derrida, that a traumatic event,
of a structurally and ontologically different order from signification, under-
goes an irreducible surrogacy when it is made into a sign. Furthermore, if
reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin has argued, withers the “aura” of an
object, the function of the lamentation’s reproducibility would be to mitigate
the horrifying aura of trauma: to forget, rather than to remember.84 Indeed,

a reproducible “remembering,” as Derrida has signalled, may be, rather than a
mode of faithfulness, a “most deadly infidelity”: “Is the most distressing, or
even the most deadly infidelity that of a possible mourning which would
interiorize within us the image, idol, or ideal of the other who is dead and
lives only in us? Or is it that his alterity, respecting thus his infinite remove,
either refuses to take or is incapable of taking the other within oneself, as in
the tomb or the vault of some narcissism?”85
The lamentation’s repetitions, which may lend themselves either to the
repetition compulsion or the work of mourning, have also been interpreted,
equally paradoxically, as both a form of logical resolution and resistance to
such resolution. For Lévi-Strauss, for example, repetition functions to resolve,
or at least ease, the conflict between irreconcilable oppositions (such as belief
in an afterlife and the evidence of a decaying body). Loraux, by contrast, the-
orizing the wrath of lamentations, “the principle of which is eternal repeti-
tion,” argues that “this tireless ‘always’” sets up a powerful rival to the
resolution of the state, to its permanence, and to “the memory of institu-
tions.”86 Kierkegaard, that idiosyncratic theorizer of repetition, perhaps
affords a way to accommodate both these positions, contrasting recollection,
the (melancholy and voluptuous) “repeating backward” of Greek thought,
with the repetition that constitutes consciousness—the repetitive relationship
between actuality and ideality.87 This latter form of repetition—the (cheer-
ful) “recollecting forward” commensurate with Hegelian mediation—is the
repetition on which metaphysics, ethics, and dogma are grounded and
which, for Kierkegaard, is simultaneously their profundity and their downfall.
What Kierkegaard privileges is repetition in the transcendental sense, which
is marked by the exception, the ordeal, and earnestness. It is the interruption
of the (metaphysical) form of repetition constitutive of consciousness; it is
the inability to repeat the world in the mind, another way of describing the
epistemological rupture and symbolic crisis characteristic of trauma. Might
then the repetitiousness of the language of lamentation bear an affinity to
this transcendental repetition, which is an exception to, and disruption of, the
ethical and the philosophical, and hence of consciousness? Might the lamen-
tation’s repetitions, rather than submitting to theory, be the principle that
traumatizes it?
We should also bring to this meditation the thought that repetition subtends
both senses of the performative we have associated with lamentation: the
iterable nature of ritual performances and the reiterative social processes that
produce the effects they ostensibly represent. Both Butler and Bhabha, as we
have signalled, extend the linguistic concept of performativity to describe the
sedimented effects of reiterative practices that acquire the aura of the natu-
ral and real. Both, moreover, contend that the very fact that reiteration is
necessary is itself a sign that referents—a sexed body for Butler or a native
culture for Bhabha—are never quite complete, that bodies and cultures
never quite comply with the norms by which their “nature” is impelled. A
similar argument might be made about the lamentation’s repetitions and the
traumatic events that are their referent. Further, Butler and Bhabha both
locate a space of agency, a transformative moment, in this process of reitera-
tion: it is precisely because identity comes into being through repetition that
it can be altered. This argument might be used to reinforce LaCapra’s con-
tention that while repetition may become compulsive, it may also open a
space for “working through,” for cognitive or social transformation.
Lamentation is tentative and interrogative.
It is largely comprised of provisional and indagative gestures that seek out an

apposite response to loss. These gestures bear the weight of those recogni-
tions with which we began this book: that loss produces confusion and dis-
orientation, requires belated reconstruction, and varies in both kind and
degree. These features of loss are manifested in the lamentation’s incessant
questioning, its tentative assessments and shifting hypotheses, its formulations
of incredulity and anxiety, its frustration over finding language adequate to
the circumstances. The ancient Greek threnos regularly began with an expres-
sion of the lamenter’s despair over the inadequacy of language, usually formu-
lated in interrogative terms.88 Many lamentations, indeed, are largely
comprised of questions, and such questions are often implicit refusals of con-
solation, expressions of irremediability and incomprehensibility, attempts to
acknowledge what is evident but unbearable. “Where is greatness gone?”
asks Euripides’s Hecuba:
Where is it now, that stately house, home

where I was happy once? King Priam
blessed with children once, in your pride of wealth?
And what am I of all I used to be,
mother of sons, mother of princes?89
Similarly poignant, if more prosaic queries, structure the lament of this

Bulgarian mother:
Ah, Dimka, Dimka, unhonoured,

who, mama, will dry her,
mama, who will bathe her,
who, mama, will wash her napkins?90
Frequently addressing the dead (as well as other entities that are unlikely to
respond, like objects, abstractions, or deities), such questions often stress
that lost does not mean absent from consciousness or concern:
My son George, does the earth weigh on you,

my son George, does the wind blow on you,
my son George, does the sun burn you,

my son George, do the girls come to you?91
Tell me, son, tell me dear Stoyan,

is the earth-blanket soft
is the stone pillow soft
is the sky coverlet light?92
They sometimes include queries about the afterlife:
I’m going to give my wish

to my Nikos, the brave,
to go to Hades and return
to ask him to tell me
how are the souls treated?
Do the nuns tell the truth?
Are [the souls] hanging by the hair
in a dirty cave?
And those who committed good deeds,
do they sit in soft armchairs?93
Riddled with questions and resisting the stubbornly indicative impulse of

language—its unbearable and overdetermined meaningfulness—the lamen-
tation cultivates illocutionary ambivalence; it is a gallery of rhetorical mech-
anisms that inscribe the uncertain and the unspeakable. Exemplary is the
opening line of the Hebrew lamentations, simultaneously and indistinguish-
ably an exclamation and a question: “How doth the city sit solitary[?]!”94 In
Karelian laments, “the most striking feature,” writes Nenola-Kallio, “is
that usually nothing is called by its everyday name.”95 Because of the taboo
on the use of proper names, much of the lament is comprised of elaborate
identifying formulas or “lament names” that make them nearly impenetrable
to the uninitiated. Okkuli Kirillova’s beautiful lament for her children, who
were taken into forced labor during World War II, illustrates this practice:
Now I am smothered, greatly agonized

I am burning, burned, with the thought of my held-on-my-knees:
had I covered them in our own graveyard, my flowers-under-the-arm
had we laid them in the sod ourselves, my curly-heads
I would not have wept so much for my flowers-under-the-arm
nor would I have burned so much for my held-on-my-knees
but I gave them into Hitler’s hands, my formed-with-my-hands
in torment, my held ones
that they had to suffer all agonies, my curly-heads
they were burnt in fire, my held-on-my-knees
the skin was torn off their backs, my apple blossoms.96
Ingrian and Karelian laments are also remarkable for their “oblique, obfus-
cated expression of meaning,”97 use of sonic patterning (for sound rather
than meaning), and “musical masking” (disguise of meaning through musi-

cal rhythms and accents).98 It is not difficult to hear in these gestures the dis-
sonant strains of trauma, its disabling of perceptual, affective, and reflective
capacities, its resistance to interpretation and understanding, or its regression
to the threshold of language. Indeed, by way of its disarticulating expressions,
the lamentation tacitly poses a series of questions central to therapeutic treat-
ment: What has been lost or damaged? What can be recovered? What should
be remembered? How does one express—or even experience—what can’t be
contained in knowing? Is it ethically responsible to attempt understanding?
It is perhaps not surprising that a language that responds to a moment of
epistemological breakdown and shattered identity leaves very few rhetorical
stones unturned. The language of lamentation indeed often contains motley
juxtapositions of baroque figuration with prosaic literality. If the former dis-
tances and mediates the literal, the latter grapples with a materiality that
obstinately refuses to signify. Even the assertions of lamentation, which reg-
ularly take the form of paradox and antithesis, are, by and large, disbelieving
reiterations of the literal:
They ravished the women in Zion,

and the maids in the cities of Judah
Princes are hanged up by their hand:
the faces of elders were not honoured.99
The lamentation’s tentative and interrogatory gestures not only bear the
imprint of trauma, but coincide, on a number of counts, with descriptions of
modernity, with features of aesthetic modernism, and with specific strains of
continental philosophy. They are expressive of a number of experiences and
moods supposed to epitomize late modernity, such as uncertainty, anomie,
alienation, and anxiety; they correspond to Giddens’s description of the
reflexivity of modern social life—the constant questioning and reformation
of social practices and information—and of its subversion of certainty and
mastery. Neither are these gestures far from certain techniques of modernism
that seek out the threshold of the utterable, defy realism and representation,
or, in Kristeva’s terms, inscribe the extremely provisional, uncertain, and
indeterminate articulations of the chora. Calinescu, we might recall, defines
modernism as a relentless interrogation of tradition, bourgeois society, and
itself. Accordingly, these interrogatory features of lamentation might be said
to be at variance with the knowledge produced by disciplinary society and its
systems of surveillance, as well as with the instrumental reason so central to
Enlightenment thought. By contrast, such persistent questioning and ram-
pant uncertainty might well warm the hearts of Nietzsche’s destructive cre-
ators, those purveyors of intractably tentative knowledge, who habitually
place question marks after society’s “special words and favorite doctrines,” as
well as after themselves.100 One can discern echoes of Heideggerian break-
down in this language, and Heidegger might also lead us to recognize that
the anxiety inhabiting such gestures (a mode of indefiniteness, foreign to
metaphysics, and capable of dismantling that quotidian familiarity “in which

everything looks as if it were genuinely understood”101) is also anticipa-
tory—that questions, however unanswerable, inevitably await a response.
The lamentation is of the order of invocation.
It is a calling out; it seeks for a witness. The primary task of invocation is

locating an addressable other. Pre-predicative and performative, it is a speak-
ing to before a speaking of. No doubt the most reappropriated lines of the
Hebrew lamentations are just such a calling out, a plea to the stranger to pay
attention, to witness:
Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

Behold and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow.102
The invitation to join in mourning, common to modern laments as well,

sometimes requests specific kinds of aid, information, or solidarity and fre-
quently appeals to reciprocal social obligations, as in this Greek daughter’s
lament for her mother:
Ah women of Dzermiathes, weep, sing laments for her;

she too gave you her words to comfort and to soothe you.
Where are you women of Dzermiathes, decked out in your best clothes?
The midwife is going who used to hold your children.103
Scenes of lamentation are often subsequently judged by the success of such

invocations, by the numbers of witnesses gathered to mark a death or catas-
trophe. This gathering of witnesses, an apparatus of corroboration and con-
sensus building, establishes an event as traumatic, as worthy of notice and
care. In this mission, it bears a clear similarity to therapeutic projects—
Fanon’s on colonialism, Vietnam veterans’ on war trauma, Herman’s on
domestic abuse—that seek public recognition of particular traumas. An inte-
gral part of the performativity of laments, such invocations are confronta-
tional, even invasive: they draw others into the circle of grief, infect them with
its moods. Discomfiting to be sure, the lament’s invocations refuse to leave
spectators uninvolved or unimplicated; they too are called on to respond.
The antiphony of the lament is the formal matrix of this invocatory preoc-
cupation. But the lamentation also regularly invokes entities that are unlikely
to respond: strangers, the walls or pillars of the house, metonymic objects,
strangers, or natural elements, as in this Arab lament:
O shining star, testify that I am miserable

The Christians imprisoned me for the land of Rome
O shining star, testify that I am destitute
The Christians imprisoned me for the land of Sham . . .
O scribe, write in the margins

Greetings to the resting place of our beloveds . . .
O camel rider! Take me with you my beloved.104
A Greek mother, lamenting her son killed in the Greco-Turkish war of 1897,
develops an extended invocation to the crow:
Hey, my crow that flies

with your jet-black wings
sailing through the sky
if you by chance see my Dikio
my heart of hearts
could you bring me some sign
either his foot or hand
or his smallest finger
where he wore the silver ring.105
The lamentation’s invocations are often characterized by a futile calling out

that is the sign of an inordinate hope. Indeed, the most frequently invoked
entity in the lament is the dead person him or herself. The dead are often
encouraged to return to the living, sometimes with finely elaborated incen-
tives, as these Irish and Bulgarian examples attest:
My own beloved dear!

Now get up on your feet
And come on home with me.
It’s time to slaughter beef—
We’ll organize a feast—
We’ll have musicians play,
And I’ll make you a bed,
With clean white sheets
And colored patchwork quilts,
To make you sweat with heat
Instead of this awful cold.106
Rise up, beloved Stoyan,

rise up beloved, come,
good days are coming,
St Dimiter’s day, love, St. George’s day,
every child is shod,
shod and dressed
and ours, love, go naked,
go naked, love, go barefoot.
Rise up, love, and come.
Your nuggetty little horse
hasn’t been watered yet.107
Such invocations, which may carry as much reproach as affection, are a resist-
ance to the inassimilable evidence of loss even when they acknowledge the
hopelessness of their addresses. In a lament for her sister, Anna Ivanova sings
poignantly:
I still try to ask whether you could say goodbye forever with cold tongue . . .
I am unable to evoke any words on your cold tongue.
Your words are closed behind hundred mounds and your tongue is locked
behind thousand locks.108
In addition to architecture, the natural world, and the dead, another striking
object of invocation in many laments is the mourner’s own body. Hecuba’s
laments in the Trojan Women are rich in this formulation:
Rise, stricken head, from the dust;

Lift up the throat . . .
O head, O temples
And sides . . .
Come, aged feet;
make one last weary struggle.109
Invocations to the body appear in many modern laments as well, as in these

lines from a Palestinian lament:
Weep my eyes, weep

O eyes! Do not cease your lament.110
Such exhorations to an alienated body, over which the lamenter has, it would
seem, ceased to have her habitual control, represents an estrangement of that
which one has taken as most proper to oneself, as most one’s own. If it sug-
gests an insistently material and embodied version of the alienated subject of
late modernity or of the cognitive splitting characteristic of trauma, such
invocations to the body also recall Elaine Scarry’s descriptions of pain: while
“occur[ing] within oneself, it is at once identified as ‘not oneself,’ ‘not me,’”
encountered as something alien.111 In the Mediterranean, the self-alienation
brought about by death is sometimes reenacted in the ritual of cutting off (or
pulling out) pieces of hair to be laid on the grave.
Even when it is not engaged in explicit apostrophe, the lamentation is
inherently invocatory insofar as it is language that calls out to itself to wit-
ness. It seeks in its shattered language to call itself to reflection, decipher
what has happened, establish what has been lost; it is of the nature of testi-
mony, as described by Dori Laub:
As a relation to events, testimony seems to be composed of bits and pieces of a

memory that has been overwhelmed by occurrences that have not settled into
understanding or remembrance, acts that cannot be constructed as knowledge
nor assimilated into full cognition, events in excess of our frames of reference.
. . . In the testimony, language is in process and in trial, it does not possess

itself as a conclusion, as the constatation of a verdict or the self-transparency of
knowledge.112
Implicit in calling a witness, be it an other or the self, is the prior shattering

of understanding, and it is here that the invocatory nature of the lamentation
dovetails with the shattered, hesitant, and interrogative language we have
evoked above. Distilling this shattered understanding, the most common
apostrophe in the Hebrew laments, the imperative “Behold!” (hee-nay), sig-
nifies a breach in the symbiotic relation between perception and reflection. A
call both to see and to consider, the word itself is an attempt to reconstruct
the relationship between the phenomenal world and reflection that has been
fractured by loss.
Inextricably bound up with invocation and with this crisis of understanding
is the threat not only of meaninglessness, but of injustice. The laments of
Greek tragedy are so entangled with issues of (in)justice that it is difficult to
say where the lament ends and juridical argument begins. Similarly, the
ancient Hebrew poets call on Yahweh to witness the disproportion into which
the balance of justice has fallen, and poetry drawn from the Shi‘ite lamenta-
tions for Hussein often casts Fatima as a prosecutor. Modern laments, sup-
ported by the juridical conventions of questioning and antiphony (the latter,
Seremetakis reminds us, can refer to the process of contractual agreement or
guarantee), regularly cast blame, indict, and call for revenge. A Greek mother,
for example, lamenting her drowned son, takes a patron saint to task:
St Dimitri, my master,
didn’t I always praise you
and honour you with light?
Did I fail to light a candle?
Didn’t I bring two silver
candles on your memorial
day and four candelabra?
Why didn’t you help as well
leeward of Tsirigou island
when the north wind blew
and the sea brimmed over and broke in crooked waves?113
Another Greek mother arraigns God himself over her lost son:
God is a merciless criminal

to have killed the orphan!. . .
This thing that God did
on the Savior’s Day,
killing the orphan
Is this not sinful and bad?114
Calling a witness—and here the legal trial is paradigmatic—is a preliminary

moment in a process of assigning meaning and locating an event in an economy
of justice. But although lamentations call for revenge, such locutions remain
largely invocatory and preliminary, on the order of summons, accusations, or
indictments. As the following Palestinian lament illustrates, the lamentation
tends to be more concerned with rejecting inadequate forms of recovery, with
venting rage and inflicting harm, than with submitting to a system of justice:
We will not accept blood money, of sirs

Not even a precious coin
Only a head for a head
To blow off with a rifle
We will not accept blood money
Neither silver nor copper
Only a head for a head
To smash with our shoes.115
Indeed, if this verse seems to call for equivalence—“a head for a head”—it is
clear that the head alone will not settle the debt or resolve the injury, that
what is called for is the incalcuable and disproportionate effect of trauma.
From this perspective, the lamentation might be said to share properties with
Nietzsche’s critique of the idiom of justice, not only because of its refusal to
displace rancor and hostility onto an abstract law, but because of its implicit
rejection of the economic basis of justice, of the obscenity of conceiving an
equivalent for trauma.
As is already apparent, the initial “calling out” of the invocation facilitates
numerous secondary tasks such as narration, exclamation, supplication,
exhortation, blaming, and cursing. Invocations are often employed to assign
attributes and responsibility, as does this Palestinian lament, which attributes
generosity to a cousin:
O Ibn Ammi, who sheltered me

O like bracelets tumbling from my wrist.116
By contrast, an Irish widow’s invocation of her dead husband is a stinging

attribution of stinginess:
You used to give me

The thick end of the stick,
The hard side of the bed,
The small bit of food.117
The secondary tasks of invocation are creatively diversified, but in them all
remains an implicit but fundamental call for witness, a search for an address-
able other, laden with a gaping responsibility and a desperate hope.
Lamentation is a confrontation with the foreign and fantastic.
Lamentations, as we have seen, may be sung for exile or migration to a for-

eign land, and other forms of loss or sorrow are often metaphorically appre-
hended through these tropes. We have also noted the finely layered history
associating women and death with foreignness, as well as with the irrational,
improper, primitive, and animalistic. The time of lamentation, moreover, is
one when the world has become strange and foreign, as if it suddenly spoke
a different language, operated by unfamiliar laws. Foreignness also inheres in
the lament’s anxiety, which, as Heidegger contends, discloses an indefinite-
ness foreign to metaphysics. Lamentations composed in wartime or under
occupation, moreover, instances of which could be gathered from the
Mycenean age to World War II, struggle with and thematize literal encoun-
ters with foreigners.
But what constitutes “literal” foreignness is by no means self-evident; the
use of the term foreign to designate those from another country or ethnic
group, or those who speak a different language is, in fact, derived from a pool
of more fluid primary meanings: from the outside, strange, unfamiliar.118 In
this sense, death, trauma, and incomprehensibility are all foreigners. Death,
indeed, is often figured as a stranger, as something that comes from the out-
side (foras), as not belonging, or as improper. Sermetakis notes the way in
which, in Maniat culture, the semiology of death is governed by xenitia,
“which encompasses the condition of estrangement, the outside, the move-
ment from the inside to the outside, as well as contact and exchange between
foreign domains, objects, and agents.”119 Perhaps the most culturally wide-
spread image of death is of a journey, a voyage from this world to the next,
to an undiscovered country. To die is to travel elsewhere, become foreign. In
its classical description, trauma also comes from the outside; it is a physiolog-
ical incursion, a foreign invasion of the borders of the psyche. The strange-
ness and unintelligibility characteristic of the moment of lamentation, rather
than being merely metaphorically foreign, are materializations of the primary
meanings of foreignness.
This foreignness is reenacted in the performance of lamentation, which
deploys sounds, language, and gestures that are alien—to music, speech,
proper comportment. Acoustically violent, tonally unstable, and metrically
interrupted by sobs, moans, or weeping, its meanings are estranged in broken
lines, peculiar phrasing, and shifts in stress—in what Tolbert refers to as
“musical masking.” Its gestures are unnatural, uncivilized, barbaric, mad.
Partly for this reason Greek tragedy associated lamentation with foreigners,
routinely displacing its immoderation onto the Oriental—Euripides’s
Hecuba or Aeschylus’s Persians, for example—thus rendering it foreign to
the polis, where the decorum of Logos and Dike preside. While there is prob-
ably some truth to the conception of lament forms originating in the East,
this conviction has also been well nourished over the centuries by stereotypes
associating all that is heathen, barbaric, feminine, and immoderate with the
Orient. Two millenia after Hecuba first appeared on the Athenian stage,
Edmund Spenser wrote of Irish women:
their lamentations at their burials with despairful outcries and ymoderate wail-
ing . . . savor greatly of the Scythian barbarism. [Some] think this custom to
come from the Spaniards for that they do so immesurably likewise bewail their
dea[d]. But the same is not proper Spanish but altogether heathenish, brought
in first thither either by the Scythians or by the Moors which were African but
long possessed that country, for it is the manner of all pagans and infidels to be
intemperate in the wailings of the dead.120
This schema which contrasts the proportionate, correct, and domestic with
the disproportionate, erratic, and foreign governs not only the history of
lamentation but, as Edward Said has compellingly demonstrated, much of the
geopolitics of modernity.
This disproportionality is also manifest in the fantastic language of lamenta-
tion, which, perhaps not surprisingly, responds to the world defamiliarized by
trauma with a language of unabashed extremity. Situated on an uncertain bor-
der between the real and the fantastic, speaking to inanimate objects and the
dead, fabricating impossible wishes and plotting improbable revenge, lamenta-
tions reach for a non-existent tongue. Among the most striking features of the
language of lamentation are gestures that strive to describe the sudden for-
eignness of things, to express an experience which has itself become irreal,
impossible, too strange for words. Such fantastic locutions include the cate-
gorical, the hyperbolic, and the paradoxical. They also often include person-
ification, which, fantastically granting life to the insensible and inanimate,
abounds in the lamentation, from the extended figure of the city as widow in
the ancient Hebrew laments to the “tearful thresholds” and “weepful win-
dow frames” of the modern Ingrian lament.121 Also contributing to the
lamentation’s fantastic language is an uneasy rhetoric of possession, which
asserts grammatically a possession that it negates semantically:
Our inheritance is turned to strangers,

our houses to aliens.122
Bring me back my treasure

Though for me the interest is forbidden.123
My mother has travelled far away. To whom can I call out? . . .

I have lost my courage. I have lost my hope.124
This contradictory rhetoric of (dis)possession, which I explore at length in

Chapter 3, not only performs fantastic acts of retroactive possession, but
claims to possess what is alien (e.g., the aversiveness of pain) and to be dispos-
sessed of what is (linguistically) inalienable (kin and body parts).
If this propensity of the lamentation for the fantastic is bound up with

confronting the foreign, there would also be other ways of describing it: as
the trace of the supernatural powers the lamentation is widely believed to
possess; as transcendental repetition which, in Kierkegaardian terms, is “hard
to [speak of] in any human language” and comes into being “when every
thinkable human certainty and probability [are] impossible”;125 or as an
antecedent of Nietzsche’s tensed bow aimed at the unheard-of. Following
such paths, a pattern begins to emerge in which the language of lamentation
shuns—or is banished from—the middle ground that constitutes ordinary
consciousness, from intermediary alliances between things and meanings. It
oscillates between the literal and the fantastic, between an absolute material-
ity and the hyperessential; it clings to the outer edges of experience and
sometimes, paradoxically, conflates them.
Lamentation is mood.
Though we are thoroughly determined by mood, Heidegger contends, it

regularly escapes reflection. In medieval philosophical terms, mood is neither
a substance nor an essence, but a mobile distinctiveness that taints the sub-
stantial (a body, the material, the signifier) and unsettles the essential (the
spirit, ideology, meaning). This description is, in large part, compatible with
Kristeva’s recent psychoanalytic one, in which she describes mood as an
“apparently very rudimentary [psychic] representation, presign and prelan-
guage” that is “irreducible to its verbal or semiological expressions.”126
Risking the inaccuracy of fixing moods with names, I wish to theorize three
moods that play a central role in the lamentation: melancholy, anger,
dread.127 Mingling freely with each other, these moods combine forces to
form what amounts to an atmosphere of sacrality: a mood that sets the lan-
guage of lamentation apart, shields it from scrutiny and critique, proclaims it
untouchable. Lamentations are rarely interrupted; they are usually witnessed
in respectful silence. Those who are not caught up in its frenzy often draw
back: from fear of displeasing the dead or a god, the threat of contagion, the
affective intensity, or the memorandum of one’s own mortality.
Melancholy: The lamentation conspicuously employs the metaphors
most commonly used to describe melancholy: darkness and heaviness.128 It
also shares with melancholy the fundamental characteristic of disproportion-
ality. As early as Aristotle, melancholy was described in terms of an affect out
of proportion to circumstances, as an imbalance that is at once unjust and in
error.129 The penthos alaston (unforgettable grief or interminable mourning),
which in Loraux’s analysis characterizes lamentation, is equivalent to Freud’s
depiction of melancholy as a mourning that can’t be worked through, that
resists resolution and recovery.130 What Freud writes of the melancholic,
moreover, aptly portrays the burden of the lamentation’s hesitant and ques-
tioning verse: “he knows whom [or what] he has lost but not what it is he has
lost in them.”131 Kristeva’s description of the speech of the melancholic also

bears a striking resemblance to the language of lamentation: “It is repetitive
and monotonous. Faced with the impossibility of concatenating, [sufferers of
melancholy] utter sentences that are interrupted, exhausted, come to a stand-
still. Even phrases they cannot formulate. A repetitive rhythm, a monotonous
melody emerge and dominate the broken logical sequences, changing them
into recurring, obsessive litanies.”132
Kristeva further describes melancholia both in terms of a symbolic crisis
and as a return to an archaic position, both of which might describe the
moment of lamentation. Melancholy is characterized by “intolerance for object
loss and the signifier’s failure to insure a compensating way out,”133 a mourn-
ing for “the real that does not lend itself to signification”—what Kristeva
terms the “Thing,” a non-signifiable “insistence without presence.”134 If, for
Kristeva, a negation of (primary) loss is necessary for the subject’s entrance
into the Symbolic, and melancholy is characterized by a denial of the nega-
tion of that loss, a similar dynamic arguably subtends the lamentation’s
responses to more immediate losses. In both cases, the resistance to negating
loss “deprives the language signifiers of their role of making sense for the
subject.”135
According to Freud, the mood of melancholy conceals aggression; the
self-reproaches that characterize it are actually “reproaches against a loved
object which have been shifted onto the patient’s own ego.”136 It is experi-
enced as a loss of one’s own being, a lowered self-regard that in Freud’s
account “culminates in a delusional expectation of punishment”:137 the
melancholic “represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any effort
and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expects
to be cast out and chastised.”138 The mood of melancholy also commands
an exclusive devotion; it focuses all of the attentions and energies of the
melancholic on the lost “object,” “Thing,” or moment. The corollary of
this absolutely focused devotion is at once an impotence—“abrogation of
interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, inhibition of all
activity”139—and an omnipotence: “Through their empty speech,” writes
Kristeva, “[melancholics] assure themselves of an inaccessible . . . ascendancy
over an archaic object that thus remains, for themselves and others, an
enigma and a secret.”140 The mood of melancholy, then, posits and protects
a realm inaccessible to any signifier; it claims to commune with the ineffable
and thus poses a significant threat to the Symbolic and to signs. It is the man-
ifestation of a “modality of significance” that “insures the preconditions for
(or manifests the disintegration of) the imaginary and the symbolic.”141 A
mood that has the power to conceal agressivity, to persuade the self that it is
a disdainful object, create an expectation of punishment, induce exclusive
devotion and focus attention absolutely, protect a domain ulterior to signifi-
cation, and disintegrate the Imaginary is a powerful instrument indeed.
Anger: Rarely settling into a decisive or stable mood, the shifty language
of lamentation also grows angry. Cursing, blaming, it lashes out against causal
agents, authorities, God, the dead. Loraux has written brilliantly on this
dreadful marriage of grief and rage, of the “memory-wrath” that in Greek
bears the name of menis. This “repetitive and endless” anger, she writes, is a
kind of memory that is alastos, “reduces itself completely to nonoblivion” in
which “the negation must be understood in its performativeness” as an
active, tenacious unforgetting that, “immobilized in a negative will, and
immortalizing the past in the present,” cultivates itself obsessively, but is
never achieved.142 This unappeasable wrath, which demands vengeance but
will not be satisfied by it, is not only “a relentless presence that occupies, in
the strong sense of the word, the subject and does not leave,” but also “the
worst enemy of politics,” a kind of memory and permanence that rivals that
of institutions.143
That grief should turn into anger is not surprising. The one thing on
which theorists of anger from Aristotle to modern psychology seem to agree
is that anger is conditioned by a perceived slight or injury. “[A]nger is
aroused by the direct impression of an injury,” writes Seneca, and Aquinas
concurs: “the movement of anger does not arise save on account of some
pain inflicted” and “the motive of a man’s anger is always something done
against him.”144 Cognitive psychology’s version of this principle, which pro-
poses (in Richard Lazarus’s formulation) that “a demeaning offense against
me and mine is the best shorthand description of the provocant to adult
human anger,” also emphasizes that anger is directly related to what or
who is considered important—part of “me and mine,” my own (and)
proper(ty).145 This rule was not lost on Aristotle, who specified that anger
results from “those who speak ill of us and show contempt for us, in connec-
tion with the things we ourselves most care about.”146 Cognitive psycholo-
gists, using different terms for a similar argument, posit anger as a response
to what is perceived to threaten the maintenance of ego-identity.
Anger is not only conditioned by what is held to be important, but by who
is considered important. This is certainly true in the sense that injury to those
who are part of my identity gives rise to anger, but also because anger
responds to perceived insubordination, to a disruption of “proper” hierarchi-
cal relationships. This is perfectly explicit in Aristotle’s argument—“A man
expects to be specially respected by his inferiors in birth, in capacity, in good-
ness, and generally in anything in which he is much their superior,”147 as it is
in Aquinas’s: “deficiency or littleness in the person with whom we are angry,
tends to increase our anger, in so far as it adds to the unmeritedness of being
despised.”148 Anger is, from this perspective, conservative and disciplinary; it
appears, armed and dangerous, when one’s social or economic position is unset-
tled, hell-bent on restoring things and people to their proper place. In medieval
Christian Europe, recognition of the instrumentality of anger in maintaining
social hierarchy translated into notions of proper anger (on the part of kings,
lords, and God) and improper anger (exhibited by, for example, peasants and
women).149 The former was necessary to uphold divinely ordained social
relations, emblematic of honor, righteousness, and justice; the latter was
socially disruptive, unjust, one of the seven deadly sins. While reconfigured
in accordance with (among other factors) capitalist class formations and the
secular power of the nation state, such a distinction is by no means absent
from modernity. The virtuous indignation of legitimate states is not consid-
ered equivalent to the insane fury of terrorists; the judge’s anger is not the
same as the criminal’s; the lawful owner’s not the same as the dispossessed’s,
the citizen’s not the same as the foreigner’s.
The undemocratic, double face of anger is the nub of a debate that has
followed anger for centuries: whether it is, on the one hand, manageable,
useful, and compatible with reason and justice or, on the other hand, uncon-
trollable, destructive, irrational, and wrong. Aristotle and Aquinas take the
former view, Seneca, eloquently, the latter. Aristotle is interested in how
anger is useful to politics and justice, how orators may use it to elicit bravery
in soldiers or win a lawsuit. His analysis of anger is in the service of produc-
ing it; it is, significantly, part of the Rhetoric. Aquinas, whose God exercises
an anger that is justice itself—perfectly measured, absolutely proper—while
less keen on cultivating anger, is equally anxious to reserve its utility to jus-
tice. Seneca will have none of this: “there is nothing useful in anger,” he
writes, “nor does it kindle the mind to warlike deeds; for virtue, being self-
sufficient, never needs the help of vice.”150 It is unfit even for revenge: while
“no passion is more eager for revenge than anger,” it is “for that very reason
unfit to take it; being unduly ardent and frenzied, as most lusts are, it blocks
its own progress to the goal toward which it hastens.”151
Seneca’s argument rests on the conviction that anger is fundamentally
“unbridled and ungovernable,” even by reason.152 “For if it listens to reason
and follows where reason leads, it is no longer anger, of which the chief char-
acteristic is willfulness.”153 Anger is, he argues, a kind of temporary madness,
“devoid of self-control, forgetful of decency . . . closed to reason and coun-
sel, excited by trifling causes, unfit to discern the right and true.”154 In a
phrase that bears directly on our analyses of recovery, adequation, and the
economy of justice, he describes anger as “altogether unbalanced,” as, that is,
inimical to health, reasoning, and ethical action. 155 This mad imbalance, this
“most hideous and frenzied of all the emotions,”156 Seneca does not hestiate
to associate with barbarians, women, children, old men, weakened minds,
and the sick. In one passage, warning against the invasivness of anger, he
tellingly portrays it as at once a dreaded foreigner, a threat to civic order, and
an insidious imperialism: “The enemy, I repeat, must be stopped at the very
frontier; for if he has passed it, and advanced within the city-gates, he will not
respect any bounds set up by his captives.”157
Implicit in the anger of the lament, as well as in the critical weight
accorded to injury and social relationships in the production of anger, is the
presence of a blameworthy agent. Unlike melancholy or dread, anger
requires an object, though in the complex societies of modernity, “because
there are so many environmental levels at which it is possible to assign
accountability and control,” a responsible agent may be difficult to identify;
anger may seek out a scapegoat.158 Attempting to specify the difference

between anger and other negative emotions that derive from injury or loss,
Lazarus argues that blameworthiness is central: “One attribution distin-
guishing anger from other negative emotional provocations is whether blame
is directed at someone or something other than ourselves.”159 Responding to
the crisis of justice that haunts the moment of lamentation, the lamentation’s
angry invocations, as we have seen, hurl accusations, and cast blame. It is lit-
tle wonder that they appear as a menace to religious and political institutions
that claim a monopoly on such judgments.
This menace is augmented by the formidable liaison of anger with desire.
“[U]nsatisfied desires are prone to anger and easily roused,” writes Aristotle.
“Further, we are angered if we happen to be expecting a contrary result.”160
Cognitive psychologists, who speak in terms of “goal-blockage,” once more
arrive at a similar conclusion.161 Anger both results from and incites desire;
and the desire it most commonly constructs is for revenge or counter-injury.
This desire is central to Aristotle’s definition of anger and confirmed by
nearly all who follow him: “anger is an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a
conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight.”162 While from one stand-
point, this anger and the demands it entails can be frightening and even
punitive, from another, it can be highly contagious, particularly if one
believes oneself to share in the injury that produced the anger in the first
place. Anger affects, spreads, gathers steam. This, as Aristotle recognized, is
a redoubtable source of power: anger affects the judgment, influences how
and what one thinks.
Aristotle’s theory of anger, and its placement in the Rhetoric, emphasize
that anger is performative, in the twofold sense of that term: it can be per-
formed whether or not it is “felt”; it can create the effects that it apparently
expresses. This indeed is Aristotle’s wager: that one can possess and perform
anger without being possessed by it. This performativity is also the only con-
cession Seneca makes to the utility of anger; it comes in the last line of his
treatise, and is treated as a last resort. “Anger is therefore never permitted;
sometimes we must pretend to possess it if we have to arouse the sluggish
minds of our hearers, just as we apply goads and brands to arouse horses that
are slow in starting upon their course. Sometimes we must strike fear into the
hearts of those with whom reason is of no avail.”163 Anger, in short, is for
performance purposes only. But it is clear from the foregoing that such per-
formances can be powerful: they can spread or construct a sense of injury,
shake up or reinforce social hierarchies, legitimate violence, unbalance reason
and justice, cast blame, and construct desire. They may threaten what is most
one’s own, what is most integral to the self, most proper. They can ignite a
fury that runs out of control, takes on a life of its own.
Dread: Dread is a term which has translated notions as divergent as
Ricoeurian terreur, Kierkegaardian angest, and Blanchotian angoisse.164 It cov-
ers much of the same semantic territory as anxiety, including the Heideggerian
sort, and while connotatively dread is slightly more concentrated and objectal
than anxiety, I take the two as largely synonymous. Unleashed by moder-

nity’s ceaseless transformations and uneasily repressed by its “internally refer-
ential systems,” dread stalks the discourses, experiences, institutions, and
cultural productions of modernity. In the lamentation, moreover, we can
spot its shadow at nearly every turn: in the lamentation’s wrestlings with the
unknowability of death, refusal of resolution and recovery, encounter with
the improper and foreign, expressions of the inarticulate, anguished antithe-
ses, hesitations, questions, and impossible invocations. We have also marked
the affinity of dread for that exceptional, visionary moment that Kierkegaard
and Heidegger call “augenblick.” While it might seem odd that a language
that responds to the past and houses a retrospective mood like melancholy
should also be inhabited by an anticipatory mood such as dread, the lamenta-
tion, it must be kept in mind, stands in the midst of a loss that is not yet known,
a trauma which is still happening to consciousness. The forward-looking anx-
iousness of dread is also, for both Kierkegaard and Ricoeur, the persistence of
an archaic moment, and it is thus not entirely surprising to spot it lurking in a
language confronted with a newly primeval, “re-originated” world.
Dread attaches to what precedes, or resists sublimation into, meaning or
justice. It is the mood that corresponds to calling a witness, to the dual
threats of senselessness and injustice that haunt the lamentation, to a materi-
ality that refuses to signify. Heidegger articulates this principle in relation to
both equipmental breakdown and “being-towards-death,” moments in which
anxiety accompanies a collapse of significance. Ricoeur, examining the rela-
tionship of dread to perceptions of evil, describes dread as a non-conceptual
“half-light,” logically and chronologically anterior to reflection: a pre-reflective
association of misfortune with wrongdoing, the vague but persistent suspi-
cion that suffering is a sign. Dread has also often been described in terms of
a trial. In Ricoeur’s analysis, this trial necessitates the formulation of dread
into language and is the portentous threshold between mood and reflection:
Now it [the word dread] insinuates itself into the experience itself as an instru-
ment by which the defiled self becomes conscious of itself . . . not only does
[consciousness] begin to communicate but it discovers the unlimited perspec-
tive of self-interrogation. Man asks himself: since I experience this failure, this
sickness, this evil, what sin have I committed? Suspicion is born; the appearance
of acts is called in question; a trial of veracity is begun.165
For Ricoeur, this “trial of veracity” to which dread is submitted ultimately

allows for judgment: dread is sublimated into philosophy. But because the
lamentation stays suspended in the time of a preliminary hearing, because it
remains interrogative, tentative, and paradoxical, because it rarely accedes to
judgment or philosophy, it is inevitably inhabited by the suspicion that judg-
ment cannot be reached, that the evidence does not add up to anything; it
always suspects philosophy of being premature.
The trial of dread proceeds quite differently according to Blanchot, for
whom dread is not a “half-light,” but a fully lit, non-revelatory, clarity: “in
reality, dread has no mysterious underside; it exists completely in the obvi-

ousness that makes us feel it is there; it is entirely revealed as soon as one says:
I am full of dread.”166 Like the arrested, repetitious literality noted above,
which does not give rise to meaning, Blanchotian dread “challenges all the
realities of reason, its methods, its possibilities, its very capacity to exist”167
and is a confirmation of the unbearably apparent: it is nothing to all those
who pass by; my sorrow is like any other sorrow; it is insignificant, nothing:
One dies at the thought that any object to which one is attached is lost, and in
this mortal fear one also feels that this object is nothing, an interchangeable
sign, an empty occasion. There is nothing that cannot feed dread, and dread is,
more than anything else, this indifference to what creates it, although at the
same time it seems to rivet the man to the cause it has chosen.168
Blanchot’s dread is vacuous and désouvré, but Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and

Ricoeur all find something instructive in it. For Heidegger, it is powerfully
disclosive, clearing away the concealments that obstruct Dasein. Ricoeur’s
sublimated variety of dread is “the soul of all true education” and remains, he
contends, “an indispensable element in all forms of education, familial, scho-
liast, civic, as well as in the protection of society against the infractions of cit-
izens.”169 But it is Kierkegaard who makes of dread the master teacher.
Pitiless but liberating, it weans the human from the constraints of finitude:
Anxiety [angest] is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith
absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their
deceptiveness. And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readi-
ness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to
attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which
he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate
and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape,
neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day
nor by night.
Whoever is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who
is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude.170
Dread is thus allied not only with instruction, but with freedom and possibil-
ity. This theme, as have seen, is reworked by Heidegger: disrupting habitual
modes of understanding, anxiety discloses an awful, but impassioned free-
dom, one that “projects itself essentially upon possibilities” and “brings
Dasein face to face with its Being-free for . . . the authenticity of its Being.”171
Dread, then, designates a mood that is associated with the disarticulation
of knowing, with the not-yet-known, and with that which resists, or is dis-
ruptive of, rational and ethical systems. It puts things, people, and ideas on
trial, but exasperatingly and endlessly suspends judgment, retaining a
remarkable resistance to philosophy. For Blanchot, it marks a perpetual fail-
ure to generate meaning and an exposure of the vacuity of reason. Dread is
also a mood of freedom and possibility, and (though Blanchot remains
unconvinced on this point) may have educative value. It is possible, then,

that dread inhabits languages that mess with the irrational or inconceiv-
able. It is also possible that a language imbued with dread might be of util-
ity in resisting philosophical resolution; in exposing the chicanery of reason,
ideology, or common sense; in putting (a person, a class, a discourse) on
trial; or in creating (a sense of) possibility or freedom.
Chapter 3

L a m e n tat i o n a n d ( D i s ) Po s s e s s i o n :
Fau l k n e r’s A B S A LO M , A B S A LO M !
and the New South
R eaders of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! have often remarked the relent-

less torrent of loss that comprises the novel’s plot, the epistemological losses
that inhere in its narrative structure, as well as the fundamental incomprehen-
sibility of the narrated world both to the characters who participate in it and
the narrators who describe it.1 If such recognitions prompt consideration
of the novel within the lament tradition, so too do its tentative and contra-
dictory narratives and shifting narratorial position; its propensity for paradox,
antithesis, the hyperbolic, and the irresolvable; its narrators’ self-consciously
belated position within a radically discontinuous time; and its invocations,
which, under the dual threat of meaninglessness and unrequited injustice,
call out to passersby to witness.2 The novel, in addition, shows recurrent
symptoms of those moods we have associated with lamentation: the exclu-
sive devotion to a lost object characteristic of melancholia, for example, and
the simultaneous attempt and inability to make suffering a sign characteris-
tic of dread.
The specific concern to which I turn in this chapter, however, is the
lamentation’s uneasy rhetoric of possession, which vacillates between claims
of possession and acknowledgement of loss. The moment of lamentation is
characterized by a redistribution of both material and ideological posses-
sions, and (dis)possession is a central rhetorical preoccupation of the lamen-
tation: though seized by strangers, the lamentation insists, they are our
houses; though dead, he is my son; though destroyed, it is my city—a propri-
etary insistence that also characterizes the lamentation from which Faulkner
draws his title:
O my son Absalom,
my son, my son Absalom!
would God I had died for thee,
O Absalom, my son, my son!3
This possessiveness is not entirely surprising: language about loss is perforce

language about possession. Loss is always loss of something, and of a particu-
lar something perceived to be proper to oneself. To lament something as lost
is to presuppose that one once possessed it, and therefore (prior to mourn-
ing) the lamentation must construct and possess a lost object; it must
engage, we might say, in an act of retroactive possession. But the lamentation
is also and simultaneously a language of dispossession. Even its most insis-
tently possessive gestures are descriptions of possessions that are lost or
destroyed. This negative movement of dispossession, as I explore in the sec-
ond part of this chapter, is buttressed in the lamentation by a proliferation of
privatives that rhetorically (re)enact dispossession.
But even beyond—or before—this semantic “taking away,” a double
uncertainty troubles the proprietary claims of the lamentation, pervading
both the object and the act of possession. The possession to which the lamen-
tation lays claim, that is, is constructed belatedly, when it can no longer be
observed or experienced. And the recollection through which this object is
(re)constructed is plagued with singular difficulties because it is concerned
with (re)possessing not only an object (e.g., a person or home) but its value
and significance, and, further, because the possessions to which the lamenta-
tion lay claim are often the “wholly familiar”—the unreflective ground of
being and thinking, the everyday, occulted by its very familiarity. If this
repossessed object is contaminated with uncertainty, so is the act of posses-
sion itself. For while possession in an objective sense (such as physical or legal
possession of a house) can be determined with a reasonable amount of cer-
tainty, possession in the subjective or affective sense (such as knowledge of,
closeness to, or cognitive investment in, a loved one) is far less determinable.
Obliged to construct and possess an object, but only able to do so specu-
latively and uncertainly, the lamentation is quite capable of constructing a
“possession” that never existed—an Israel, for example, that “was great
among the nations, and princess among the provinces” or an Old South of
cavalier landowners and happy slaves.4 It is also quite capable of peremptorily
“fixing” distressingly unstable modes of subjective possession. This is not to
say that the lamentation’s claims are necessarily illegitimate, but merely that
the lamentation is a language that insistently portrays as already and certainly
possessed an object that it speculatively constructs and only indetermi-
nately possesses. It is thus a language that lends itself to certifying proprietary
claims and legitimating a certain (re)distribution of possessions.
The moment to which the narrators of Absalom respond is, like the moment
to which lamentation responds, characterized by the transfer of property, the
redistribution of possessions, and the remapping of territorial boundaries:
Sutpen’s apparently extortionary acquisition of land from Ikkemottube; the
L a m e n tat i o n a n d ( D i s ) P o s s e s s i o n 85
subsequent transfer of “Sutpen’s Hundred” to sharecroppers, and, ulti-

mately, its transfer in toto to the state; Sutpen’s obscene (and fateful)
exchange of baubles for an heir; Judith’s exchange of a store for a gravestone.
Indeed a large portion of the narrative itself—that produced by Quentin and
Shreve—is conditioned by the Compsons’ exchange of a piece of property
for a room at Harvard, a by no means insignificant exchange of real prop-
erty for cultural capital, and of Southern land for a Northern product.
Indeed, as we have noted, lamentation is a moment when ideological as well
as material possessions are transferred, when, for example, value, knowledge,
and identity are redistributed. Material and ideological property are not, of
course, unrelated; on the contrary, they are inevitably collusive because pos-
sessions function as signs. Material property is often the procurer and
guardian of ideological property, as Sutpen acquires chairs, chandeliers, tap-
estry, Damask, slaves, and wife to be signs of respectability. Conversely, ideo-
logical possessions may be converted into material ones, as Shreve’s parodic
lawyer systematically appraises the value of knowledge, records it in a ledger,
and converts it into capital; or as Rosa, bequeathing her knowledge and iden-
tity to Quentin, suggests: “if you write down this story, you may sell it to the
magazines and buy your wife a new gown or a new chair for the house.”5
Indeed it is because the customary functioning of such significatory systems
are advantageous to the preservation of both material privilege and fixed
identities that it takes a catastrophe to effect a redistribution of possessions.
Catastrophes, hence, can be useful.
To note the convertibility between material and ideological possessions is
to recognize the degree to which material possessions function as demarca-
tions of identity. The “sprigs of holly thrust beneath the knockers on the
doors and mistletoe hanging from the chandeliers and bowls of eggnog and
toddy on tables in the halls and the blue unwinded wood smoke standing
about the plastered chimneys of the slave quarters” (267) all function, not
only as signs of what Henry and Charles do not, in their state “something
very like pariah-hood” (267) possess, but also as signs of what they are not:
integrated parts of the social body, members of a respectable family, legiti-
mate confederate soldiers, what Michel de Certeau calls “an identifiable and
legible word in a social language.”6 Lamentations often emphasize that to
be dispossessed of material goods is simultaneously to be dispossessed of the
value of one’s identity. The logical extension of this argument is that prop-
erty loss is always a loss of self, a formulation whose similarity to descriptions
of trauma should not be overlooked. Accordingly, the transfers of real prop-
erty portrayed in Absalom are everywhere accompanied by redistributions of
identity—the hobbledehoy becomes master and, subsequently, landowner
becomes merchant, slave-holding heiress becomes landlord-employer,
slave becomes freedperson, a college boy becomes inadvertent plenipoten-
tiary of the South.
In the moment of lamentation, moreover, material objects take on new
identities and undergo a process of transvaluation. Such objects not only
acquire new meanings—as the shield of Hector, which once signified

strength, valor, arete, becomes in Hecuba’s lamentation “a hateful thing to
look at”—but acquire new identities because they acquire new functions,
because they are literally re-made.7 Judith, for example, by mid-War wears
“the made-over dress which all Southern women now wore” and joins those
other women “in the improvised hospital where (the nurtured virgin, the
supremely and traditionally idle) they cleaned and dressed the self-fouled
bodies of strange injured and dead and made lint of the window curtains and
sheets and linen of the houses in which they had been born” (99–100). In
this moment, then, material possessions assume new identities because they
become functionally other. In the world of Absalom, rags become dresses,
barns become hospitals, curtains become bandages, and boards from the car-
riage house become a coffin for Charles Bon. And this transformation is also
a transvaluation: objects’ exchange value is transmuted into use value. A
dress or a curtain’s value no longer inheres in its ability to function as sign—
of taste, status, or prosperity—but in its ability to function as material with
which to cover the body or a wound. This re-made property of the lamenta-
tion is, further, no longer “proper” to its possessor. Such redistributions of
identity effect an alienating disjunction—a méconnaissance—between a “pos-
sessor” and objects. Such, for example, is the disjunctive relationship
between Rosa and the “botched over” dresses she wears, the second-hand
ring she is offered by a second-hand husband, or indeed the alien deaths she
makes over with her elegies.
My argument in this chapter is that the language of Absalom—and,
specifically, Faulkner’s idiosyncratic use of the demonstrative pronoun and
negations—is structurally, and often semantically, homologous to the lamenta-
tion’s uneasy rhetoric of possession. Further, I contend that Absalom’s narr-
ators deploy the lamentation’s possessive and privative gestures in order both
to lay retroactive claims of possession and to effect an interested redistribu-
tion of possessions. In the first part of the chapter, I focus on the demonstra-
tive rather than the (perhaps more obvious) possessive pronoun for several
reasons: because it is a striking stylistic feature of Absalom, because it illus-
trates the way in which the mode of lamentation may be displaced onto
apparently insignificant rhetorical gestures, and because Faulkner’s crafty
deployment of it exemplifies so beautifully the move of retroactive possession
and its utility in constructing a mythical past. As we shall see, the demonstra-
tive pronoun in Absalom regularly constructs knowledge, delineates identity,
and redistributes value by portraying as already and certainly established
those proprietary borders that it in fact speculatively draws.
In the second part of the chapter, I turn from possession to dispossession
and explore the rhetorical movement of the Faulknerian privative, which I
will argue corresponds not only to the language of lamentation, but to the
social movement conceived by New South spokesmen in the post-war
Reconstruction era. New South spokesmen, I contend, appropriated the
rhetorical destructions of the lamentation to produce newness, to construct
desire, and to effect a redistribution of possessions. I am thus tracing a trian-

gular resemblance between the privative gestures of the lamentation, of
Faulkner’s narrators, and of New South spokesmen, though the relation
between these three discourses is, I would emphasize, less one of deliberate
appropriation or influence, than a structural resemblance between languages
performing similar ideological tasks.
Possession and the Demonstrative Pronoun
The demonstrative pronoun is one of the primary mapping strategies of

Faulknerian language, and Faulkner’s idiosyncratic and iterative use of it
mimes the possessive activity of lamentation.8 In Absalom, demonstrative
phrases—such as “that quality of gaunt and tireless driving, that conviction
for haste and of fleeing time” (27), “that maiden revery of solitude which is the
first thinning of that veil we call virginity” (118)—are a repeated device for
demarcating ideological territory, for distributing knowledge, identity, and
value. Moreover, the demonstrative pronoun carries out these proprietary
distributions under the guise of “demonstration,” under the guise, that is to
say, of merely making evident or manifest the already existent and true.
When, for example, on the first page of the novel, Rosa is described as “sit-
ting so bolt upright in the straight hard chair . . . that her legs hung . . . clear
of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet” (3),
the demonstrative phrase grammatically presupposes that it is commonly
known that children’s feet possess an air of impotent and static rage. The
demonstrative phrase simultaneously demarcates the ideological territory
possessed by children’s feet and grammatically asserts, with its simple deictic
gesture, that this “knowledge” already exists: it need not be justified, but
merely pointed to. The demonstrative pronoun, hence, much like the
retroactive possessive of the lamentation, cloaks speculative objects and
acquisitional operations with the formidable power of grammatical legitima-
tion, as well as with the mien of logical “proof.”
The proprietary distributions effected and certified by the demonstrative
pronoun are most often, however, of far greater consequence than determin-
ing the nature of children’s feet. For example, by the belated moment of the
outset of the novel, it is commonly accepted knowledge that Thomas Sutpen
possesses a “design”—a design which he pursues with “grim and unflagging
fury” (31)—and this knowledge is established primarily through the repeated
certifications of the demonstrative pronoun. While it remains uncertain
whether this design exists prior to the moment when Sutpen recounts the
story of his youth to Grandfather Compson (in a moment, significantly, con-
ditioned by the insistent logical faultiness of the hunting dogs), and while it
is quite probable that the design is Sutpen’s retroactive logic for recovering
the past, this “knowledge” nevertheless consistently subtends the narratives
through which narrators and the townspeople of Jefferson construct the
identity of Sutpen; and it is a knowledge, moreover, that is by no means dis-

interested. For example, it allows Sutpen to rename his abandonment of his
Haitian wife, his dispossession of Charles Bon, his “affront” to Rosa Coldfield,
his seduction of Millie Jones, and his repudiation of his unnamed child,
“necessity,” and it allows him to describe inclusion and exclusion in terms of
a possible/impossible binary set to which moral argument, or human distress,
is simply irrelevant. Hence, in Grandfather Compson’s office, he explains,
indeed quite logically, how the fact of his Haitian wife’s black blood “ren-
dered it impossible that this woman and child be incorporated in my design”
(212). Possession of the design thus enables Sutpen to describe his acts as the
unavoidable effect of an already determinant and constraining entity, rather
than as the activity of a responsible moral agent.
In addition, possession of a design simultaneously renders Sutpen’s suffer-
ing significant and others’ suffering insignificant. Sutpen abandons his
Haitian wife—discounts the significance of the suffering he causes her—
because she would make “an ironic delusion of all that he had suffered and
endured in the past and all that he could ever accomplish in the future
toward that design” (211); that is, because he perceives her to pose a threat
to the meaningfulness of his suffering, to his ability to convert his distress
into meaning. When Sutpen realizes that Charles Bon and his annoyingly vis-
ible suffering will not go away, he redescribes the design as “vindication”
(220), as an act that will retroactively render his previous action (approach-
ing the plantation house door) right, and the action of the black man who
answered that door wrong, an act that will thus nullify the condition of his suf-
fering (wrongness), and delegate the emotional labor it involves to the slave.
Indeed, Sutpen manages to use the design, however spuriously, as the justifica-
tory basis for dispossession, though according to Quentin and Shreve,
Charles Bon would be content to possess nothing more than a sign—a flash
of recognition, a word, an unopened letter even—a sign that would immedi-
ately exhaust its signifying function and indeed be in exchange for any claim
to material possession. Thus the sign that Bon asks of his father, and that
Sutpen denies him, would in fact take nothing away from the design or its
products than the fundamentally gratuitous ideological dispossession that it
putatively “justifies.”9
Hence this movement that produces knowledge by grammatically fixing a
speculative object, by moving it from the uncertain realm of speculation to
the realm of certain knowledge, is a process through which interested and
consequential speculations become established as truth. Sutpen’s “design” is
one example among many. Similarly interested etiologies might be traced for
the knowledge of “that innocence” (192, 194, 198, 203, 211), “that mis-
take” (215, 218, 219), “that durance” (73, 94), “that curious relationship
which existed between [Henry and Judith]” (79), “that lawyer” (241), or
“that furious protest”of Charles Etienne (164). This process of grammatical
certification, moreover, fixes constraining and interested identities, making
Ellen’s speech into “that meaningless uproar of vanity” (58), Bon into
“that indolent fatalist” (83), Clytie into “that curious blend of savageness
and pity, of yearning and hatred” (161), and black men into nothing more
than “that [apparently insentient] expression on a balloon face bursting
with laughter” (190).
Further, like the arrow on Faulkner’s map of Jefferson that points to a
“Sutpen’s Hundred” beyond the edges of the page, the territory marked by
the demonstrative pronouns of Absalom extends far beyond the novel’s
diegetic terrain, drawing proprietary borders around such entities as women,
youth, language, solitude, and darkness. These extradiegetic properties, cer-
tified by demonstrative pronouns, function as the major premises on which
identities and value are deduced. Compson, for example, on the premise of
“that amoral boldness, that affinity for brigandage of women” (61) deduces
that Rosa is a thief and that she has stolen the materials for Judith’s trousseau
from her father’s store. Similarly, Compson’s demonstrative phrases demar-
cating the nature of women and youth—he describes Bon’s marriage as “a
ritual as meaningless as that of college boys in secret rooms at night” (93),
for example—function to de-value the narratives of Rosa, Quentin, and
Shreve, and thereby increase the value of his own. The demonstrative phrase,
then, not only distributes knowledge, value, and identity, but presupposes
assent to the particular distribution it has effected. Indeed, the finesse of the
demonstrative pronoun rests on its ability to represent its own proprietary
assignations as the “wholly familiar.” While the lamentation essays a specula-
tive reconstruction of the wholly familiar that has been lost, a less ingenuous
language, with the same movement, can construct and institute knowledge,
value, or identity, by portraying it as the wholly familiar.10 The demonstrative
pronoun, which speaks with the seductive voice of Charles Bon, “pleasant,
cryptic, postulating still the fact of one man of the world talking to another
about something they both understand” (89), is, then, the ready accomplice
of ideology and the linguistic distillate of its movement.
In addition to its acts of retroactive possession, the lamentation contends
two kinds of present possession: inalienable possessions such as kin and body
parts, and the possession of affliction. These assertions of present possession
belong to the lamentation’s structure of antithesis and reversal, for in the
lamentation one comes to possess what is alien (the aversive) and is alienated
from that which one ordinarily possesses most immutably.
By dint of linguistic constraint, lamentations posit present and rightful
possession of kin and the body.11 While kin and body parts are possessions
that are linguistically inalienable and possession of them is posited unequivo-
cally, in the lamentation, references to kin are almost invariably to alienated—
enslaved, exiled, or dead—kin. Likewise, references to body parts are, as we
have seen, almost invariably part of a description of the body turned against
itself in pain, descriptions in which the body is the alien agent of physical pain,
a weapon turned against the self.12 Hence the inalienable—my children, my
son, my daughters, my bones, my heart, my eyes, my flesh—has, in the
lamentation, become alien. And like the lamentation’s figures of alienated
kin and bodies in pain, the demonstrative pronouns of Absalom repeatedly

mark the alienation of inalienable possessions and are often complicit in
effecting it. Mr. Compson, for example, deploys the demonstrative pronoun
to linguistically alienate kin from each other in his abridged rendition of
Sutpen family history:
this father who should see that man one time, yet have reason to make a six
hundred mile journey to investigate him . . . this brother in whose eyes that sis-
ter’s and daughter’s honor and happiness, granted that curious and unusual
relationship which existed between them, should have been more jealous and
precious than to the father even . . . and this lover who apparently without voli-
tion or desire became involved in an engagement which he seems neither to
have sought nor avoided. (79; emphasis added)
Hence, rather than his father, her brother, his sister, her lover, in Mr. Compson’s
narration, kin have become discrete entities dispossessed of familial relation.
This disjunction between possessor and inalienable possession, indeed appo-
site to a family in which the father dispossesses one son, and the other son
dispossesses the father, constructs “kin” who, like a discarded object or unin-
habitable land, no one bothers to possess.
Similarly, Rosa’s description of her confrontation with Clytie on the stairs
repeatedly employs the demonstrative pronoun to deny Clytie possession of
her body. This linguistic severance of Clytie from her body, ratified by the
non-human terms in which she is described, is in marked contrast to the pos-
sessives that Rosa uses to speak of her own body:
I was crying, not to someone, something, but (trying to cry) through some-
thing, through that force, that furious yet absolutely rocklike and immobile
antagonism which had stopped me—that presence, that familiar coffee-colored
face, that body . . . no larger than my own. . . . (110; emphasis added)
I know only that my entire being seemed to run at blind full tilt into some-
thing monstrous and immobile, with a shocking impact too soon and too quick
to be mere amazement and outrage at that black arresting and untimorous
hand on my white woman’s flesh. (111; emphasis added)
Clytie is thus dispossessed of the most rudimentary of possessions, of what

Rosa calls “the citadel of the central I Am’s private own” (112), what we have
called the proprius.13 The demonstrative pronoun makes alien her face, her
body, her hand, linguistically reenacting, we might say, what the war has
done to Grandfather Compson’s arm.
But there is more to the passage than this: for while the lamentation rep-
resents the alienation of one’s own kin, and the pain of one’s own body, the
demonstrative pronoun, with a similar gesture, perpetrates this alienation on
(the representation of) another. This is to say, then, that the gestures of a lan-
guage that represents loss can likewise discursively effect loss. This alienation
of the inalienable, symptomatic of crisis, has the ability to construct a sense of
crisis, to fabricate a moment which calls for the inconceivable, and which
warrants extravagant action; in such a moment of confused and loosened

relationships between possessors and possessions, inconceivable acquisition
becomes as possible as inconceivable loss. Moreover, Rosa’s description of
her confrontation with Clytie demonstrates that this alienation of the inalien-
able, while characteristic of the lamentation, may be neither cataclysmic nor
exceptional; rather, it exists alongside other narratives and discourses, and
may be eclipsed by them. This passage, indeed, is not about Clytie’s alienated
body, but about Rosa’s attempt to find out what has happened between
Henry and Charles Bon. Not only is Clytie’s “loss” concealed by the narra-
tive of another, it can not even be conceived of as loss because it exists, rather
than as an exceptional, disjunctive moment, as a disregarded circumstance
of the everyday.
The second form of present possession asserted by the lamentation is the
possession of affliction. The lamentation repeatedly describes affliction, aver-
siveness, misery, sorrow in terms of possession—as my sorrow, my trouble,
our affliction or doom. The very proximity and presentness of sorrow, trou-
ble, terror, and misfortune make them seem like one’s personal possessions:
they comprise the immediate environment and designate one’s identity.
Indeed, like the re-made material property of the lamentation that effects a
disjunction between possessor and possession, or like the body turned
against itself in pain, one’s relationship to one’s own knowledge, value, iden-
tity is, in the lamentation, both alien and adverse: to possess oneself is to pos-
sess affliction. Thus is the adversity of the Sutpen household repeatedly
described as the possession of doom, and thus does this afflictive possession
ultimately determine, for example, Charles Bon’s identity, an identity adver-
sarial to its own possessor:
[Henry:]—You are my brother.

[Charles:]—No I’m not. I’m just the nigger that’s going to sleep with your
sister. (286)
While the lamentation’s assertions of wrongful possession indict adversity,

the lamentation’s afflictive possessions figure that adversity’s inevitable suffu-
sion into identity. For Quentin, that afflictive possession is, significantly,
accumulated significance—hearing and knowing too much, too long, a
knowledge so aversive, so inextricable from the self, that in the Spring of the
same year (though in a previous novel), Quentin will kill himself to be rid of
it. And to express this afflictive knowledge, Quentin turns to demonstrative
pronouns that simultaneously call forth and elide the overwhelming, aversive
significance of which they are the trace:
Yes. I have heard too much, I have been told too much; I have had to listen to
too much, too long thinking Yes, almost exactly like Father: that letter, and
who to know what moral restoration she [Judith] might have contemplated
in the privacy of that house, that room, that night, what hurdling of iron old
traditions since she had seen almost everything else she had learned to call sta-
ble vanish like straws in a gale. (168; emphasis added)
If the demonstrative pronoun only incidentally marks afflictive possession in

Absalom, its movement—which accumulates, circumscribes, and certifies—is
quite capable of instituting aversive knowledge or identity.
The lamentation’s assertions of possession, then, which we have character-
ized as retroactive, impossibly alienated, and afflictive, are all grammatically
marked as certain possessions. Beneath that estimable mien, however, all are
disturbed by semantic contentions that render their possessive claims equiv-
ocal. The assertion of prior possession, for example, is simultaneously and
oxymoronically both an assertion of possession and a catalog of loss; it asserts
grammatically a possession that it negates semantically. The lamentation’s
two forms of present possession are both simultaneously an insistence on
possession and a disruption of the customary relationship—of continuity and
mastery—between proprietor and property. This dual movement between
assertion and negation, between possession and dispossession, between lan-
guage that acquires property and language that effects loss, runs throughout
the lamentation and is manifested in a number of linguistic, grammatical,
semantic, and figural forms.
Privatives, Dispossession, and the New South
The lamentation is a language not only of possession, but of dispossession,

and the work of dispossession is largely carried out by privatives and other
forms of negation.14 Because unhinged from an assertion a privative means
nothing, because it must assert in order to negate, establish in order to
destroy, the privative, in re-making value, identity, and knowledge, reenacts
loss. Like the remade property of the lamentation, moreover, the privative is
by nature comparative, disjunctive, antithetical to itself. When Hecuba
laments that she, as an old woman, will be forced in slavery to perform
“asumforotata”—that which is most unfit, ill-matched, inappropriate—she
illustrates the logic of the lamentation’s affinity for privatives. For the priva-
tive “asumforotata” not only signifies disagreement, but is a (structural) dis-
agreement that mimes the disjunctive identity that Hecuba laments.15
The rhetorical dispossession effected by the lamentation’s privatives are
structurally and often semantically homologous to the various and relentless
devices of Faulknerian negativity. Faulknerian privatives—a term under which
I am including negations, negative neologisms, figures of privation, as well as
linguistic privatives—regularly function to dispossess owners of authority,
identity, knowledge, and value.16 The narrators of Absalom deploy the
lamentation’s privative gestures, I will argue, to effect an interested redistri-
bution of possessions, and I will thus be as much concerned with the ways in
which the novel’s narrators rhetorically construct catastrophe as with the way
they represent the underlying thematic catastrophe of the Civil War.17 I will
argue, further, that if the privatives of Absalom reenact the historical moment
of the Civil War and Reconstruction, they also inscribe a subsequent moment
that the novel only sketchily presents: that era between Charles Etienne’s
youth at Sutpen’s Hundred and Quentin and Shreve’s snowy night of sto-
rytelling at Harvard that we call the “New South.” The rhetorical move-
ment of the privative, I contend, structurally corresponds to the social
movement conceived by New South spokesmen during the period from
about 1877 to 1913, when Southern journalists, educators, politicians, and
preachers struggled to establish a new social and economic order. They did
so, I will suggest, by appropriating the rhetorical destructions of the lamen-
tation to produce newness, to construct desire, and, ultimately, to effect a
redistribution of possessions. While thematically the period of the New
South is only elliptically present in Absalom—glimpsed momentarily in Jim
Hamblett’s truncated speech to Charles Etienne (165), for example, or the
Ku Klux Klan’s visit to Sutpen’s Hundred (130, 134)—it is rhetorically, I
would argue, pervasively present.
In Greek lamentations, a-privatives (e.g., apolis [homeless], ateknos [child-
less]) regularly perform the loss of material possessions as well as the loss of
value and identity that accompanies them. In similar fashion, Faulknerian via
negativa descriptions designate and reenact the loss of identity concomitant
to the material losses of the war: “It was winter soon and already soldiers were
beginning to come back—the stragglers, not all of them tramps, ruffians, but
men who had risked and lost everything, suffered beyond endurance and had
returned now to a ruined land, not the same men who had marched away but
transformed” (126). In this passage, the negations function first to distinguish
those who possessed and lost property from those who cannot be dispossessed
(“tramps, ruffians”) because they have never been entitled to possession in the
first place, and second to mark the coincident contrariety (“not-sameness”) of
property and identity: as a man’s land has become other, or become the prop-
erty of another, so has the man become other to his former self. Likewise,
when Sutpen returns from war, he, like the ruined fields, fallen fences, and
crumbling walls of his property, has become other, indeed has become alien to
his own physical presence:
He [Sutpen] rode up the drive and into our lives again and left no ripple save
those [Judith’s] instantaneous and incredible tears. Because he himself was not
there, not in the house where we spent our days, had not stopped there. The
shell of him was there, using the room which we had kept for him and eating
the food which we produced and prepared as if it could neither feel the softness
of the bed nor make distinction between the viands either as to quality or taste.
Yes. He wasn’t there. . . . Not absent from the place, the arbitrary square of
earth which he had named Sutpen’s Hundred: not that at all. He was absent
only from the room, and that because he had to be elsewhere, a part of him
encompassing each ruined field and fallen fence and crumbling wall of cabin
or cotton house or crib; himself diffused and in solution held by that electric
furious immobile urgency and awareness of short time and the need for haste.
(129; emphasis added)
Hence, just as the physical presence of the fence no longer possesses the
characteristics of a fence—the ability to enclose space, divide property, pro-
hibit movement—so the physical presence of Sutpen no longer possesses the
characteristics of a self. The repeated negations of presence (“not there,”
“not in the house”), of sentience (feeling and taste), of effect (“no ripple”
save Judith’s in-credible tears), and subsequently of absence, construct an
identity which, like the privative itself, is disjunctive from, and antithetical to,
the self—an identity figurally reinforced by the passage’s alternative descrip-
tions of Sutpen as a “shell” (which implicitly likens him to the material alter-
ity of the house),18 as “diffused,” and as “in solution” (transformed beyond
identifiability by and into a dissimilar substance). These passages thus reenact
that moment of remade property and disjunctive identities that we call
“Reconstruction:” a term that, not coincidentally, also describes the remak-
ing activity of the privative.
If lamentation is a moment of remaking, it is also a moment when destruc-
tion has produced the radically new, when the world has been “re-originated”
through catastrophe. Indeed destruction commonly functions as a sign
of the new, and while the newly remade identities inscribed in the lamenta-
tion are alienating and aversive, newness is nonetheless often positively
marked. Destruction of existing knowledge is, for example, closely associated
with the production of new knowledge and indeed formulations of knowing
itself—revelation, disclosure, unconcealment—often rely on a primary act of
destruction (of cover or concealment). Thus the very act of destruction
itself—however excessive, however independent of the legitimately new—is
easily enough purveyed as the production of new knowledge. The fact that
destruction may stand as a sign for the new begins to explain why Faulknerian
narration often seems gratuitously destructive—narrators describe the knowl-
edge they efface in more detail than the knowledge they affirm, employ pri-
vatives to construct suspiciously sophistic distinctions, and posit highly
unlikely possibilities as if merely for the point of having something to negate.
Faulknerian privatives are, moreover, frequently imbedded in a “not . . .
but” sequence that not only destroys knowledge but functions to affirm a
new knowledge. Mr. Compson, for example, explains that when Sutpen first
arrived in Jefferson, he looked like a man who had been sick, yet “not like
a man who had been peacefully ill in bed and had recovered to move with a
sort of diffident and tentative amazement in a world which he had believed
himself on the point of surrendering, but like a man who had been through
some solitary furnace experience which was more than just fever” (24;
emphasis added). Similarly, Shreve insists that Judith grew old:
not as the weak grow old, either enclosed in a static ballooning of already life-
less flesh or though a series of stages of gradual collapsing whose particles adhere
not to some iron and still impervious framework but to one another as though
in some communal and oblivious and mindless life of their own like a colony of
maggots, but as the demon himself had grown old. (151; emphasis added)
Emerging from a frenzy of rhetorical destruction, such affirmations allow the

Faulknerian narrator to lay claim to a radically new, and thus particularly valu-
able, knowledge: a pristine knowledge traditionally associated with purity of
thought, with truth (a-letheia we should not forget, depends on a privative),
and, later, with the originality that Romanticism valorized as authenticity.19
Even in those passages where narrators seem to be mired in a past that
won’t go away, in a legacy that threatens to eclipse the very possibility of a
New South, the “not . . . but” structure of their discourse insistently pro-
duces newness. Picking up the narrative from Quentin and Shreve, the omnis-
cient narrator, for example, describes:
the starved and ragged remnant of [the Confederate] army . . . swept onward
not by a victorious army behind it but rather by a mounting tide of the names
of lost battles from either side . . . battles lost not alone because of superior
numbers and failing ammunition and stores, but because of generals who
should not have been generals, who were generals not through training in con-
temporary methods or aptitude for learning them, but by the divine right to say
‘Go there’ conferred upon them by an absolute caste system. (276)
This pervasive destruction of knowledge in Absalom, customarily propaedeu-

tic to a new knowledge, structurally replicates that program which both
urged and rhetorically enacted the destruction of old ideas, ideals, and iden-
tities in the interest of producing a New South. The project advocated by
New South spokesmen like Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution and
Richard Edmonds of the Manufacturers’ Record was contingent upon a series
of destructions: of the South’s single-crop system, of its reliance on cotton, of
its colonial raw-material economy, and of the leisure, manners, and elitism
associated with the antebellum plantation. Such destructions, New South
advocates wagered, would at once signify and produce newness: a South cha-
racterized not by plantation farming but by diversified agriculture; not by
production of raw materials, but by the manufacture of finished products;
not by Northern and freedmen’s governments but by Southern white
supremacy—would effect, that is, a radical redistribution of both material
and ideological possessions.20
To enact such a revolution and produce the new—and because destruc-
tion functions as a sign of the new—New South spokesmen inevitably relied
on a battery of rhetorical destructions, deploying not only the literal sort of
privative we have signaled in the lamentation and in Absalom but a particu-
larly rich line of mortuary and burial imagery. On December 21, 1886, at
Delmonico’s restaurant in New York, Henry Grady rose to speak to a group
of New England businessmen and, in what would become the New South’s
defining moment, began by quoting Georgia statesman Benjamin Harvey
Hill: “There was a South of slavery and secession—that South is dead. There
is a South of union and freedom—that South, thank God, is living, breath-

ing, growing every hour.”21 Grady’s opening statement at once structurally
reproduces the Faulknerian “not . . . but” sequence, predicates a claim to
newness on an event of destruction, and typifies the rhetorical construction
of the New South. For just as Faulkner’s narrators repeatedly perform acts of
linguistic destruction to produce new knowledge, so did Grady and his col-
leagues repeatedly perform rhetorical destructions to produce the New
South. State Chronicle correspondent Walter Hines Page, for example, in a
similarly seminal phrase, rhetorically decimated a generation of politicians by
labeling them “mummies,” hoping thereby to bury “dead and now malodor-
ous traditions,” make possible a new industrial school in North Carolina, and
build a region distinguished not by unnatural preservation of already dead
ideas and enterprises, but by “active and useful and energetic men.”22
New South spokesmen often mined for rhetorical materials in the destruc-
tion effected by Civil War, a destruction that, in New South terms, was less
significant for the freedom it granted to blacks than for the new order—and
economic opportunity—it produced for whites. Frequent rehearsals of the
destruction of slavery thus expediently functioned as both a conciliatory ges-
ture toward the North and the destruction necessary for production of the
new. In Grady’s “New South” speech at Delmonico’s, for example, the South
became the enslaved rather than the enslaver and the war, accordingly, about
the South’s emancipation rather than its defeat:
The South found her jewel in the toad’s head of defeat. The shackles that had
held her in narrow limitations fell forever when the shackles of the negro slave
were broken. . . . [The New South] understands that her emancipation came
because through the inscrutable wisdom of God her honest purpose was
crossed, and her brave armies were beaten. (37–38)
Rhetorically appropriating the destruction of war also allowed New South

spokesmen to insert themselves into that logic of lamentation that simultane-
ously declares the past utterly destroyed and proclaims loyalty to it—a posi-
tion not unlike Mr. Compson’s insistence on the Old South as both “a dead
time” and “larger, more heroic” than the “diffused and scattered” present
(71).23 At once constructing, decimating, and eulogizing the Old South, the
speeches and editorials of the New South routinely carried wrenching
descriptions of either the dying confederate soldier or the surviving soldier
who, like Sutpen, returns home to find “his house in ruins, his farm devas-
tated, his slaves free, his stock killed, his barns empty, his trade destroyed, his
money worthless, his social system, feudal in its magnificence, swept away.”24
Such lamentations ratified the New South program with the affective
potency of catastrophic loss and the reverence afforded the dead: men and
women wept when Grady spoke. Thus harnessing the elegiac sensibilities of
the South’s Rosas and the tragic irony of its Compsons, New South spokes-
men turned mourning to political advantage. Grady, for example, conclud-
ing his Texas Fair speech, launched an excruciatingly long description of a
wounded confederate soldier who, left by the surgeon to struggle for life
until the following sundown, waited in “patient agony,” dreaming of the
South. Following the story’s dramatic conclusion—in which, at long last,
“the lanterns of the surgeons came and [the soldier] was taken from death to
life”—Grady continued with an allegory:
The world is a battle-field strewn with the wrecks of government and institu-
tions, of theories and of faiths that have gone down in the ravage of years. On
this field lies the South, sown with her problems. Upon this field swings the
lanterns of God. Amid the carnage walks the Great Physician. Over the South
he bends. “If ye but live until tomorrow’s sundown ye shall endure, my coun-
trymen.” Let us for her sake turn our faces to the east and watch as the soldier
watched for the coming sun. . . . [A]nd the Great Physician shall lead her up
from trouble into content, from suffering into peace, from death to life.25
In a single deftly conceived paragraph, Grady thus depicted catastrophic

destruction, rhetorically replicated production of the new (transposing the
Faulknerian “not . . . but” into a “from . . . to”), transferred sympathy for
the soldier’s pain onto the South, retrieved the South from identification
with dead soldiers, lost battles, and “wrecks of government,” and made the
adherent to New South ideology into a continuation of the confederate
soldier—watching as he watched for the coming sun, fighting as he fought
for the sake of the South.
This identification of the New South with a soldier fighting the North also
attests to the fact that the destruction most crucial to the New South pro-
gram was the destruction of neither slavery nor of the Old South but of
Reconstruction. For in many Southern whites’ view, Reconstruction was pri-
marily a vindictive punishment conceived by Northern radicals to humiliate
the South, a moment Southern historians long interpreted as “an era of cor-
ruption presided over by unscrupulous ‘carpetbaggers’ from the North,
unprincipled Southern white ‘scalawags,’ and ignorant freedmen,”26 a
moment the novel describes as “the winter when we began to learn what
carpet-bagger meant and people—women—locked doors and windows at
night and began to frighten each other with tales of negro uprisings” (130).
New South spokesmen, both sharing and constructing the Southern white
community’s sense of terror and dispossession, thus customarily portrayed
Reconstruction not as a new society produced by the destruction of war (as
did the Radical Republicans) but rather as a continuation of that destruction.
In Facts About the South, for example, a book that summarized editorials from
the Manufacturers’ Record, Edmonds’s rehearsal of the devastation of war
continued with the assertion: “That was bad enough, but ten years of
Reconstruction—Destruction it should be called—with its unscrupulous
swindling and debauchery of legislation, its reign of terror greater than that
of 1860–1865, was equally bad if not worse.”27 Similarly, in his Texas State
Fair address, Grady described Reconstruction’s enfranchisement of freedmen,
disfranchisement of rebels, military rule, and carpetbagger governments as an
extension of the North’s conquest of the South: “Not enough to have con-
quered our armies—to have decimated our ranks, to have desolated our fields
and reduced us to poverty, to have struck the ballot from our hand and
enfranchised our slaves—to have held us prostrate under bayonets while the
insolent mocked and thieves plundered. . . .”28
By representing Reconstruction as loss—of ballot, power, and dignity—
and by rhetorically negating Reconstruction and affirming Southern white
power, Grady and his colleagues considerably fortified that process called, sig-
nificantly, “Redemption.”29 Signifying at once a purification, a redistribution
of property, and the recuperation of a lost object—a “but” retrieved from the
“not”—“Redemption” named the Democratic overthrow of Reconstruction
governments and the reestablishment of “home rule,” strict segregation, and
white supremacy. The degree to which the Redeemer’s project was conceived
as an act of destruction is evinced by the degree to which they defined their
political platform via negativa; for as Edward Ayers notes:
The Democratic Redeemers defined themselves, in large part, by what they

were not. Unlike the Republicans, the Redeemers were not interested in a bira-
cial coalition. The democrats would not seriously consider black needs, would
not invert the racial hierarchy by allowing blacks to hold offices for which
whites longed. Unlike the Republicans, too, the Redeemers would not use the
state government as an active agent of change.30
The conceptual negativity of Redemption, moreover, materialized, for

Redemption was ultimately accomplished by a series of material destructions
that, continuous with and legitimated by the Redeemer’s rhetorical destruc-
tions, destroyed the bodies of blacks to affirm the identity of whites: the pri-
vative made flesh. During the “Redemption” of Faulkner’s Mississippi, for
example, white leagues murdered as many as 300 blacks in Vicksburg, as
well as a number of prominent blacks, including a state legislator, in Yazoo
County; Republican officials resigned under threat of assassination.31
Absalom alludes to this violence in Rosa’s description of “the sheets and
hoods and night-galloping horses with which the [KKK] discharged the
canker suppuration of defeat” (134). Indeed, the novel’s climactic fire at
Sutpen’s Hundred might stand as a figure for the materially enacted priva-
tives of the Democratic Redeemers: it is at once the culmination and an incar-
nation of the novel’s privatives, a ritual purification, and the destruction of a
black body.32 Yet it is in the novel’s rhetorical negativity, its destruction of old
knowledge and affirmation of newness, that the conceptual negativity of
Redemption is, I would maintain, most consistently chronicled.
If the privatives of Absalom inscribe the rhetorical structure of the New
South, so too does that indistinction between the phenomenal and the rhetor-
ical that characterizes both the lamentation and Faulkner’s novel. J. Hillis
Miller has argued that Absalom dramatizes the necessity but incompatibility
of constative and performative language in narration:
If in one direction a storyteller tries to stick to the facts (the constative effort),
and ends by inventing them (the performative element), in the other direction
if a storyteller tries to invent a purely fictional story, wholly cut off from life, if
he tries to absorb life into a perfect narrative design, he always ends by referring
to life and to history, since the words he must use are after all referential.33
I wish to insist, however, that Miller’s first “direction”—in which the consta-
tive slides into the performative—describes a situation particularly acute in
traumatic circumstances and thus particularly marked in the lamentation and
that his second “direction”—in which the performative inevitably “refer[s]
to life”—describes not only a mere reference to, but a consequential con-
struction of, life. Mr. Compson, for example, narrating the moment of
Mississippi’s redemption, employs the “not . . . but” structure to refigure the
foreignness of Charles Etienne as unreal:
this child with a face not old but without age, as if he had had no childhood,
not in the sense that Miss Rosa Coldfield says she had no childhood, but as if
he had not been human born but instead created without agency of man or
agony of woman and orphaned by no human being . . . but produced complete
and subject to no microbe in that cloyed and scented maze of shuttered silk as
if he were the delicate and perverse spirit-symbol, immortal page of the ancient
immortal Lilith, entering the actual world not at the age of one second but of
twelve years. (159)
This rhetorical emptying out of age, childhood, natural birth, mother, the
vulnerability of the body, and indeed mortality itself is not without conse-
quences; for it not only enacts a sustained and fantastic loss of being, but
legitimates the novel’s later constructions of Charles Etienne as insentient, as
possessing “a strength composed of sheer desperate will and imperviousness
to the punishment, the blows and slashes which he took in return and did not
even seem to feel” (164). Indeed this rhetorical insentience solidifies into
knowledge and, ratified by the deictic gesture of the demonstrative pronoun,
becomes not only “that same fury and implacability and physical impervious-
ness to pain and punishment” (167) but, in a disturbingly eloquent elision
of history, social conditions, and race, “that furious protest, that indictment of
heaven’s ordering, that gage flung into the face of what is” (164). The
mutual contamination of constative and performative language of which
Miller speaks thus allows a rhetorical construction of identity—such as the
catastrophic loss of identity suffered by Charles Etienne—to pass for a repre-
sentation, that is, for a disinterested record of the real. The gestures of a lan-
guage that represents catastrophe may, such passages suggest, function to
construct useful and interested catastrophe, for a reenactment and an enact-
ment are disconcertingly difficult to distinguish.
In similar fashion, New South spokesmen, placing themselves like the nar-
rators of Absalom at that site where the phenomenal and the rhetorical are
indistinguishable, recorded as fact the very “New South” that they were in
the act of rhetorically constructing. Grady opened his 1887 address at the
Augusta exposition, for example, with a rhetorical destruction of desolation

and poverty that, like the exposition itself, was less an accurate record of phe-
nomena than a performance intended to enact them:
We give thanks to-day that the Lord God Almighty, having led us from desola-
tion into plenty, from poverty into substance, from passion into reason, and
from estrangement into love—having brought the harvests from the ashes,
and raised us homes from our ruins, and touched our scarred land all over with
beauty and with peace permits us to assemble here to-day and rejoice amid the
garnered heaps of our treasure.34
Grady’s negation of post-war conditions and affirmation of “heaps of treas-

ure” illustrate the manner in which a new knowledge or a New South, which
is less a representation of phenomena than a rhetorical construction of them,
grants itself the status of a representation and thereby disguises its own inter-
ested production of the real: a reenactment and an enactment are disconcert-
ingly difficult to distinguish.
Yet while such representations might well produce belief in a material
heap of treasure, they did not, alas, always produce the material heap of treas-
ure itself, a fact confirmed, for example, by the “carpetless room [in which
Judith and Charles Etienne confer] furnished with whatever chairs and such
which they had not had to chop up and burn to cook food or for warmth or
maybe to heat water for illness from time to time” (167). Hence, at the Texas
State Fair, while enlisting his customary series of performative destructions,
Grady shrewdly combined his rhetorical destruction of the one-crop system
and of raw material production with a description of loss of profits:
with amazing rapidity [the South] has moved away from the one-crop idea that
was once her curse. . . . With equal swiftness has she moved away from the folly
of shipping out her ore at $2 a ton and buying it back in implements at from
$20 to $100 per ton; her cotton at 10 cents a pound, and buying it back in
cloth at 20 to 80 cents a pound; her timber at 8 per thousand and buying it
back in furniture at ten to twenty times as much.35
At the same time that Grady’s constative language slides indistinguishably

into the performative—precisely as the fair’s “exhibits” were intended to
do—his description of loss of profits compensates for the failures of rhetori-
cal performativity by producing desire.
Desire is a kind of anticipatory loss: an anticipated possession and the
(concomitant) lack of it. The lamentation produces desire—for a lost object,
a forgotten past, a less aversive future—not only by chronicling loss, but by
employing the privative, for in (re)enacting loss, the privative enacts desire.
It is thus no coincidence that Absalom’s primary site of desire—Bon’s long-
ing for the recognition of his father—is repeatedly constructed through pri-
vatives: “And he sent me no word? He did not ask you to send me to him?
No word to me, no word at all?” (285). The very conception of the father
and his signs (as anticipated possession) conditions both Bon’s desire and his
sense of perpetual “loss” of a father he has never possessed. “Thus desire for
what is withheld,” writes Matthews, “is scarcely distinguishable from sorrow
over what has been lost.”36
Just as the novel’s rhetorical loss of the father produces Bon’s incessant
desire for the father, so does Grady’s rhetorical loss of profits produce desire
for profits. And the privatives employed by New South spokesmen routinely
functioned to produce a desire that compensated for the failures of rhetori-
cal performativity: if language itself did not remake society, perhaps desire for
that remade world would. Benjamin Harvey Hill, for example, in a widely-
read article calling for educational reform, posited both a series of anticipated
possessions and the lack of them and thus, enlisting the common technique
of comparing the South’s productivity with the North’s, reenacts—and per-
formatively enacts—desire:
the persistent, pertinacious, persevering energy of the North has erected a hun-
dred cotton factories where we have but one. . . . The facilities for manufactur-
ing are all in our favor; and it is owing to our own inattention and neglect that
we are so immeasurably behind. . . . We became dependent upon the North for
everything, from a lucifer match to a columbiad, from a pin to a railroad
engine. A state of war found us without the machinery to make a single percus-
sion cap for a soldier’s rifle, or a single button for his jacket.37
In similar fashion, in what came to be known as the “funeral oration,” Grady

cannily placed himself at the burial of a confederate soldier and, tapping the
affective potency of the site of death, proceeded to describe not merely the loss
of the soldier, but a series of losses calculated to produce desire for precisely
those industries he wished to promote: lumber, mining, and textile mills:
They buried him in the midst of a marble quarry: they cut through solid mar-
ble to make his grave; and yet a little tombstone they put above him was from
Vermont. They buried him in the heart of a pine forest, and yet the pine coffin
was imported from Cincinnati. They buried him within touch of an iron mine,
and yet the nails in his coffin and the iron in the shovel that dug his grave were
imported from Pittsburg. They buried him by the side of the best sheep-grazing
country on the earth, and yet the wool in the coffin bands and the coffin bands
themselves were brought from the North. The South didn’t furnish a thing on
earth for that funeral but the corpse and the hole in the ground. There they put
him away and the clods rattled down on his coffin, and they buried him in a
New York coat and a Boston pair of shoes and a pair of breeches from Chicago
and a shirt form Cincinnati .38
Where rhetorical destruction failed to produce the New South, the privative
thus offered the auxiliary function of formulating desire.
The phenomenal redistributions of the moment of lamentation and the
rhetorical dispossessions of the language of lamentation thus often follow a
logic in which moment and language indissociably produce each other, in
which language both represents and effects a redistribution of possessions. If

the privatives of Absalom chronicle the rhetorical destructions of New South
spokesmen—their production of newness and desire—they also inscribe the
redistribution of possessions that characterized the New South. Both the New
South spokesmen’s explicit announcements—“a hundred farms for every
plantation, fifty homes for every palace”39—and their remarkable affinity for
tabulating possessions (statistics, tables, charts, and graphs abound) testify to
the fact that a redistribution of possessions was fundamental to the New
South program. Because material and ideological possessions customarily
condition each other, moreover, New South spokesmen often attempted to
achieve a redistribution of material possessions by rhetorically redistributing
ideological ones. Hill’s argument for educational reform, for example, which
redistributes value and aims to re-make knowledge, transfers value to the
manual labor, hard work, and utilitarian knowledge necessary to the produc-
tion of material possessions: “We want . . . [a] plan of instruction, which will
embrace the useful rather than the profound, the practical rather than the
theoretic.”40 Edmonds, likewise, rhetorically transfers value from the pleas-
ures of material luxury to the hard labor and autonomy he believes will trans-
fer material possessions to the South: “a loaf, whether of bread or educational
opportunity, won by hard and honest work, by the sweat of the brow, means
more for manhood than a thousand dainties accepted as charity from those
upon whom they have no claim.”41
If the war remade the identity of the South, New South spokesmen,
deploying a language of catastrophe and following the logic of their own
privatives, attempted to remake the identity of the South once again, this
time in the interest of attracting Northern capital. Edmonds, for example,
in Facts about the South—a book distributed to hotel rooms and ostensibly
aimed at traveling Northern investors—was at pains to re-make the image of
the Southern gentleman, the man of leisure and letters, into an image of a
Southern businessman, a man of energy and enterprise. “But this is only a small
part of the evidence available,” he writes after a page of statistics on the
South’s antebellum progress in industry, “to conclusively prove that great
energy and enterprise were displayed by the people of the South”; the census
of 1860, he contends, proves that Southern peoples “were not slothful in the
business of money-making.”42 Edmonds also wished to re-make the identity
of the South not as a place of monstrous social unrest but as a peaceful,
secure place for investments. He thus advised newspapers to portray the
South as “prosperous and contented, devoting her energies to the develop-
ment of her unequalled resources, and to the education of her citizens, white
and black.” Editors, he urged, should “reduce to the minimum their record
of local crimes and should demand that new suppliers send them other mat-
ters,” especially “industrial information.”43
Thus if the moment of lamentation is a moment when transfers of real
property effect redistributions of identity, New South spokesmen bargained
that by miming the moment of lamentation and re-making identity they
might effect a transfer of real property. And while neither the causes of phe-
nomena nor the effects of language are singular, to a certain degree they did.
For such rhetorical redistributions of value and identity, subtly sliding from
the constative to the performative, from “referring to” to constructing life,
effected an actual, if not cataclysmic, redistribution of material possessions.
The President of Emory College, Bishop Atticus Haygood, in his 1880
Thanksgiving Sermon entitled “The New South: Gratitude, Amendment,
Hope,” described such a redistribution, catalogued the new material posses-
sions of the South, and, adopting the “then/now” structure of the lamenta-
tion, urged his parishioners to compare the new with the old:
The houses built recently are better in every way than those built before the
war. I do not speak of an occasional mansion, that in the old times lifted itself
proudly among a score of cabins, but of the thousands of decent farm-
houses, comely cottages that have been built in the last ten years. I know
scores whose new barns are better than their old residences. Our people have
better furniture. Good mattresses have largely driven out the old-time feath-
ers. Cook-stoves, sewing machines, with all such comforts and conveniences,
may be seen in a dozen homes to-day where you could hardly have found
them in one in 1860. Lamps that make reading agreeable have driven out tal-
low dips, by whose glimmering no eyes could long read and continue to see.
Better taste asserts itself: the new houses are painted; they have not only
glass, but blinds. There is more comfort inside. There are luxuries where
once there were not conveniences. Carpets are getting to be common among
the middle classes. There are parlor organs, pianos, and pictures, where we
never saw them before.44
Not an occasional mansion but scores of cabins, not old time feathers but
good mattresses, not tallow dips but electric lamps: while Haygood’s list of
possessions, characteristic of New South hyperbole, is no doubt comprised as
much of commodities his parishioners were encouraged to desire as those
they actually possessed, it nonetheless indicates the kind of redistribution of
possessions that resulted, at least in part, from the rhetorical redistributions
of New South spokesmen.
Moreover, many men and women in the New South enacted the structure
of New South privatives and, like Judith, the mistress turned merchant,
assumed re-made identities: the planter became industrialist, the industrialist
became merchant, the merchant became planter.45 Many blacks, remaking
their lives as freedpeople, acquired both a mobility and an opportunity to
bargain for wages that allowed them to obtain material possessions; they
were able, according to Ayers, “to acquire considerable amounts of clothes,
furniture, musical instruments, bicycles, and buggies.”46 Many working class
whites moving from farms to the South’s new mill towns, and many women
and children re-making themselves as factory workers, acquired education,
material possessions, and a new sense of respectability.47
Thus, if the war itself caused singular, cataclysmic transformations, New
South boosterism brought about its own redistributions of knowledge,
identity, and material property—less dramatic to be sure, but arguably more

sustained. And if, as we have argued above, Faulknerian privatives reenact the
loss of identity concomitant to the material losses of war, they also construct
an even more pervasive and continuous loss of identity. Faulknerian priva-
tives repeatedly construct identities antithetical to the “natural,” the wholly
familiar, identities that are not a disjunction from a temporally prior self, but
rather a disjunction from the logically prior self posited (and subsequently
negated) by the privative.48 Charles Bon, for example, “must have appeared
almost phoenix-like, fullsprung from no childhood, born of no woman and
impervious to time and, vanished, leaving no bones nor dust anywhere”
(58). Just as Bon is here dispossessed of childhood, mother, and the marks of
time, so are nearly all the characters of Absalom sooner or later described in
terms of what they are not, as selves disjunctive from the natural or ordinary,
from their environment, or, as in this passage, from the very materials
through which identity is constructed.49 Indeed, this disjunction, in Faulkner
as in the lamentation, takes on fantastic proportions. Many of the identities
constructed by Faulknerian privatives are precisely of this fantastic nature—
rhetorical constructions of the monstrous, the inhuman, and the fantastic,
identities equivalent to sustained catastrophe.50
If the lamentation’s privatives construct identities that are fantastic, losses
of and by knowledge effect an anti-knowledge which, like the fantastically
disjunctive identity left by the privative, is antithetical to, and a negation of,
that wholly familiar knowledge taken for the real, natural, and believable.
Such privatives perform the ultimate transvaluation of knowledge, in which
that knowledge of the world taken for the “real”—the believed because senso-
rially perceived—is made over so dramatically as to be unbelievable, fantastic.
The Faulknerian privative, accordingly, repeatedly enacts a loss of knowledge
that makes knowledge disjunctive from its own customary constituents. Mr.
Compson’s “It just does not explain” speech, for example, employs a series
of privatives—incredible, incomprehensible, impervious, inexplicable, inde-
cipherable, inscrutable—that both describes the impossibility of constituting
the past into knowledge and empties out the constituents of that knowledge,
leaving, ultimately, “just the words, the symbols, the shapes themselves,
shadowy inscrutable and serene” (80). Indeed, Faulknerian privatives rou-
tinely construct perceptions that are emptied out of both knowledge and the
properties of the “natural”; Rosa’s description of her arrival at Sutpen’s
Hundred following Henry’s murder of Charles Bon is exemplary:
Rotting portico and scaling walls, it stood, not ravaged, not invaded, marked
by no bullet nor soldier’s iron heel but rather as though reserved for something
more: some desolation more profound than ruin as if it had stood in iron jux-
taposition to iron flame, to a holocaust which had found itself less fierce and
less implacable, not hurled but rather fallen back before the impervious and
indomitable skeleton which the flames durst not, at the instant’s final crisis,
assail. (108–9)
In this passage, privatives simultaneously establish and empty out the “natu-
ral,” causal relation between the activity of war and a destroyed house and
leave only a residual anti-knowledge, an emptiness (“desolation”), which can
only be gestured towards negatively (as not ravage, not invasion, not the
result of bullet or iron heel), metaphorically (“as though”), and compara-
tively (“something more,” “more profound than ruin”). More generally, the
privatives de-value that knowledge that imputes destruction of the house of
Sutpen to an active agent; indeed, the passage reinforces the passivity left
over from its initial privatives (“not ravaged, not invaded”) with a number of
“figural privatives” (“rotting portico,” “scaling walls,” “skeleton”) and with
a holocaust emptied out of its active properties both by a privative (“not
hurled but rather fallen back”) and by the semi-privative “less” (“less fierce
and less implacable”). Moreover, in dispossessing the material world of its
“natural” constituents, the passage’s privatives are likewise a dispossession of
that most certain of knowledges—the believed (because sensorially per-
ceived) nature of the material world. Thus, house and body (skeleton), ordi-
narily vulnerable to invasion by fire, according to the passage’s privatives, are
impervious and indomitable, and have a fantastic ability to resist the external
and the active; likewise, fire, which in ordinary circumstances, actively and
fearlessly overcomes the passive materials of house or body, is here “less fierce
and less implacable,” is “not hurled, but fallen back,” and dares not assail. Yet
this fantastic world where wood and flame are like iron, where passivity is
stronger than any activity, where house and body are invulnerable and fire
quails, is the site of a further perversion of the unbelievable beyond itself. For
if war is already a perversion of “natural” peacetime, then Sutpen’s Hundred
is a catachrestic perversion of that perversion—a “something more” in the
language of the passage. And if this passage fantastically distorts the natural,
it is also a (catachrestic) distortion of that (already fantastic) distortion. For
unlike the fantastic body of the house, Bon’s body has been ravaged, invaded,
marked by a bullet, and indeed by the iron heel of a soldier’s racist morality.
Hence while the description of the house may function as a wish-fulfilling
displacement, it also functions to cast the ostensibly natural (a body vulnera-
ble to a bullet) as the fantastic. Likewise, this passage’s doubly duplicitous
foreshadowing—this is not the final crisis, the house will be assailed by fire—
proleptically casts the novel’s final holocaust not as the natural result of set-
ting a match to a “tinder-dry rotten shell” (300) but as a final, fantastic
permutation of the house’s fantastic imperviousness.51 Faulknerian privatives
thus repeatedly construct the epistemologically fantastic, the most cat-
achrestic of knowledges, a “knowledge” that indeed is often no knowledge
at all, but the impossibility of knowledge.
In this manner Faulknerian privatives chronicle, I would argue, the ill-
fitting identities and fantastic knowledge of the New South. For while New
South spokesmen rhetorically remade the identity of Southern whites into an
energetic, enterprising, and industrious people, they simultaneously con-
structed an identity for blacks as an indolent, vagrant, deceitful, ignorant,
and violent people. Many freedpeople thus came to bear identities that were
alien and to lead lives equivalent to sustained catastrophe.52 And with a con-
veniently circular justificatory logic abetted by the liaison between material
and ideological possessions, blacks were often denied access to material prop-
erty on the basis of their alleged lack of ideological possessions: rhetorically
made violent and sexually aggressive, blacks were excluded from the prosper-
ity of mill towns where white women worked; rhetorically made deceitful
and ignorant, educated blacks were excluded from skilled jobs; rhetorically
made indolent and prone to vagrancy, black laborers (with the help of fifty
strikes against black labor between 1882 and 1900) were similarly excluded
from many unskilled jobs.53 Black farmers, moreover, who comprised the
vast majority of black laborers, “not only worked the white man’s land but,”
according to Woodward, “worked it with a white man’s plow drawn by a
white man’s mule.”54 Capturing both the shady calculations characteristic of
the South’s notorious lien system and the general redistribution of posses-
sions in the New South, an African-American lyric of the period ran:
Naught’s a naught
And five’s a figger
All for the white man
And none for the nigger.55
Similarly excluded from New South progress were white tenant farmers—the
Wash Joneses of the South; for while New South spokesmen rhetorically con-
structed a South not of plantations, but of diversified small farms, the mate-
rial enactment of that negation and affirmation was not only a destruction of
the old plantation, but a rise of the new lien system—a system in which small
farmers not only did not possess any land, but were soon dispossessed of
both economic autonomy and freedom of movement.56
New South rhetoric, moreover, which continued to announce a fantastic
progress, increasingly created a moment that was, like the moment of lamen-
tation, characterized by a disruption of that most certain of knowledges—the
believed because sensorially perceived, an incomprehensible moment in which
the world no longer fit into language: not because the world had become fan-
tastic and language was inadequate to describe it, but because language had
become fantastic and the world was simply inadequate to perform it. That
very incomprehensibility, moreover, provided a rhetorical subterfuge behind
which to conceal material conditions: “the magnitude of the investments
made in Southern railroads . . . is almost beyond comprehension,” declared
Edmonds in Facts About the South; “the magnitude of the wealth of the South
in coal is beyond computation”; the impact of Southern iron and steel
supremacy “is beyond our power at present to fully grasp.”57 Such assertions,
which rhetorically obscure the real by declaring it unknowable, demonstrate
how the gestures of a language that records confusion can likewise be used
to construct confusion, to produce disbelief in the sensorially perceived
conditions of the material world. For the incomprehensibility that inheres in
the moment of lamentation—and that Faulknerian privatives repeatedly

produce—increasingly functioned in the hands of New South boosters as
obfuscation, a “can’t-be-known” that concealed what must not be known.
Thus while the New South, from a number of perspectives, was a moment
of dramatic change, those excluded from New South progress—particularly
freedpeople and poor whites—testify to the degree to which a rhetoric that
produces the appearance of newness may function to mask continuity.
Indeed, both New South spokesmen and Democratic Redeemers aspired to
re-establish antebellum social relations in a new, industrial atmosphere.58
And both the convict-lease system (which sold convicts to industries in need
of labor and primarily affected blacks convicted on petty theft or vagrancy
charges) and new codes of white supremacy—“vastly more complex than the
antebellum slave codes or the Black Codes of 1865–1866”—effectively insti-
tuted a caste system that reproduced the social and economic dependency,
and often the brutality, of slavery.59
Ultimately excluded from New South progress, moreover, was the South
itself; for the language of New South boosters had neither the performative
nor the motivational potency to enact the fantastic South to which it
referred. Thus in 1913, the South remained a colonial dependent mired in a
raw-material economy, a region of low-wage industries, and the poorest sec-
tion of the nation; its railway system was in the hands of Northern
investors—by 1890 more than half belonged to Northern companies; its
mining industry was controlled by absentee owners; two thirds of its lumber
industry belonged to men in Chicago, Michigan, and Wisconsin.60 Thus
when Mr. Compson employs his customary privatives to describe Rosa
“hearing and losing the knell and doom of her native land between two
tedious and clumsy stitches on a garment which she would never wear and
never remove for a man who she was not even to see alive” (61)—his priva-
tives alienate Rosa from the products of her own labor in a disjunction both
structurally homologous to the “hearing and losing” of the passage and
semantically homologous to the doom of the native land.
The New South program, for all its emphasis on progress, not only
deployed enough nostalgia to rival any Faulknerian narrator but, through its
very rhetoric of newness, disguised its continuity with that “lost” society on
which Absalom so obsessively dwells. Conversely, if the narrators of Absalom
seem thematically to resist New South optimism by dwelling on devastation
and clinging to nostalgia, they are rhetorically as insistent on producing
newness as any New South spokesman. The Faulknerian privative thus
simultaneously marks the appearance of the mode of lamentation, refers to
a fictional moment of catastrophe, and inscribes the historical moment of
the New South. Those privatives record, that is, the production of newness
and desire, the indistinction between the phenomenal and the rhetorical,
the redistribution of material and ideological possessions, and the assertions
of incomprehensibility characteristic of both the lamentation and New
South discourse: in this unprepossessing rhetorical gesture resides capacities
to remake the world.
Chapter 4

L a m e n tat i o n a n d P u r i t y :
M a l l a r m é ’s “H o m m ag e ,” W A G N É R I S M E ,
a n d Fre n c h N at i o n a l i s m o f t h e 1 8 8 0 s
I n no doubt his most celebrated pronouncement on poetic purity, Mallarmé

declares, “L’oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui
cède l’initiative aux mots” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disap-
pearance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words);1 Mallarmé declares,
that is, that poetic purity is subsequent to loss—to “la disparition élocutoire du
poëte”—and thus tacitly declares that purity bears a resemblance to lamenta-
tion, which is also subsequent to loss. Simultaneously, his pronouncement
authorizes an investigation of what words, including the words of the pro-
nouncement itself, will say of their own initiative; and the word pure speaks
from a long memory of ritual practice and philosophical symbolism.
It is not surprising that Mallarmé should describe a purity established by
loss, for purity is above all a negativity; it is primarily defined by negation—as
that which is not defiled, not stained, not mixed, not foreign—and often
established by subtraction: by a fire that eliminates foreign matter, a lustra-
tion that washes away semen or blood, an exile that removes an offender or
scapegoat. Purity is meaningful, therefore, only by reference to (the threat
of) defilement and bears a reciprocally constitutive relation to it. Defilement,
accordingly, is a stain; the verbal form of miasma (miaivnw`), for example,
means “to paint over, stain, dye, color.”2 But the relationship between the neg-
ativity of purity (the absence of stain) and the positivity of defilement (the
presence of stain) is not, alas, so simple. For purity, which in the evaluative
sense is a positive term, can designate the presence of moral virtue or clear
thought—that is, of what we have called “ideological possessions”; and defile-
ment, which in the evaluative sense is a negative term, can designate a loss of
possessions such as identity or social standing. “Dread of the impure,” writes

Ricoeur, “beyond the threat of suffering and death, aims at a diminution of
existence, a loss of the personal core of one’s being.”3 Indeed the uncertain
origin of the Hebrew word kippur (purification) is an emblem of the simul-
taneously negative and positive nature of purity: on the one hand, if the der-
ivation based on Assyrian and Babylonian is correct, kippur means “to wipe
away”; if, on the other hand, the derivation based on Arabic is correct, it
means “to cover.”4 Moreover, not only does defilement bear within it a sense
of loss, but some forms of loss, such as death or destruction, produce defile-
ment; an unburied corpse, for example, is a primary source of miasma.5 Loss,
therefore, quite problematically, appears to condition both purity and defile-
ment. This semantic indistinction, no doubt a result of the fact that purity
and defilement are, before being concepts, matrices of logically unarticulated
ritual practices, thus permits a language that responds to loss—a lamentation—
to function as both a sign of defilement and an instrument of purity.
On the one hand, then, the moment of lamentation is a moment of defile-
ment and indeed the anguish of that moment is often expressed figuratively
as defilement:
Jerusalem is as a menstruous woman among them;6
And I . . . poor image of a corpse, weak shining among dead men.7
On the other hand, because the lamentation is subsequent to loss, and

because loss logically precedes the establishment of both the new and the
pure, the moment of lamentation may also mark a moment of unprecedented
purity. Lamentation is, as we have noted, both a moment when destruction
has left in its wake a re-originated, primeval world and a language that reen-
acts destruction and thus ostensibly validates the originality or purity of
knowledge. Indeed, as we have also noted, knowledge has historically been
established through destruction: of a veil (revelare), of a cover (dis-covery,
dis-closure), of forgetting (a-letheia), or—as duBois has argued in her analy-
sis of the role of torture in the construction of truth—of the body. Thus the
language of lamentation, while mourning defilement, may be used as an
instrument in cultivating purity.
Defilement, furthermore, is simultaneously restricting and liberating. On
the one hand, “once one is defiled, certain restrictions are placed upon him:
He may not enter the sanctuary, nor offer up a sacrifice, nor participate in the
Temple worship.”8 And restriction not only follows from defilement but
anticipates and forestalls it, for as Ricoeur has noted, “the interdict antici-
pates in itself the chastisement of suffering.”9 Defilement, that is, is discipli-
nary; it functions, as Mary Douglas has shown, to “impose system,” “enforce
conformity,” and “marshall . . . moral disapproval when it lags.”10 Defilement
is, she contends, a danger by which a dominant social order protects itself.
L a m e n tat i o n a n d P u r i t y 111
On the other hand, Douglas also contends that defilement, a kind of disor-
der, can liberate one from the constraints of order:
Ritual recognizes the potency of disorder. In the disorder of the mind, in

dreams, faints and frenzies, ritual expects to find powers and truths which can-
not be reached by conscious effort. Energy to command and special powers of
healing come to those who can abandon rational control for a time. . . .
In these beliefs there is a double play on inarticulateness. First there is a ven-
ture into the disordered regions of the mind. Second there is the venture
beyond the confines of society. The man who comes back from these inaccessi-
ble regions brings with him a power not available to those who have stayed in
the control of themselves and of society.11
A similar logic subtends Bakhtin’s description of the empowering defile-

ments of carnival, Kristeva’s description of the “powers of horror,” and
Kierkegaard’s description of the freedom of dread.12 Accordingly, the lamen-
tation, which is a moment and language of defilement, is at once restricted—
at a loss for words and thoughts, cut off from community—and capable of
reaching “inaccessible regions” of thought or experience.
In his letters and theoretical writings, as well as in his poetry, Mallarmé
repeatedly returns to a notion of ideal purity—“l’oeuvre pure” (the pure work),
“la notion pure” (the pure notion) (OC, 366, 368); “le livre comme pur
ensemble” (the book as pure unity) (OC, 378); “poésie pure” (pure poetry),
“une Conception pure” (a pure Conception), “poémes en vers . . . d’une
pureté que l’homme n’a pas atteinte” (verse poems . . . of a purity that man
has not reached),13 a poet who gives “un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu”
(a purer sense to the words of the tribe) (OC, 70). And he employs, in addi-
tion, repeated images of negativity—“[une] disparition vibratoire” (a vibra-
tory disappearance) (OC, 368); “[les] chastes cris [de la poésie]” (the chaste
cries of poetry) (OC, 372); “une notion ineffaçable du Néant pur” (an
indelible notion of pure Nothingness) (C, 259); “le Rien qui est la vérité”
(the Nothing that is truth) (C, 208).14 Indeed, in his letter to Eugéne
Lefébure of May 17, 1867, he insists on loss and destruction as conditions
of poetic truth:
C’est bien ce que j’observe sur moi—je n’ai créé mon oeuvre que par élimina-
tion, et toute vérité acquise ne naissait que de la perte d’une impression qui,
ayant étincelé, s’était consumée et me permettait, grâce à ses ténèbres
dégagées, d’avancer profondément dans la sensation des Ténèbres absolues. La
destruction fut ma Béatrice.
(This is what I observe about myself—I only created my work by elimination,

and each acquired truth was born only through the loss of an impression that,
having shimmered, was consumed and allowed me, thanks to its clear darkness,
to venture deeply into the sensation of absolute Darkness. Destruction was my
Beatrice.) (C, 245)
It is evident, then, both that purity is central to Mallarmé’s thought—though,

like the suppositions of ritual, it is never logically elaborated—and that elim-
ination, loss, and destruction play a significant role in attempts to achieve
such purity.
I argue in this chapter that Mallarmé constructs a crisis—a Crise de vers—
that mimes the circumstances of loss and the moment of lamentation, in the
interest of producing poetic purity, but that he constructs his purity out of
the materials of ritual and philosophical defilement: not only does his poetic
theory valorize death and danger, but his poetic practice largely relies on
contact with the foreign, on semantic contagion, and on syntactic fragmen-
tation. That is, rather than mourning death, contamination, fragmentation,
and incomprehensibility (all sources of ritual defilement) Mallarmé seeks
them out, for a symbolic defilement—“Le reploiement vierge du livre,
encore, prête à un sacrifice dont saigna la tranche rouge des anciennes
tomes” (The virginal folding back of the book, still prepared for a sacrifice
where the red edge bleeds from ancient tomes) (OC, 381)—is, it would
seem, necessary to produce purity. The significance of this defilement, I will
argue, spreads in multiple directions: it is instrumental in producing newness
and in mediating Mallarmé’s professional rivalry with Wagner, it bears wit-
ness to the domestic crisis of the Troisième Republique, and it functions as a
form of resistance to cultural assimilation. Further, because defilement is at
once material and symbolic, and because that “symbolism” is, rather than a
simple sign system, an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality—“a well-
spring of sign for a non-object,” as Kristeva puts it15—Mallarmé’s cultivation
of defilement is, I will argue, a recuperation of the scapegoats that “pure”
philosophy necessarily exiles: the material and the hyperessential.
I will turn to Mallarmé’s “Hommage” to Wagner, a poem that both for-
mally responds to loss and figures that loss in terms of cataclysmic crisis—as a
“tassement du principal pilier” (settling or shaking down of the principal pil-
lar)16—though it is a ritual performance not, apparently, coincident with grief:
“je suis le seul à qui cette tâche n’incombe pas exactement” (I’m the only one
on whom this assignment isn’t exactly incumbent) (OC, 1496), Mallarmé
protested to Dujardin, who commissioned the poem for the Revue wagnéri-
enne.17 The poem nonetheless memorializes a double loss thematically—the
loss, that is, of the old theater destroyed by Wagner and of Wagner himself—
and laments an artist for whom death and purity were central concerns.
Contact and Contagion
Because defilement is both produced and transferred by contact, purity

maintains itself by separation. Defilement, that is, is produced by a particular
kind of prohibited contact (with a corpse, a menstruous woman, a leper, a
foreigner) and thus purity is maintained by avoiding that contact (burying
the dead outside city walls, separating the sexes, marginalizing the ill, marking
the foreign).18 Contact with the foreign, for example, is a primary source of
defilement. In the Hebrew Bible, “everything which has to do with alien
gods or their cultus is condemned as unclean. . . . Foreign land and foreign
food are therefore unclean. The use of many animals for food is forbidden for
the reason that they figure in alien cults or magic rites.”19 Indeed, the adjec-
tival form of the word for defilement (tame) is used in the Hebrew Bible as a
simple synonym for alien and strange. As we have noted, not only does such
defiling contact with the foreign characterize the moment of lamentation,
but the foreignness of death is often reenacted in mourning practice in ways
that make the defiled mourner foreign to the community—separated, pro-
hibited from washing clothing, body, or hair; from engaging in sexual activ-
ity; from working; from studying scripture; and even from making a greeting
of well-being.20 But the confrontation with foreignness that characterizes the
moment of lamentation is not merely a metaphorical reenactment; it is often
a literal confrontation with a mastering culture that poses the threat of a
slower and more subtle death: a cultural assimilation in which it would no
longer be possible to separate one’s own culture from the defiling other. The
Hebrew lamentations and the stringent purity laws of Leviticus—which, for
example, forbid sowing a field with mingled seed or wearing a mixed gar-
ment of linen and wool21—are both products of the Babylonian exile and a
reaction to the formidable threat of cultural assimilation that it posed.
If separation from the foreign guarantees the purity of a people, it is an
analogous separation—from a threatening assimilation with the mother—
that, according to Kristeva, constitutes the identity of a speaking subject.
Reading the Levitical purity laws as a cultural extension of this subjective
imperative, she argues:
The place and law of the One [Yahweh] do not exist without a series of separa-
tions that are oral, corporeal, or even more generally material . . . carry[ing]
into the private lives of everyone the brunt of the struggle each subject must
wage during the entire length of his personal history in order to become sepa-
rate, that is to say, to become a speaking subject and/or subject to Law.22
Purity, then—of a place, of a people, of a self—establishes itself by a separa-

tion from that which it designates as foreign. Moreover, restitutive separation
is necessary to eliminate defilement when it occurs because defilement is con-
tagious. When a member of a community becomes defiled, a separation is
necessary to eradicate that defilement: an exile, an exclusion from cultic
activity or community life, the dispatch of a scapegoat; in ancient Athens,
even inanimate objects that had caused death were expelled beyond the bound-
aries of the city.23 Thus in the first tetralogy, the initial speech for the prose-
cution argues:
The whole city is polluted by the guilty man until he is prosecuted, and if we
connive at this by charging the innocent, the guilt for this pollution of the
city becomes ours, and the punishment for the mistake you would make falls
upon us.24
The resiliency of this relation between fault and restitutive separation is evinced
not only in the subjective experience of estrangement that Ricoeur contends
clings to fault, even when it is no longer imbued with pollution beliefs, but
in the material and institutional segregation of criminals and the insane that
Foucault details in modernity.
Yet while contact, stain, foreignness, and contagion threaten ritual purity,
Mallarméan purity, according to the passage with which we began, is condi-
tioned by an emphatic contact between words: “L’oeuvre pure implique la
disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l’initiative aux mots, par le heurt de
leur inégalite mobilisés” (The pure work implies the elocutionary disappear-
ance of the poet, who cedes the initiative to words, which are mobilized by
the collision of their difference) (OC 366; emphasis added). And the pure
nothingness to which Mallarmé aspires—“une notion ineffaçable du Néant
pur” (an indelible notion of pure Nothingness) (C, 259)—is an ineradicable
stain. Thus, Mallarméan poetic theory, which quite unabashedly strives to
give “les impressions les plus étranges” (the most foreign impressions) (C,
193), is, as far as ritual is concerned, defiled. Furthermore, if Mallarmé’s
poetic practice produces the purity of which his other writings speak, it does
so by contact with the foreign and by a kind of semantic contagion. The
“Hommage,” for example, brings into contact the semantically and syntacti-
cally foreign, transfers significance across ambiguous boundaries, and
thereby insists on a significance that is both indistinct and ulterior to logic.25
Contact between words, then, is semantically foreign. In lines such as
“Notre si vieil ébat triomphal du grimoire” (Our so old triumphal sport of
the magic book, 5), words contaminate each other with a radically foreign
significance, with a significance, that is, that makes words anomalous to their
own meaning. Unlike a familiar, domestic contact—“ébats amoureux” (love
games), for example—a contact that imbues an “ébat” with age (“vieil”),
militancy (“triomphal”), and the difficult seriousness of a “grimoire” is a
contact that renders the word “ébat” foreign to the youth, playfulness, and
insouciance that it customarily signifies, makes it a stranger, as it were, to its
own semantic community. And “grimoire,” which is appropriately both a
thirteenth-century defilement of the word grammaire and a semiotic rever-
sal that proclaims the vulgar tongue pure by contrast with the unintelligibil-
ity of la grammaire latine, is accordingly semantically corrupted by its
contact with “ébat.” Rather than distinguishing or clarifying, as does
“domestic” modification, such contact disturbs the literal identity of words
or sublimates literal meaning in favor of a figurative meaning: the ébat is
mental, not physical; frolicking with the arcane is a figure for the composi-
tional roots of Wagnerian music, or, according to an alternate reading, “the
old poetry that is merely a matter for libraries.”26 Similarly, the word “fracas”
(uproar, 9)—which signifies the acoustic sign of violently transformative
contact—is brought into just such transformative contact with the words
“souriant” (smiling), “originel” (original), and “haï” (hated). “The noun
and its adjectives together form an astonishingly improbable sequence,” con-
tends Malcolm Bowie; “as we move from word to word we are obliged to
leap the wide gaps which separate their fields of association—to leap from the
physical to the moral, from the spatial to the temporal, from the outward to
the inward.”27 And following the logic of contagion, the word “fracas,” jos-
tled on all sides by the semantically foreign, becomes itself foreign, becomes
alien, that is, to a literal fracas that, for example, is not capable of smiling,
perhaps particularly not if hated.28 Words, that is to say, like material objects
in the moment of lamentation, take on new identities, functions, and values.
This contaminating contact with foreignness, moreover, initiates a chain
of contagion: meaning spreads uncontrollably. A single word like “grimoire,”
for example, signifies “the old poetry”;29 the inherent mystery of music and
poetry;30 Mallarméan grammar; the legend material of Wagnerian opera, or
what Mallarmé in “Rêverie d’un poëte français” (Reverie of a French poet)
calls “le secret, réprésenté, d’origines” (the secret of represented origins)
(OC, 544); “a Wagnerian score”;31 or irresponsible writing that must be
“stack[ed] away in a cupboard,” that is, in the “armoire” of line 8.32 Its
meaning spreads—both through the semantic association of “grimoire” as a
forgotten language and practice and through the aural association of “gri-
moire” with “mémoire”—to the “manque de mémoire” (lack of memory) of
line 4, which in turn signifies the fall of old poetry or its relegation to obliv-
ion, a forgetting inherent in that poetry, a “lack of original inspiration in the
contemporary public theater,”33 or Mallarmé’s own lack of mourning over
Wagner; to the “hieroglyphs” of line 5, which figure the hermetic nature of
linguistic signs, or the cause of the “frisson familier” (familiar shudder, 7),
the instrument, that is, of a banal reproduction of the mysterious; to the
“sanglots sibyllins” (sibylline sobs) of line 16, which signify the sound of
poetry or Wagnerian music, “mystery and poignant sensibility, a ‘sobbing’
for beauty,”34 or an indecipherable lamentation—that is, the poem itself.
This epidemic of meaning that critics, to be sure, have repeatedly attempted
to quarantine and control, nonetheless spreads exponentially from words to
phrases to poems to Mallarmé’s entire oeuvre.
This spread of meaning, furthermore, not only results from ritual defile-
ment, but produces philosophical defilement; for the purifying separations of
ritual—which, according to Douglas, are organized around a logic that
“requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong”
and that “different classes of things shall not be confused”35—are an antici-
pation of the separation into categories, division of function, and disam-
biguation of terms that constitute the purity of philosophy.36 In Douglas’s
lapidary formula, defilement is “matter out of place.” “It implies,” she argues,
“two conditions: a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that
order.”37 Maintaining the order demanded by ritual—separating out the for-
eign and the contagious—demands definition and discrimination: a principle
emblematized by the tetralogies, by the fact that the location of ritual defile-
ment must be determined by the logical proceedings of a courtroom. Thus
both the association of purity with order and the necessity of logical discrim-
ination in maintaining that order initiate the historical transformation by
which purity comes to designate ordered thought. “The group katharos-
katharsis,” writes Ricoeur:
thus comes to express intellectual limpidity, clarity of style, orderliness, absence

of ambiguity in an oracle, and finally absence of moral blemish or stigma. Thus
the word lends itself to the change in meaning by which it will come to
express the essential purification, that of wisdom and philosophy.38
Philosophy, moreover, in its own separating, purifying act of self-definition—

in its struggle to become a speaking subject—will spit out ritual as the irra-
tional, will identify ritual as foreign to philosophy, as defiled.39 Thus it is that
defilement—source of ritual fear and, subsequently, fear of ritual itself—
comes to designate disordered thought: the irrational, the ambiguous, the
confused, the anomalous. And thus it is that philosophy comes to associate
disordered thought with the primitive, the uncivilized, the infantile, and
the barbarian. It should not be overlooked that these are descriptors we have
repeatedly encountered in analyses of both trauma and lamentation practice:
in Janet’s description of the linguistic disorder, knowledge crises, and regres-
sion characteristic of traumatic experience, for example, or in the lamenta-
tion’s performance of the breakdown of speech, its threatening inversion of
logos, its “Oriental” rage.
This is to say, then, that in addition to the violated spaces and dead bod-
ies of the lamentation, its disordered thought also constitutes defilement.
Moreover, the Mallarméan spread of meaning we have been discussing—
like the incomprehensibility, cognitive upheaval, and symbolic crisis that we
have argued characterizes the moment of lamentation—constitutes that
ambiguity which philosophy designates defilement; for rather than con-
structing distinction, such contact cultivates duplicity. Mallarméan words,
set in foreign surroundings, are indistinct, the site of multiple and contra-
dictory semantic identities.
If Mallarméan purity is constructed by a semantically foreign and philo-
sophically prohibited contact, it is simultaneously subtended by a syntacti-
cally foreign, linguistically prohibited contact: by the transformation of
“grammaire” to “grimoire.” For example, the noun phrase, “Notre si vieil
ébat triomphal du grimoire” (Our so old triumphal sport of the magic
book, 5), rather than neighboring the syntactic familiarity of a predicate,
abuts instead another noun phrase: “Hiéroglyphes dont s’exalte le millier”
(Hieroglyphs that the thousands exalt). Although this second noun phrase
may function as an appositive or as part of a compound subject, it is con-
tiguous to a prepositional phrase—“à propager” (to spread)—a form not
only foreign to the noun phrases but also to the syntactic elements in the
preceding line—“hiéroglphyes,” “s’exalte,” and “le millier.” The pronomial
phrase “dont s’exalte,” moreover, is foreign in number to the ostensible sub-

ject of the phrase (“hieroglyphs”). Grammatically speaking, these lines are
both incomplete and disordered. And while it is quite possible to rearrange
the line so that “hieroglyphs” is the object of “s’exalte”—“The normal
order,” according to Davies, would be “hiéroglyphes dont le millier s’exalte
à propager un frisson familier de l’aile”40—and while such alternative syntactic
arrangements pluralize meaning in a manner that compounds the semantic
contagion we have described above, such rearrangements are not, strictly
speaking, what the poem says.41
If we resist such syntactic manipulations, if we read Mallarméan syntactic
foreignness itself, rather than a domestication of it, we confront the kind of
significant incomprehensibility and symbolic crisis that characterize the
lamentation. For lamentation is a moment when experience is at once incom-
prehensible, urgently significant, and alien to the meaning producible by
language, a moment in which discrete materials of meaning may exist, but
the structure which organizes them—the covenant, the name, the syntax—
has been lost. It is not difficult to detect shades of Heideggerian breakdown
in this depiction: the collapse of the meaningful, instrumental totality of ref-
erences and assignments that makes the world intelligible, while condition-
ing an alternative form of reflection. Mallarméan poetic practice, however,
rather than responding to an incomprehensibility and to a world become for-
eign, deliberately cultivates a defilement that propagates foreignness; a defile-
ment, that is, that produces a significance alien to philosophically verifiable
meaning, or in Mallarméan terms, “un mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue”
(a total word, new, foreign to the tongue) (OC, 368). Indeed, we might
describe that “mot étranger à la langue” as a symbolic crisis in which lan-
guage becomes alien, not only to worldly experience, but to its own mean-
ing, a crisis in which language expresses a meaning that it can’t, properly
speaking, signify. A part of the lamentation’s sense of defilement is the move-
ment of anguish into a language that is foreign to it, a transformative contact
in which experience that is not only not language, but outside the reflective
domain of language, becomes and remains language. If, then, Mallarméan
poetry produces the kind of crisis that characterizes the moment of lamenta-
tion, then his poetic language—and this indeed is the aim of Mallarméan
“evocation”—produces experience that it can not describe.
Uses of Defilement
In the lamentation the irrational significance of which we have been speaking

marks a moment not only when structures of meaning have been destroyed,
but when the world is alien because new. Thus in bearing resemblance to the
moment of lamentation, Mallarméan defilement bears resemblance to a world
re-originated through catastrophe. The irrational significance of defilement
also resembles both a historical moment prior to the logical elaboration of
ritual practice—prior, that is, to philosophy—and a subjective moment prior

to language.42 It is these fluid resemblances between defilement, the irra-
tional, the infans, and the new that render defilement instrumental in pro-
ducing the new, for once defilement comes to function as a sign of radical
transformation and newness, it may increasingly function as a substitute for
its referent, may by its very constative insistence become performative, that is,
produce the appearance of newness.43 Just as the act of destruction that we
have studied above may be purveyed as the site of new knowledge, so may
the irrational significance of defilement construct an aura of newness: “un
mot total, neuf, étranger à la langue” (emphasis added).44
The “Hommage” to Wagner is customarily interpreted as a figurative
destruction of the old and establishment of the new, as an elegy, that is, to
Wagner the revolutionary; to the author of Art and Revolution and The Art-
work of the Future; to the poet of death and regeneration; to the master who
transformed theater musically, ideologically, and socially; to the guru of the
artistic avant-garde and of other aspiring traducers of tradition.45 It is even,
perhaps, an homage to Wagner the Dresden rebel, critic of modern society, and
titular high priest of political reformers.46 But if the “Hommage” thematically
celebrates Wagnerian innovation, the defilement of which we have been speak-
ing poses, I would argue, a rival newness. For if the images in the quatrains,
syntactically normalized and philosophically purified, symbolize the old the-
ater and old poetics and the images of the tercets—“the theater regenerated
by Wagnerian music, whose influence also transfigures the book,”47—this
thematic Wagnerian newness is subverted by Mallarméan semantic and syn-
tactic foreignness, by that significant incomprehensibility which, in practice,
constitutes Mallarmé’s “mot neuf.” Indeed, such subversion is consonant
with the ambivalent tribute proffered in Mallarmé’s other major text on
Wagner, “Rêverie d’un poëte français,” in which he ostensibly praises
Wagnerian newness and the “singulier bonheur, neuf et barbare” (singular
joy, new and barbarous) of Wagner’s representation of origins (OC, 544),
but nonetheless reproaches Wagner’s “harmonieux compromis” (harmo-
nious compromise) between music and drama (OC, 543), his reliance on
legend, and thus, ultimately, his failure to reach “la source.” “Tout se
retrempe au ruisseau primitif,” Mallarmé writes, “pas jusqu’à la source”
(Everything is reimmersed in the primitive stream, but doesn’t arrive at the
spring) (OC, 544).48
But if the “Rêverie” tellingly casts Wagnerian Bühnenfestspiel as a “défi . . .
aux poëtes” (challenge to poets) (OC, 542), if it constructs an aesthetic rivalry
between musical dramatist and abstract poet, it also constructs a distinctly
national rivalry between German and Frenchman. Not only did Mallarmé
apparently equivocate between the titles “Rêverie d’un poëte contemporain”
(Reverie of a Contemporary Poet) and “Rêverie d’un poëte français,”
between a title that emphasizes his temporal similarity to Wagner and one that
insists on his national difference,49 he refers to Wagner, as “cet étranger” (this
foreigner) (OC, 542) and contrasts the German public with “l’esprit français”
(the French mind), the latter of which is equated with both artistic integrity
and true innovation: “Si l’esprit français, strictement imaginatif et abstrait,
donc poétique, jette un éclat, ce ne sera pas ainsi: Il répugne, en cela d’ac-
cord avec l’Art dans son intégrité, qui est inventeur, à la Légende.” (If the
French mind, strictly imaginative and abstract, thus poetic, throws some
light, it will not be thus: it loathes Legend, and in this agrees with Art in its
integrity, which is the inventor) (OC, 544). Such language no doubt had
particular resonance in the political atmosphere of the 1880s, when France
was absorbed by the crisis over Alsace-Lorraine and by a vigorously anti-
German nationalism.
While Wagnerian controversy had long been entangled with competing
nationalist fervors—at least since the Franco-Prussian war and publication of
Wagner’s unmistakably spiteful “Eine Kapitulation” (A Capitulation)
(1873), which ridiculed French suffering during the German siege of Paris—
that fervor came to a boil in the 1880s. Indeed, it was the year in which
Mallarmé wrote the “Rêverie” that Georges Boulanger (with public adora-
tion at his heels and revanchism on his mind) was appointed ministre de la
guerre and that the so-called Lohengrin affair—the nationalist furor that
broke loose over Léon Carvalho’s plans to stage Wagner’s Lohengrin at the
Opéra-Comique—raged relentlessly in the press.50 If the siege of Paris had
been a military conquest of spatial territory, the performance of Lohengrin,
according to an increasing number of Parisians, would be an equally humil-
iating aesthetic conquest of temporal territory, an event tantamount to a
German occupation of modernity. Juliette Adam, who had organized a
“salon d’opposition” to Wagner a decade previously, and who would publish
an influential pamphlet entitled La Question Wagner pour un Français, wrote
in Le Figaro: “For me, when I hear the music of Wagner, I hear the march of
the soldiers of the conqueror, the song of its triumphs, the sobs of defeat.”51
Despite the fact that his symphonic renditions of Wagner continued through
the 1880s (with Mallarmé regularly in attendance), when Lamoureux
attempted to stage a production of Lohengrin the year following, demonstra-
tions by Paul Déroulède’s infamous “Ligue des Patriotes” closed it down
after a single performance.
Responding to such anti-Wagnerian sentiment, as well as to Wagner’s own
strident nationalism, the Revue wagnérienne, whose very inception had been
challenged on nationalist grounds,52 routinely deployed a rhetoric of natural
ethnic specificity and diversity, a fin-de-siècle sediment of Herder and
Schleiermacher.53 Indeed, Mallarmé’s “Rêverie,” characterized by just such
rhetoric, is arguably a rejoinder to Wagner’s essay on Beethoven, the final
installment of which appeared in the same issue of the Revue as the
“Rêverie,” and a copy of which was found in Mallarmé’s writing desk after
his death.54 For, as the Revue’s précis announces, “Wagner, taking advantage
of the war that Germany in 1870 waged against France, shows in the history
of modern art an analogous struggle between the German mind and French
style”—a struggle conspicuously engaged by Mallarmé’s “Rêverie.”55
We might say, then, that both the subversive newness of the “Hommage”
and the nationalist sentiment of the “Rêverie” bear traces of the kind of cri-
sis of national identity that frequently characterizes the moment of lamenta-
tion. And such crisis—which indeed describes the early decades of the
Troisième Republique, when a physically and symbolically fragmented France
groped for political stability—arguably conditions Mallarmé’s proposal for
modernity in the “Rêverie,” a proposal that both pits itself against Wagner’s
and openly aspires to reflect French national identity. Portraying the “har-
monieux compromis” of Wagner as responding to “la disposition de sa race”
(the mood of his race) (OC, 543), Mallarmé—in a fascinating conflation of the
impersonality to which his own work aspires with the very notion of nation—
suggests that French theater is “dégagé de personnalité, car il compose notre
aspect multiple: que, de prestiges correspondant au fonctionnement
national, évoque l’Art, pour le mirer en nous” (freed of personality, for it
composes our multiple appearance: that from prestige corresponding to the
functioning of the nation, it evokes Art, to reflect it in us) (OC, 545).56
Hence, when the “Hommage” is read in conjunction with the “Rêverie” and
in the context of its historical moment, behind the manifest lament for
Wagner appears, I would argue, a lament for France.
Yet neither Mallarmé’s “Hommage” nor his “Rêverie” is a simple repre-
sentation of a social or political crisis, but as we have suggested, rhetorical
constructions of crisis. For while the irrational significance of Mallarméan
defilement may disclose an undiscovered country or produce newness, it also
functions to alienate. We have noted that the Levitical purity laws, a product
of exile, were a reaction to the threat of cultural assimilation; and if, in a for-
eign land, one resists assimilation by maintaining purity, it is quite possible
that one might resist assimilation within one’s own culture by cultivating a
defiling foreignness. Defilement, we should recall, separates; its conse-
quences are exile, exclusion from community, a subjective estrangement.
Indeed, the “Hommage à Wagner” may well be less a legitimate homage
than a poem about Mallarmé’s discomfort with the mass cultural assimila-
tion we call wagnérisme.57 For although Wagner began his career on the
coattails of musical idealists for whom fashion and mass culture were anath-
ema,58 by 1886 Auguste de Gasperini could nonetheless quite rightly call
Wagner “the man à la mode,”59 and two years later Alfred Ernst could
declare, “The art of Wagner had succeeded in being accepted by every-
one. . . . Everyone accepts and profits from it even if only thirdhand. . . .
From the point of view of Wagnerian art, the ‘heroic’ period is over, and to
admire Wagner has become banal.”60
If, then, the “Rêverie d’un poëte français” emphasizes France’s distinction
from another culture, the irrational significance of the “Hommage” insists,
both syntactically and thematically, on a distinction within French culture
itself. If the “tassement du principal pilier” (settling or shaking down of the
principal pillar) of the first quatrain figures the death of Wagner—and it is a
standard image of the lamentation61—and the “moire” the “tissu d’accords”
(fabric of harmonies) by which Mallarmé describes Wagnerian drama in

“Rêverie” (OC, 544); if the “ébat” of the second quatrain is the “spiel” of
Bühnenfestspiel, and the “grimoire” a Wagnerian libretto or its arcane refer-
ents, then the “Hiéroglyphes dont s’exalte le millier” (Hieroglyphs that the
thousands exalt) would be Wagnerian drama itself, and the “frisson familier”
the effect it produces. On this view, then, the last line of the second quat-
rain—“Enfouissez-le-moi plutôt dans une armoire” (Bury it for me rather in
a closet), the pronoun of which might refer either to the cumulative subject
of the quatrains (Wagnerian drama) or to the “frisson familier” of the previ-
ous line—would signify Mallarmé’s conviction that the now familiar, pre-
dictable, and reproducible shivers of wagnérisme, its mass-distributed and
easily consumable difficulty, should be buried: abandoned altogether per-
haps, obscured at least.62 Moreover, the disturbing intrusion of the word
“simulacre” in the ostensibly panegyric tercets seems to confirm the uneasi-
ness of the poem’s homage, for it suggests both a transformative contamina-
tion of the “sacre” of line 13 and the presence of a sham: indeed the word
simulacre customarily functions in Mallarméan thought as a mark of what
Lacoue-Labarthe calls Mallarmé’s “merciless critique of semblance.”63 And
the “simulacre” of this poem seems less a neutral synonym for “dramatic rep-
resentation”—as the conventional reading would have it—than a pejorative
reference to the diverse and fuzzy reproductions of Wagnerian thought,
which, as Large and Weber write, “was invoked for a large array of contradic-
tory purposes and linked with a baffling variety of cultural fashions, political
crusades, artistic controversies, and sweeping theories of human renewal.”64
Depending on how one reads the pronomial reference of “leur simulacre,”
wagnérisme seems to have become either a bastardized repetition of others’
enlightenment (“elles de clartés maîtresses” [those of master lights], 10) or
of Wagner’s own “trompettes tout haut” (loud trumpets, 12).
This critique continues in the “Rêverie,” where Mallarmé speaks of
Wagnerian music drama as “violent[ant] votre raison aux prises avec un sim-
ulacre” (assaulting your reason with a captivating simulacrum) (OC, 542)
and, if we take “simulacre” and “faux semblant” as roughly synonymous, it
is the “Rêverie’s” starting point: Mallarmé commences with the proposal “à
réfléchir aux pompes souveraines de la Poésie, comme elles ne sauraient exis-
ter concurrement au flux de banalité charrié par les arts dans le faux semblant
de civilisation” (to reflect on the sovereign pomp of Poetry, as it would not
know how to exist jointly with the flux of banality carted along by the arts in
the false pretense of civilization) (OC, 540). Although specific practitioners
of such falsity are left unspecified, the following line of the “Rêverie”—
“Cérémonies d’un jour qui gît au sein, inconscient, de la foule: presque un
Culte!” (Ceremonies of a day that lodge unconsciously in the breast of the
crowd: almost a Religion!)—seems by force of contiguity to link “le faux
semblant de civilization” to the cult of wagnérisme, to its overtly religious
pretensions and to the religious imagery—the parvis, the dieu, the sacre—of
the poem.
Thus if the poem thematically signifies Mallarmé’s resistance to the cultural

assimilation—the “frisson familier”—of wagnérisme, its semantic and syntac-
tic defilements are techniques of alienation for resisting such assimilation. Its
cultural distinction, that is, is produced by its syntactic and semantic indis-
tinction. And in the “Hommage,” not only is contact between words seman-
tically and syntactically foreign, but the very boundary that establishes the
distinction between foreign and domestic is indistinguishable; as in many of
Mallarmé’s poems and prose works, the boundaries between units of mean-
ing are ambiguous and mobile. For example, in the phrase “un sacre/mal tu
par l’encre” (13–14) semantic borders might be drawn around “un sacre
mal” (an evil consecration), “un sacre mal tu par l’encre” (a consecration
badly silenced by the ink), or “mal tu par l’encre” (evil itself silenced by the
ink). Similarly, the “haï” of line 9 migrates freely from the phrase “souriant
fracas orignel haï” (smiling hated original uproar) to “haï entre elles de
clartés maîtresses” (hated among those of master lights), though such migra-
tion constructs meanings entirely foreign to one another. Such boundary dis-
putes are, moreover, fueled by words that function as more than one part of
speech: the “maîtresses” of line 10, for example, may function as a noun—as
“mistresses of clarity” renaming “elles,” or as an adjective—as principal
lights. Likewise the “vers” of line 11 may function as either a preposition—
toward a temple courtyard, or as a noun—verse itself which “parvis” then
renames. The ambiguity of semantic and syntactic borders, then, continues
both the poem’s epidemic spread of meaning and—by miming the boundary
confusion of the subject prior to language and thereby ostensibly “tap[ping]
that pre-verbal ‘beginning’” that Kristeva contends remains within lan-
guage65—its production of newness: of modernity, of “un mot neuf.”
But is this resistance to assimilation—what we have been calling Mallarméan
defilement—merely that sort of “distinction” that Richard Terdiman
describes as a “characteristic sociocultural gymnastic of the later nineteenth
century”?66 On the one hand, Mallarméan language is characterized by the
distinguished stylistic choices and the disgust at the facile that, according to
Pierre Bourdieu, construct social distinctions. Yet on the other hand, the
semantic and syntactic defilements we have noted are precisely the sort of
“unnatural union” that terrorizes that sense of distinction:
The sense of distinction, the discretio (discrimination) which demands that cer-
tain things be brought together and others kept apart, which excludes all mis-
alliances and all unnatural unions—i.e., all unions contrary to the common
classification, to the diacrisis (separation) which is the basis of collective and
individual identity—responds with visceral, murderous horror, absolute dis-
gust, metaphysical fury, to everything which lies in Plato’s “hybrid zone.”67
Does Mallarméan indistinction, which transgresses the prohibitions that

guard linguistic and philosophical purity, thus implicitly violate social order?
While literary experimentation and social revolution cannot be simply
equated, and while the former does not simply produce the latter, it might be
more modestly argued that the indistinction produced by Mallarméan lan-

guage contaminates distinctions that separate and classify, and that such con-
tamination may bear the capacity to debilitate certain disciplinary
mechanisms that confer value, identity, and privilege.68 This poetic language
that resists disambiguation into distinct, philosophically “pure” concepts is,
moreover, not only a transgression of a boundary, but a defilement of the
boundary itself, a systemic contamination that subverts the very possibility of
distinction. The irrational significance symptomatic of a moment when a
social order and its structures of meaning have fallen may thus be of use in
resisting the distinctions—inextricably logical and sociological—imposed by
that order.
The Material and the Hyperessential
Mallarmé, then, as kathartis, constructs his “oeuvre pure” out of the materi-
als of defilement—contact with the foreign, semantic contagion, philosophi-
cal ambiguity. In addition, both his theoretical valorizations of death—the
“Conception pure,” according to the famous letter to Cazalis, is conditioned
by death and an excursion into the impure region of eternity—and his poetic
practices of fragmentation constitute the kind of ritual and philosophical
defilement we have been describing.69 This cultivation of defilement is, in
addition to a construction of newness and resistance to assimilation, a recu-
peration of the scapegoats that pure philosophy necessarily exiles: the mate-
rial and the hyperessential, which idealist and metaphysical traditions banish
beyond the borders of significance.70 By returning to ritual sources of defile-
ment, Mallarméan poetic practice returns to a moment when defilement,
before its domestication as philosophical ambiguity, is both material and
symbolic, when defilement is neither just dirt, stain, blood, or semen nor just
moral unworthiness, and when purification, accordingly, is a branch of both
medicine and religion.71 “In truth,” writes Ricoeur, “defilement was never
literally a stain; impurity was never literally filthiness, dirtiness. It is also true
that impurity never attains the abstract level of unworthiness; otherwise the
magic of contact and contagion would have disappeared.”72
Mallarméan defilement recuperates the materiality—the body—of lan-
guage; it attempts to reintegrate into thought the opaque materiality of
language that philosophy’s insistence on linguistic and conceptual trans-
parency has exiled. For not only is defilement a material (a mark, a stain) that
ritual purity laws read as sign (of moral unworthiness, danger to the commu-
nity), but a materiality that itself constitutes defilement: the idolatry that con-
taminates Yahweh, the maternal that contaminates signification, the body that
contaminates the soul.73 While ritual reads the material as sign, philosophy—
from Plato’s Phaedo to the Cartesian distinction between res extensa and res
cogitans to Kantian pure reason—designates materiality itself as defilement.
Thus while the idealist tradition may speak about the material as other, and
indeed must do so to establish and maintain the purity of its identity, it simul-
taneously discards the materiality of the very language on which it relies. For
like the body of a servant, the materiality of language is to philosophy merely
instrumental—not of significance.74
By contrast, the word for Mallarmé does not function solely as a transpar-
ent referential instrument, but to a large degree through its material proper-
ties: by the visible and audible properties of the word, by appeals, that is, to
sensations of the body. This description, we should note, bears similarities
to “dual memory hypotheses” in which traumatic memory is conceived as
being organized somatosensorially rather than symbolically. This concern
with materiality—and the defilement of philosophy that it represents—also
characterizes the moment of lamentation, which is urgently concerned with
material conditions that don’t, as far as philosophy is concerned, mean any-
thing. A poem such as the “Hommage,” in other words, resembles that
moment when the transparency of material conditions—the comfortable
familiarity into which they disappear when one is thinking of other things—
is shattered, when one can not see through or beyond material conditions
and when philosophy, consequently, seems frighteningly impotent.
Mallarmé attempts, as do ritual and lamentation, to read the significance
of the material and to create a significance that is material, that, unlike phi-
losophy, is produced in the sensations of the body.75 While Symbolism had
long envisioned a poetics that would fuse the properties of music, dance, and
painting, it is, as Bernard notes, from the time of Mallarmé’s attendance at
the Concerts Lamoureux that “the word symphony made a significant return
in his writing to designate poetic works.”76 Valéry records of these experi-
ences that “Mallarmé came out of the concerts filled with a sublime envy. He
searched desperately to find a way to recapture for our art the marvel and
importance the so powerful Music had concealed for (or stolen from)
him.”77 This jealousy, as Valéry puts it, is in the Rêverie, transformed into an
indignation at Wagner’s “simple adjonction orchestrale” (simple orchestral
addition) (OC, 542) and into an implicit argument that music need not be
added to poetry because poetry is music. Accordingly, when Debussy
requested permission to set to music “L’après-midi d’un faune,” Mallarmé,
as the story goes, replied, “But I thought I had already done that.”
Thus the “multiplicité des cris d’une orchestration, qui reste verbale” (the
multiplicity of cries of an orchestration that remains verbal) by which
Mallarmé describes poetry in “Crise de Vers” (OC, 361) constructs a signif-
icance that is “materiellement la vérité” (materially the truth) (OC, 365;
emphasis added) and ulterior to the symbolic meaning of words.78 This is a
significance that suggests, for example, that memory (mémoire, 4), like a book
of magic spells (grimoire, 5) or a place to store one’s possessions (armoire,
8), is an expansion of, or supplement to, a kind of wavy fabric (moire, 1), a
fabric that might, associatively, be a shroud, “a cloth covering, laid over the
furniture of an empty theater,”79 that restless “voile dans le temple avec des
plis significatifs” (temple veil with significant folds) of the “Crise de Vers”
(OC, 360), fate (moira), the texture of Wagnerian music, the successive
waves of wagnérisme, or the flamboyant dress of Wagner himself. Such

sounds, read as signs, might by extension suggest then that memory
(mémoire) adds to the covering of death (moire); that the techniques of
Wagnerian music (moire), if expanded upon, may become a place to store
one’s past (mémoire), one’s possessions (armoire), one’s magic (grimoire);
or that wagnérisme (moire) may be as faulty as memory, as banal as a piece of
furniture, as illegible as a grimoire. Likewise the materials of the poem may
signal that the consecration that Wagner radiates (sacre, 13) is an excision
performed on, or a contraction of, the polyvalent “simulacre” of line 11;
that, accordingly, the religious trappings of Wagnerian music drama (sacre)
are merely a gutted version of artistic representation (simulacre); or that just
as “un sacre” (from Latin sacrare) sets apart, so the pure rites of Wagnerian
music drama are set apart—here audibly extracted from—false representa-
tions. More complexly, the phrases “vers un parvis” and “pâmé sur les vélins”
in consecutive lines (11–12) set up a kind of aural chiasmus in which six
sounds (v, e, s, p, a, i) are repeated, but in which the inaugural “v” and “p”
sounds are inverted: ve(rs)-pa(r)-vis . . . pâ(mé)-vé(lins). Read as sign, this
aural configuration might suggest that the act of moving toward a sacred
place or indeed the temple of verse itself (“vers un parvis”) stands in a chias-
matic relation to swooning on paper (“pâmé sur les vélins”), that the one is
at once the image and the inversion of the other.
Yet such idolatrous readings do not suggest that all the material properties
of the poem must be read as signs. The poem’s alliterations, for example—to
which we are initially alerted by phrases such as “principal pilier” (3),
“manque de mémoire” (4), and “frisson familier” (7)—extend to its iterative
“p” sounds (plus, pli, principal, pilier, précipiter, parvis, pamé, par), “t”
sounds (tassement, triomphal, trompettes, tout, tu), “s” sounds (silence, seul,
sur, souriant, simulacre, sur, sacre, sanglots, sibyllins), “m” sounds (moire,
mobilier, manque, mémoire, milier, maîtresses, mal) and “f” sounds (funèbre,
frisson, familier, fracas), as well as to the repetition created by the internal
sounds of words (tassement, for example repeating “s” and “m” sounds).
While such alliteration creates an audible relation that might conceivably be
symbolically interpreted, it also constructs an intricate web of musical—
indeed Wagnerian—leitmotives that produce recognition in the body even
when they do not produce concepts for the mind. Such sounds, moreover,
have a cumulative effect. Indeed, by the time we reach the final sounds of
the poem—“sibyllins”—we hear in them an echo of previous sounds in the
poem— “si(lence),” “si (vieil),” “(mo)bil(ier),” “(vé)lins,” “(pr)in(cipal)”—
in such a way that the word itself, sensed as material rather than read as sign,
functions as an aural collage of the poem’s own material memory.
On the one hand, then, Mallarméan defilement recuperates the material-
ity of language that is purged by philosophy’s insistence on linguistic and
conceptual transparency. On the other hand, defilement, as we have noted, is
both material and symbolic. Yet to speak of defilement as “symbolic” is some-
what misleading, for the symbolism of defilement is, rather than a simple sign
system, an obstinately obscure mode of referentiality. Indeed the obscurity of
our readings of the materiality of the “Hommage” illustrate the difficulty of

reading the material and suggest that such readings are inevitably character-
ized by the irrationality of defilement and by the kind of “significant incom-
prehensibility” we have spoken of above.
The difficulty of reading the stain of defilement literally has made defile-
ment particularly susceptible to allegorical interpretation. Its recalcitrant
materiality has often been read as a disguise for a significance extrinsic to
literal signification, as a sign that, like allegory—from állos (other) and
agoreúein (to speak)—speaks otherwise than it seems to speak. For example,
the defilement of a corpse, which, according to Hebrew purity laws is conta-
gious to open vessels under the same roof,80 has for Philo nothing to do with
material pollution or cultic unworthiness; rather, it signifies that “wretched-
ness is due to the different parts of the soul having been left loose and gap-
ing and unfastened, while proper ordering of life and speech is the result of
those being kept close and tight.”81 Similarly, the defilement laws surround-
ing leprosy have, according to Philo, less to do with a contagious disease or
moral inadequacy than with the inconstancy of the disease, which signifies
“lack of firmness of judgment and an unstable, agitated life.”82 Significantly,
in Midrashic literature, leprosy defilement functions as an allegory for the
conquerors of Israel:
Here the Scripture on leprosy is made to refer to the four conquerors of Israel:
Babylon, Media, Greece, and Rome. All reference to actual leprosy or to leprosy
as a sign of some closely related sin is lost. But the comparison of the situation
of the leper to the “exile” of Israel had been made earlier and provided the point
of departure for the allegorical use of leprosy to refer to the conquerors.83
The midrashic commentators, then, taking their cue partially from the lamen-
tation’s own comparison between exile and leper, link defilement specifically
to moments of lamentation and indeed make of defilement not merely a
symptom of, but a symbol for, lamentation. In other words, midrashic alle-
gory makes defilement a symbol for a moment of incomprehensibility; in the
manner of philosophy and in a movement both circular and domesticating, it
transforms defilement from a kind of incomprehensibility into a symbol for
incomprehensibility.
This tendency to read the incomprehensibility of defilement as allegory and
as an allegory of incomprehensibility is a symptom of the fact that defilement,
as Kristeva puts it, is “a wellspring of sign for a non-object,”84 a material pos-
sessing “an anaphoric, indexing value, pointing to something else, to some
non-thing, to something unknowable.”85 Indeed, even when read allegorically,
defilement, like the material conditions of lamentation, persistently confounds
the literal, spiritual, and moral levels of allegory—to borrow Aquinas’s
terms—and gestures toward the anagogical: toward the inconceivable and
ineffable, toward that “transcendental repetition” that comes into being
“when every thinkable human certainty and probability [are] impossible,”86
toward the “inaccessible regions” courted by ritual,87 toward a flower absent

from all bouquets.
In more prosaic terms, Mallarmé’s cultivation of defilement—the contact
with foreignness, the semantic contagion, and the indistinction that charac-
terize his poetic practice—recuperates the hyperessential, which philosophy,
securing the borders of its own identity, marks as foreign to significant
thought. By dwelling on incomprehensibility that cannot be subsumed
within philosophical assertion, on significance that cannot be generalized, on
anomalous and inessential attributes that betray identity, Mallarmé ventures
into the foreignness beyond the orderly territory of metaphysical thought; he
speaks to the barbarian at the border of philosophy.
Mallarmé’s crisis of verse thus mimes the moment and the language of
lamentation and in so doing appropriates a language that is at once a sign
of defilement and an instrument of purity. Mallarmé not only deploys a the-
oretical rhetoric of catastrophe, I have argued, but also poetically reenacts
the significant incomprehensibility characteristic of the moment of lamenta-
tion. This significant incomprehensibility, as we have seen, serves to produce
newness, record domestic crisis, and resist assimilation; it allows Mallarmé to
forage through the materiality of language and to reach for the hyperessential.
Thus if Mallarméan poetic practice produces the celebrated purity of which
his theoretical writings speak, that purity results from and produces defile-
ment; and it is a messy business indeed, giving “un sens plus pur aux mots de
la tribu” (a purer sense to the words of the tribe) (OC, 70).
Chapter 5

L a m e n tat i o n a n d N at i o n a l I d e n t i t y :
H at z i s’s T O D I P LO B I B L I O a n d t h e
( D e ) C o n s t ru c t i o n o f M o d e r n G re e c e
While states may be threatened by lamentations—we have witnessed their

sometimes direct political engagement, as well as a history of restrictions
against them—modern nations nonetheless make ample use of rituals of
mourning and spectacles of trauma. There is clearly too much loose power
lying around in such scenes, too much ideologically useful grief, anger, and
anxiety, too many empty signifiers susceptible to errant meaning, for them to
go unregulated or unexploited by nations. On the one hand, national
rhetorics of loss, like lamentations, publicly recognize and interpret an event
of loss and mark it as meriting response; they portray the present as a trauma
demanding restitution and recovery; they deploy the lamentations’ gestures
of retroactive possession for retrieving an identity—or a land—and claiming
it as one’s own; and they exploit the ability of the lamentation to function as
a sign of newness and purity, as well as its power to construct desire. On the
other hand, the lamentation presents clear dangers to nations, to their
demand for a unified and stable identity; their need for useful, legible, docile
bodies; their clearly defined (territorial and ideological) boundaries; and their
“homogenous, empty time.”1 Indeed, nation-states, for quite understand-
able reasons, have proven largely unreceptive to the lamentation’s disruption
of social discipline and the Symbolic order, its irresolution and unquenchable
anger, its thematization of shattered identity, and its brazen dealings with the
foreign. From this perspective, the “lamentations” adopted by nations corre-
spond less to the tradition of women’s laments we have traced than to forms
such as the epitaphios logos or elegy, which offer resolution and consolation
and often directly elaborate death’s usefulness for the state. This is a response
to loss that women’s lamentations have frequently critiqued and rejected,

refusing to transmute death into national glory, heroic sacrifice, or manly
virtue. As this chapter demonstrates, the mode of lamentation can thus work
both ways—both for and against the state, depending on which of its attrib-
utes are appropriated and deployed.
In this chapter, I explore three sites of loss widely constitutive of modern
nations: an “inaugural crisis” generative of both the nation-state as the dom-
inant political formation of modernity and of individual nations; the “lost
identity” that nations are customarily figured as recuperating; and a series of
what I term “losses-in-exchange”—that is, the losses one is asked to sustain
in exchange for national belonging. Nations regularly mark and memorialize
the first two of these forms of loss while repressing into insignificance the
trauma produced by the third.2 Subsequently, I turn to Greek author Kostas
Hatzis’s 1977 novel, To diplo biblio (The double book)—a novel explicitly
structured as an inquiry into national identity and bearing the imprint of
two salient features of the lamentation: its testimonial construction and
antiphony.3 The fictional author portrayed in Hatzis’s text (the Singrafeas)
sets out to explore the question: who or what is the modern Greek (romeiko)?
He solicits a series of narrative testimonies: from Kostas, a “guest worker” in
a German factory; Kostas’s father, a tailor and defeated communist; Anastasia,
his sister (with whom the Singrafeas is in love); the owner of a lumber busi-
ness in Volos; and a repatriated and embittered gasterbeiter from Pindos.
But these narratives do not add up to the coherent national identity the
Singrafeas seeks. Rather, they mock the losses hallowed by the nation while
exposing and mourning the losses sublimated by it. Yet I argue that the scat-
tered notebooks the Singrafeas leaves behind at his death are less the failed
identity he conceives them to be than a productive construction of crisis that
returns the nation to its point of origin, seizes its mode of production, and
disrupts its system of exchange.
Inaugural Crisis
Theories of the rise of the nation as diverse as Benedict Anderson’s, Ernest

Gellner’s, and Elie Kedourie’s bear the similarity of conceiving the nation as
inaugurated by loss or crisis—as a political unit generated out of the kind of
epistemological uncertainty, cognitive upheaval, sense of radical newness,
and redistribution of power and possessions that we have associated with
both lamentation and modernity. For Anderson, that crisis involved the
simultaneous demise of the dynastic realm and the religiously imagined com-
munity. The nation was conditioned, he argues, by the Enlightenment
thought and Revolutions that “destroy[ed] the legitimacy of the divinely-
ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm”4 and by a series of traumas within the
religious community: the defeat of sacred languages by the vernacular and a
concomitant loss of confidence in linguistic signs as emanations of reality; the
L a m e n tat i o n a n d N at i o n a l I d e n t i t y 131
demise of a messianic conception of time in favor of “homogeneous, empty

time”; and, above all, the Reformation, its complicity with print-capitalism
and mass literacy, destruction of (priestly) privilege, and emphasis on individ-
ualism. Gellner locates the rise of the nation at the moment when the stable
“purposive, hierarchical, ‘meaningful’” society of the agrarian world—based
on kin structures and local organization—was disassembled by the innova-
tive, homogeneous, mobile, and anonymous society of industrialization, an
“unutterably profound break in human history” that he depicts as a moment
of cognitive upheaval and social crisis:
the age of transition to industrialism was bound, according to our model, also
to be an age of nationalism, a period of turbulent readjustment, in which either
political boundaries, or cultural ones, or both, were being modified, so as to
satisfy the new nationalist imperative which now, for the first time, was making
itself felt. Because rulers do not surrender territory gladly (and every change of
a political boundary must make someone a loser), because changing one’s cul-
ture is very frequently a most painful experience, and moreover, because there
were rival cultures struggling to capture the souls of men, just as there were
rival centers of political authority striving to suborn men and capture territory:
given all this, it immediately follows from our model that this period of transi-
tion was bound to be violent and conflict-ridden. Actual historical facts fully
confirm these expectations.5
Kedourie, tracing the philosophical heredity of the nation, finds its roots in
Enlightenment conceptions of human progress and, more specifically, in
their valorization of crisis, upheaval, and struggle. Exemplary is A. R. J.
Turgot who averred in a 1750 lecture, “It is only through turmoil and
destruction that nations expand, that civilization and governments are in the
long run perfected.”6 Kant, similarly, described history as ceaseless struggle;
Fichte posited war as injecting “a living and progressive principle into
History”;7 and Herder affirmed the necessity of violent struggle to national
progress. “Only amid storms can the noble plant flourish,” wrote the latter,
“when irrigated with blood [the seed] seldom fails to shoot up to an unfad-
ing flower.”8
If both the historical losses associated with modernity and philosophical
valorizations of crisis conditioned the nation as political unit, particular
nationalisms have largely formed as responses either to (perceived) injustice
and adversity—to what we have called “sustained catastrophe”—or to the
threat of losing power. The former characterized the earliest forms of
nationalism that, according to Eric Hobsbawm, “represented the common
interests against particular interests, the common good against privilege”;9
anti-colonial nationalisms responding to sustained losses of material necessi-
ties, the products of labor, and self-determination; and the “break-off”
nationalisms of minority populations that perceived themselves to be at a dis-
advantage within larger nations. The latter—the perceived threat to power or
privilege—characterized the majority of Latin American nationalisms;10 the
“official nationalisms” of Europe that, according to Anderson, were “from

the start a conscious, self protective policy, intimately linked to the preserva-
tion of imperial-dynastic interests”;11 and the anti-Semitic nationalisms that
emerged in Europe during the 1880s.12
Greek nationalism is officially narrated as arising from the “sustained losses”
suffered by the Greek population under Ottoman rule, but it is probably
equally accurate to argue the inverse: that it was Greek nationalism (largely
imported from Western Europe) that translated those circumstances (many of
which had been unchallenged for centuries) into intolerable loss. In the social
and philosophical climate of the late eighteenth century, the fact that Muslims
owned the majority of land, that a Christian’s testimony was not accepted in
court against that of a Muslim, that Christians paid higher taxes, were not
allowed to bear arms, and were forced to give children to serve as janissaries
in the Ottoman state ripened into a politically charged lament.13 As the
empire crumbled, moreover, peasants were increasingly oppressed with tax
burdens levied by local landlords, and often with eviction and dispossession.
But this is not the whole story, for support for Greek nationalism also came
from a number of groups threatened with imminent losses of power as a result
of the crises within the Ottoman empire: wealthy Greek merchants who per-
ceived their security and capital to be at risk; the Western powers who feared
loss of political and economic power in the Mediterranean; and, following
the execution of Patriarch Grigorious V, the Orthodox Church, which
increasingly feared loss of autonomy.14
Fashioned out of both the sustained losses that comprise adversity and
fears of imminent loss of power, Greek nationalism also testifies to the prin-
ciple that nations are typically the offspring of death, including the mass
deaths of revolutionary wars.15 As Ernest Renan contends, the solidarity of
the nation is “constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made
in the past,” and its unity is produced through common suffering. “Where
national memories are concerned,” he writes, “griefs are of more value than
triumphs, for they impose duties, and require a common effort.”16 Perhaps
no incident did more to create nationalist sentiment among Greeks—many
of whom were quite comfortably complacent in the empire and elsewhere—
than the execution of the revolutionary theorist Rigas Velestinlis at the hands
of Ottoman authorities in May 1798; indeed Rigas’s death had far greater
impact on Greek nationalism than the political writings to which he had
devoted his life.17 Similarly, it was a series of widely advertised deaths in the
first half of the 1820s—Patriarch Grigorious V in 1821, the Christians of
Chios in 1822, Lord Byron (however ingloriously) in Messolonghi in 1824—
that, more than any other factor, solidified philhellenic sentiment in the
West and transformed that sentiment into financial contribution and mili-
tary support.18
The deaths that inaugurate a nation customarily accede to the status of
national myth; they are, with the help of national mourning rituals, specula-
tively and belatedly (re)constructed as national artifact: Patriarch Grigorious
becomes a saint of the Orthodox Church; the massacre of Chios, as rendered

by Delacroix, hangs in the Louvre; locks from Byron’s bonny head lie in the
national museum. Yet unlike the lamentation, such myths exceed, resolve,
and replace the incomprehensible experience and empty signifiers of crisis:
trammeled fields, destroyed homes, and dead bodies are assigned nationally
useful meanings, and the actual expressions of grief that accompanied such
losses are largely eclipsed by their nationally appointed significance.
The dead, indeed, are much more ideologically pliable than the living, a
principle well illustrated by the Greek nation’s ongoing struggle with kleftes—
brigands who became national heroes by providing badly needed paramili-
tary support for the revolution, and, subsequently, by realizing daring
irredentist forays into Turkish territory, but who inconveniently persisted in
attacking members of the newly formed Greek government, its citizens, and
foreign travelers—acting, in short, like simple outlaws. Thus dead guerillas,
as Michael Herzfeld writes, “could be apotheosized, since they no longer
constituted a threat.”19 They became the subjects of heroic narratives,
Romantic poetry, and an entire genre of lamentations known as “Klephtic
ballads.” Yet at the same time that dead kleftes were being transformed into
exemplary nationalists, live ones were being frantically purged from the
“imagined community”: Greek journalists and politicians depicted them as
Vlachian or Albanian agents of the Turks; the Holy Synod excommunicated
them from Orthodox Christianity; and linguists revived an Hellenic term
(listis) to designate ignoble, criminal brigands and clearly distinguish them
from national liberators (kleftes).
If the appearance of the nation state as a political formation is the result of
a number of traumas associated with modernity, individual nations are regu-
larly formed on the basis of perceived losses or threats of loss. They make use
of deaths—often the mass deaths of wars—to inaugurate and sanctify them-
selves. Inscribed in monuments, national anthems, school books, holidays,
and flags, the deathly presence that pervades nations often evokes awe, rev-
erence, sacrality: the experience of nationalism, like the lamentation, is a
brush with death.
The Recuperation of Lost Identity
The majority of modern nations have fashioned themselves as the recupera-

tion of a lost identity, an imperative that derives from eighteenth and nine-
teenth century theories of natural ethnic diversity, which implicitly obligated
nations to produce and perform a coherent identity to justify their existence.
“For the political unity of the nation,” as Bhabha puts it, “consists in a con-
tinual displacement of its irredeemably plural modern space . . . into a signi-
fying space that is archaic and mythical, paradoxically representing the
nation’s modern territoriality, in the patriotic, atavistic temporality of
Traditionalism.”20 If a language of loss is particularly suited to carrying out
this task of recuperation—lamentations, as we have seen, function as acts of

retroactive possession and are useful for certifying propriety claims—nowhere
did this obligation weigh more heavily than on modern Greece, whose
acceptance by the European powers rested largely on its ability to demon-
strate continuity with the Hellenic civilization upon which Europe fancied
itself to be built. The Greek-speaking peoples, as Vassilis Lambropoulos puts
it, found themselves
under immense external pressure to respond adequately to the inflated expecta-

tions and to adjust properly to the exalted demand of European and American
romanticism which, from Goethe to Beethoven and from Shelley to Delacroix,
needed to affirm and satisfy its classical yearnings. The pressure to be true
Hellenes was presented to the Greeks as their only way or chance to define an
acceptable identity and justify their political claims.21
The construction of neohellenism—of a culturally, linguistically, and histori-

cally viable Hellenic identity that would override regional and kinship identi-
fications and justify the national state—was an enterprise that called into
service multiple actors, including archeologists, anthropologists, folklorists,
and linguists, all of whom deployed the mode of lamentation—made use,
that is, of a discourse that at once valorized the past as lost object, impover-
ished the present as a moment of loss, and thereby provided justification for
(social, cultural, and political) change.22 Linguists pointed to the survival of
the word “Hellene” as evidence of the resilience of the Hellenic ideal that,
even after centuries of foreign, Oriental oppression, waited to be liberated in
the present (never mind that Greek-speaking peoples did not use the term for
self-designation and often had little inclination to be its incarnation).
Archeologists, recognizing the degree to which philhellenes perceived the
“true identity” of the Greek people to reside in ruins rather than residents,
contributed by recuperating classical artifacts, committing them to the con-
trolled contexts of museums and monumental sites. Equally crucial were the
“verbal monuments” recorded and classified by the nascent discipline of folk-
lore, a significant portion of which were lamentations that performed the
double duty of demonstrating continuity with, and producing desire for,
past greatness. Collected by early folklorists such as Spyridon Zambelios,
Emmanuel Vivilakis, and Nikolaos Politis, these lamentations were critical in
providing what Vivilakis terms “irrefutable proof not only that ancient
Hellas is as yet far from defunct but that, just as these customs dwelt in her
millennia ago, so today they live on in her children’s children.”23 Zambelios
contended that the “sense of tragedy in the Greek spirit” was a manifestation
of the Hellenic ideal in modern Greek peoples.24 And however etymologi-
cally misguided his conflation of “tragoudia” (songs) with “tragodia”
(tragedy), his “tragic sense” thesis, supported by lamentations that both
demonstrated continuity between ancient and modern Greece and con-
structed a reproducible image of Greeks as a people of longing, was widely
influential, making its way into school textbooks and informing the develop-
ment of a national literature.25
This lost—but not destroyed—Hellenic identity was also useful to the
Western powers, who invoked it, for example, to train modern Greeks to
be Western, to be good economic and military allies. In a letter dated
December 18, 1823, Leicester Stanhope, a British agent of the London
Greek Committee, wrote to the Committee’s secretary John Bowring:
It is my practice, when the natives [Greeks] visit me, to draw their attention to
those points which are most essential to their welfare, and to put the matter in
a point of view that will interest them, and set their minds in labour. For exam-
ple, if I wish to recommend military discipline to them, I speak of the com-
bined operations and close order observed by their ancestors . . . speaking of
education, I lament that their Turkish masters should have deprived their chil-
dren of the means of acquiring that knowledge which their great forefathers so
eminently possessed.26
Thus does the mode of lamentation function both to construct desire and to
justify radically altering the circumstances of the present under the sign of
recuperating a stolen treasure—the past, one’s identity, one’s territory. Often
expressed in a metaphorics of rebirth or resurrection—awakening, regenera-
tion, risorgimento—such recuperations also made regular use of the lamenta-
tion as a sign of newness.27 In Greek, this image—routinely deployed, for
example, by nationalist Adamantios Koreas—was buttressed by the conven-
ient lexical resemblance between epanastasis (revolution) and anastasis
(resurrection).28
If the lamentation has been both empirically and thematically instrumen-
tal in recuperating nations’ lost identities, it also came prepared with a
rhetorical preoccupation with purity well-suited to the nationalist conception
of a distinct and inviolable national character. And the builders of neohel-
lenism were, to be sure, engaged in numerous rites of purification. Linguists,
who aided in the purification of national myth (distinguishing kleftes from lis-
tis), also created a “purified” language—katharevousa—based on ancient
Greek, purged of Byzantine alterations and Turkish and Albanian influences,
albeit impossibly foreign and difficult for the majority of Greek speakers.29
Folklorists, as Herzfeld has shown, “decontaminated” folkloric data in accor-
dance with what was perceived to be genuinely Greek. And archaeologists,
following the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s, set about eradi-
cating centuries of modification and reuse of the Acropolis, which had func-
tioned, for example, as the cathedral for the Latin archbishop, a mosque, and
a fortress, and which, by the early nineteenth century, was scattered not only
with Byzantine constructions, but commonplace housing.30 Recovering the
Acropolis—and here the metallurgical nuance of recovery is particularly apt—
meant effacing the traces of the irrelevant past (the waste products of his-
tory), a task that was rapidly carried out as the site was transformed from
diversely-used social space into disciplined, meaningful “monumental space.”
At the inauguration of the “restored” Parthenon, the German architect Leo

von Klenze, who had overseen the work, vowed in a phrase that emphasized
both the imperative of purification and the temporal remoteness of Greek
identity (forever exiled in an archaic past or an uncertain future), that “all the
remains of barbarity will be removed, here as in all of Greece, and the remains
of the glorious past will be brought in new light, as the solid foundation of a
glorious present and future.”31
While for most Western Europeans, Hellenism was associated with the clas-
sical past—a correlation consecrated by the choice of Athens as the Greek
capital—many Greeks and Balkan peoples perceived their heritage to reside
in Constantinople, the seat of the Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantine culture,
and the Orthodox patriarchate, the archrival of Catholic Europe and papal
supremacy. Throughout the nineteenth century, Greek nationalists increas-
ingly revived this Byzantine heritage, developing a more historically and geo-
graphically expansive identity than that envisioned by philhellenes. This
newly delineated “lost identity” coalesced into an irredentist project known
as the Megali Idea (Great Idea), which became the dominant ideology of
the emergent state and was ratified by representing the present as loss: of the
millions of “unredeemed” Greeks still living outside national borders, and
of territory in Macedonia and Asia Minor (particularly Salonika, Smyrna,
and Constantinople).32 Geographical aspirations were thus legitimated as an
indemnification of loss; and the amount of due indemnity—payable in land—
was measured by those ethnographers such as Politis who demarcated the
territorial borders of Hellenism by the collection of “verbal monuments”:
where Greek songs were found in foreign lands, that land was lost land.
Among these verbal monuments, the most cogent support for irredentism
was drawn from the lamentations for the fall of Constantinople, which served
not only to reinstate the Byzantine period as the link between ancient and
modern Greece, but as evidence that Asia Minor Greeks participated in the
“national spirit” of Greece.33 Not only did Politis consider these lamenta-
tions over Constantinople “evidence of widespread national aspirations,”
writes Herzfeld, “but he saw their extensive distribution throughout the
Greek-speaking world as proof of the Greeks’ cultural homogeneity and
shared sense of destiny.”34 Lamentations such as the “Song of Hagia
Sophia”—which Christovasilis in 1902 referred to, significantly, as “our
national lament”—were increasingly read as prophecies of the recapture of
the city. As Herzfeld has demonstrated, in the years when irredentist eupho-
ria was at its height, the last lines of this lamentation—
—Swvpase, kura; devspoina, mh;n klaivgh~, mh; dakruvzh~

pavle me; crovnou~, me; kairouv~, pavle dikav sa~ ei`nai
(Lady, don’t weep, don’t cry

Through years and time, it is still yours)35
were subtly revised—or perhaps more precisely, standardized and reinter-

preted—in accordance with the Megali Idea: dikav sa~ (yours) became dikav
ma~ (ours); ei`nai (is) became “qa ei`nai” (will be); pavle (still, again) was
read in the sense of “again”: With years and time, it will be ours once more.
Losses in Exchange
Governing much of the eighteenth century political theory at the root of

Greek nationalism is the principle that the nation constitutes itself through
an exchange relation. Rousseau maintained “that neither individual nor state
could attain happiness or virtue unless man exchanged a general will for his
own selfish particular will, and willed the good of all, rather than his own.”36
As Fichte put it, “the realization of the real self in its real freedom is the anni-
hilation of the actual self and of its imperfect freedom.”37 On this model, the
nation functions as a commodity, offering individuals benefits for a price, and
as a compensatory formation that replaces with an equivalent that which has
been lost, suffered, or sacrificed in the exchange—a structure whose similar-
ity to conceptions of recovery should not be overlooked. Such exchange may
entail forfeiting regional, ethnic, linguistic, or religious identifications or
practices in exchange for a more expansive network of associations and
opportunities, a centrally enforced social order, and access to modernity.38
But such exchange is not always voluntary. Indeed, when the habits of Greeks
failed to reproduce the community imagined by nationalists and philhellenes,
loss became imperative: if you wish to be a nation, lose your Oriental manners,
your clientelist business practices, your kinship and regional loyalties, the
unsuitable parts of your history, your bastardized language. We have seen
inklings of these necessary losses in the practices filtered out of ethnological
data, in the “barbarity” von Klenze pledged to eradicate from the country, in
the indiscipline and Oriental education Stanhope aspired to correct, and in the
institution of katharevousa as a national language.
The forfeit exacted by nations can be even more dramatic still: material
possessions, land, and lives are also lost in the exchange, a point Hobsbawm
illustrates with the example of Greece:
The logical implication of trying to create a continent neatly divided into

coherent territorial states each inhabited by a separate ethnically and linguisti-
cally homogeneous population, was the mass expulsion or extermination of
minorities . . . [and] mass expulsion and even genocide began to make their
appearance on the southern margins of Europe during and after World War I,
as the Turks set about the mass extirpation of the Armenians in 1915 and, after
the Greco-Turkish war of 1922, expelled between 1.3 and 1.5 millions of
Greeks from Asia Minor, where they had lived since the days of Homer.39
For the majority of those involved, the enforced “exchange of populations”

overseen by the League of Nations did not add up to an even exchange at all:
in many cases, it meant exchanging a comfortable urban lifestyle for an indi-

gent rural one, resettling in a place where the customs and language were
foreign, and where one was the object of contempt and discrimination by the
indigenous population. Legg and Roberts record that approximately 20 per-
cent of Asia minor refugees died within the first year after arrival in Greece
and that fifty years after resettlement, refugees and their descendants contin-
ued to make up “a major segment of the disadvantaged.”40
This structure of exchange is sublimated as nations reproduce themselves,
as, through centralized education systems and mass media, they establish
themselves as primary and invisible matrices of meaning and value.41 Indeed,
as Jean-Joseph Goux writes, “it is always through replacement that values
are created”—a principle that extends to the nation, which acquires value
by demanding sacrifice, offering itself for exchange, putting a price on
itself.42 Like other forms of value, it “sublimates the damages by compen-
sating for them. . . . [W]hat is required,” Goux continues, “to compensate
for a violation, to redeem a loss, to offset or indemnify a crime, is the deter-
mination of value, which alone can erase and liquidate while conferring its
validity and identity.”43
Yet the closer one’s personal circumstances correspond to the imagined
community, the less will the act of exchange bear a sense of loss; the more
the representation seems like an even exchange, the easier it can pass as no
exchange at all. Such is the functionally homogeneous surface toward which
nations strive, what Gellner describes as an “anonymous, impersonal society,
with mutually substitutable atomized individuals,” and Anderson analyzes
under the sign of “documentary exchangeability.”44 This functional replace-
ability does not, however, ultimately apply to the nation itself, which, unlike
its citizens, accedes to the transcendent status of a general equivalent.
Following the logic of “synthesis and subsumption” that characterizes the
general equivalent, the nation synthesizes a diversity of peoples into a
“national identity” and subsumes them beneath its authority; like the money
form, it constitutes itself as the equivalent through which other exchange
relations must pass and through which value is established.45 Analogous to a
fetishization of the Sovereign People, this ascent to the status of general
equivalent entails a forgetting of origin—“the erasure of a genesis, the oblit-
eration of a history,” as Goux puts it—that clearly resonates with our account
of the mythologized “inaugural crisis” of the nation.46 Indeed it is precisely
this effacement of origin that subtends the transcendent status of the general
equivalent: “The mysterious genesis of this privilege is effaced, leaving [its]
monopoly absolute, absolved, exempted in [its] transcendent role as a stan-
dard and measure of values.”47 The general equivalent henceforth remains
transcendent to variable values, characterized by permanence, disinterested-
ness, and neutrality in the arbitration of values; it is the keeper of law and jus-
tice, their guarantee.
The nation’s position as general equivalent both institutes a detour of
exchange and effects a loss of the materially present. First, then, it replaces
the particular and immediate relations of persons and goods with a detour
through a centralized and uniform standard of measurement. Value is
measured, rather than through the other in a simple specular relation (as in
the elementary form of value or the Lacanian Imaginary), through a repre-
sentation of the other: a representation that is at once a Symbolic father—a
Patria—that determines value and resolves conflicts, and a fraternal “peo-
ple” that is not an-other, but all others: “Greekness,” “the American peo-
ple,” “the French spirit.”48 This implies not only that the nation
masquerades as the more neighborly elementary form of value—it is “imag-
ined as a community because regardless of the actual inequality and exploita-
tion that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep,
horizontal comradeship”49—but that it mediates the social relations of citi-
zens; one can not immediately consume one’s freedoms or rights without
passing through the detour of nationality, obeying its laws, adopting its prac-
tices, conforming (more or less) to a Greek (or French or American) identity.
The value of the nation, accordingly, can no longer be measured by everyday
life, for the nation is itself the standard of measurement: “the people”
against which people are measured.
Second, the nation’s ascent to the status of general equivalent entails a loss
of the materially present, for, as Goux contends, “contained in the opposi-
tion between the commodity’s value and the commodity itself is not only the
spiritualist opposition between soul and body but also the idealist opposition
between the ideal and the real.”50 Accordingly, the substitution of the sover-
eign people that rule a nation for the peoples that comprise it constitutes a
repression of that “body” and that “real.” The material has significance only
insofar as it is convertible into the non-material: that is, into value. Indeed
if the nation functions as a Symbolic Father, we should not forget that “the
‘standardizing identification with the paternal image’ is made possible only
by the death of the real father, who then takes up the position of the dead
father, first fetishized and subsequently symbolized and idealized.”51 Thus
the material present of peoples must be effaced—forgotten if not literally
destroyed—to produce a fetishized (overvalued and idealized) symbolic rep-
resentation of the people, in which a sign replaces material presence. “The
history of the money function is marked by a progression toward abstraction
and convention,” writes Goux, that ultimately tends to “make matter indif-
ferent.”52 Through its movement of sublimation and idealization, the nation
aligns itself with the authenticity and authority of the Idea, and thus, in that
far-reaching set of terms analyzed by Derrida, with the immediate presence
of meaning over the mechanics of signification, the spiritual over the mate-
rial, consciousness over deathliness, the natural over the artificial, the interior
over the exterior, the familiar over the foreign. This is to say not only that
materiality is, however ironically, recast as indirection and detour, but that the
nation, as Idea, has the redoubtable power to supercede, eclipse, and ren-
der irrelevant material circumstances.53 Indeed, nothing is more inimical to
the nation’s process of abstraction than the kind of recalcitrant materiality
thematized by the lamentation: a physicality that resists signification, that

refuses to be submitted to exchange or governed by a general equivalent, to
be transported from the defiled, foreign realm of matter to the clean, well-lit
room of meaning.
Hatzis’s Antiphonal Testimonies
The Singrafeas of To diplo biblio—the intradiegetic author who elicits the

narratives that comprise the novel—initially aspires to craft a coherent
national identity for the romeiko (modern Greek), to function as a sort of
general equivalent that regulates and synthesizes relations between individu-
als. But this project largely fails. Not only do the multiple stories he collects
dislocate Greek identity from both Hellenism and a national territory, they
remain intransigently in the form of testimony—fragmented and unresolved,
mourning the very losses that the nation finesses beneath the structure of
compensation. The novel’s shifting narrative stance—a structure that, much
like the antiphonal form of lamentation, functions as both an evidentiary
technique and a political strategy—figures the romeiko as an intersection of
heterogeneous voices and a site of contention. However, the Singrafeas’
invocation of witnesses, I would argue, is less a failed construction of identity
than a productive construction of crisis that returns the nation to its point of
origin, seizes its mode of production, and disrupts its system of exchange.
The Singrafeas’ question, in one important sense, already determines the
parameters of national identity, for his question is about the romeiko and thus
a choice between dueling Greek identities—one grounded in the Orthodox,
Byzantine heritage (romeiko) and the other in the pagan, classical heritage
(hellene). “That contrast,” writes Herzfeld, “pit[s] against each other two
cultural ideologies, two Greek languages [demotic and katharevousa, and]
two readings of Greek history.”54 Indeed, Hellenic identity functions in the
novel primarily as a joke, an ironic incongruity with the reality of modern
Greek lives. Kostas, a gasterbeiter in a German factory and the novel’s main
narrator, explicitly mocks the discrepancy between the timeless Hellenic ideal
inculcated in the national education system and his own monotonous life in
exile, mass producing modernity for others. Working in tandem with his
Turkish counterpart, he muses:
Katebaivnei fortwmevno~ aujtov~, trabavw kai; gw; xefovrtwto~ sto;

diavdromo, na; pavw pavli sto; tmh`ma —kai; gurivzoume e[tsi pivsw kai;
mprov~, ajpavnw kai; kavtw, xeftivdia paradarmevna, th`~ megavlh~
tourkikh`~ aujtokratoriva~ ejkei`no~, th`~ aijwniva~ ‘Ellavdo~ ejgwv, pou;
ma`~ th; levgane sto; scoleiov.
(As he goes down in his loaded cart, I pull into the corridor in my unloaded
one, to go again to the office— and we go back and forth this way, up and
down, dangling threads, him the great Turkish autocrat and me, the eternal
Hellene, as they told us in school.) (25)55
Although pursuing something distinct from the resuscitated Hellene envi-

sioned by early nationalists and European travelers, the Singrafeas nonethe-
less seeks a coherent national identity for the modern Greek. Converting
narrative fragments into national meaning, he assumes the role of general
equivalent: the transcendent center that synthesizes and subsumes, a sym-
bolic father that determines value and governs the representation through
which one’s relation to the other is mediated. Indeed, characters in the novel
rarely speak to each other, but through the Singrafeas who converts their
idiosyncratic verbal artifacts into national sense value. What the Singrafeas
sees in Anastasia’s eyes on her wedding day is, significantly, not her tears or
her sorrow, but the national identity they represent. When Kostas asks him:
“tiv koitavzei~ e[tsi;” (What are you looking at like that?), he responds: “To;
romeviko . . . {Ola ei\nai mevsa, koivtaxev ta mevsa, s’aujta ta; mavtia th~,
Kwvsta” (The romeiko. . . . Everything is within them, look at it all within her
eyes, Kostas) (55). Diverted through the general equivalent of “Greekness”
(and purified through katharevousa), Anastasia’s eyes are converted, in the
Singrafeas’ notebook, into a generalized elegy for Greek womanhood:
pernou`ne genie;~ ajt eleivwte~ basanismevne~ romiev~. ΔAkovma . . .

gunai`ke~ sfagmevne~, ajt imasmevne~, sth; Ciov, sta; Yarav, gunai`ke~
mesologgivt isse~, mikrasiavstisse~ th`~ katastrofh`~, oJmadike;~
ejktelevsei~ th`~ katoch`~, oJ ejmfuvlio~ povlemo~ —oJ patevra~ th~. Ta;
blevpw mevsa —cwravfia prasinismevna th`~ hJmeravda~ kai; stavcua
mazi; th`~ ajpelpisia`~ kammevna ajp’ to; livba sto;n kavmpo th`~
Qessaliva~ —o}lo~ oJ kavmpo~ th`~ Qessaliva~ ei\nai mevsa sta; mavt ia
th~—korfe;~ ajpavnw lampkopou`n cionismevne~ katakalovkaira . . .
Kai; Blevpw mevsa —ti;~ panagive~ tw`n bravcwn, tou;~ plhgwmevnou~
ajrcavggelou~ se; sapismevna tevmpla ajpo palie;~ ejkklhsiev~ . . . Kai;
ti;~ ajkouvw—kampavne~ ajpo; nucterine;~ litanei`e~ gia; ta; karavbia pou;
kinduneuvoun sto; pevlago—gunai`ke~ ajpavnw sto; xavgnanto— a[llh mia;
qavlassa—mau`ra manthvlia—kΔei\nai mikrh; kai; de;n th`~ pa`n ta;
mau`ra. . . . Aujthnh`~ th`~ pa`ne. Perissovt ero ajp’ ta; nufiavt ika.
(endless generations of the romeiko passing by, full of hardship. Still . . . slaugh-
tered, raped women on Chios, in Psara, women from Messolonghi, from the Asia
Minor Catastrophe, the mass executions of the occupation, the civil war—her
father. Within them I see—green fields of gentleness together with despair, stalks
burned by the hot wind of the Thessalian countryside—all the countryside of
Thessaly is held within her eyes, snow-covered mountaintops which gleam all sum-
mer . . . And I see within them—the madonnas of the rocks, the wounded
archangels of rotting icons in ancient churches . . . and I hear in them—church
bells from nighttime litanies for the ships that navigate the open sea—women upon
the promontory—another sea—black veils—she is young and black doesn’t suit
her . . . it’s fitting for her. More fitting than a wedding dress.) (55–56)
Such florid description, however poignant, is in marked contrast to the novel’s

testimonies and, however attentive to the losses sustained by the nation’s
women, an erasure of Anastasia’s experience, an occultation of the material

present ostensibly indemnified by a timeless national presence.
But this national character keeps falling apart; the center does not hold.
And the Singrafeas increasingly recognizes that his collection of testimonies
testifies, above all, to the inability of resolving such indeterminate evidence
into knowledge or identity:
Tou;~ blevpw polu; kala; tou;~ spasmevnou~ aJrmou;~ tou` biblivou mou.
Kai; blevpw pivsw ajpΔ aujtou;~ th;n sujs iastikhv tou ajnepavrkeia . . . De;
mporw` na; procwrhvsw, na; ta; devsw provswpa kai; katastavsei~ se;
mia;n eJnovthta . . . De;n ei\nai ajkribw`~ ejreivpia —ei\nai kommavt ia,
yhfia; skorpismevna. Kai; de;n eJnwvnontai tovΔna me; tΔ a[llo.
(I see them very well, the broken joints of my book. And I see behind them the extent
of its inadequacy. . . . I can’t move ahead, can’t tie together characters and situa-
tions into a unity. . . . They aren’t exactly ruins—they’re pieces, scattered figures.
And they aren’t joined one with the other). (185–86)
Such passages seem to suggest that the Singrafeas’ project ends in utter
defeat, an interpretation arguably confirmed by his suicide. But I would like
to suggest another reading, one that acknowledges the similarity of the “bro-
ken joints” and “scattered figures” of this passage not only to the (literally
and symbolically) fractured bodies thematized by lamentations, but also to
“the fragments and limbs of men” on Zarathustra’s figurative battlefield
which, for Nietzsche, are the pieces of a possible future—the symptoms of a
vibrant, regenerative crisis.
This regenerative crisis is instigated by the gesture of the question that
elicits the novel’s testimonies—a question that puts national identity on trial,
infers that nationality is a site of shattered understanding. This gesture, I
would argue, not only returns the nation to a point of “inaugural crisis,” but
is fueled by the nationally unusable knowledge it elicits: testimonies that
incessantly contest the structure of compensation that produces national
value, noxious waste products that threaten the integrity of national processes
of self-reproduction. The catastrophe orchestrated and lamented by the
Singrafeas, that is, parodically reenacts the nation’s coming into being,
returns it to its point of origin: both to the crisis through which it inaugu-
rated its identity and to the scene(s) of loss through which it supplied itself
with a past. This crisis is a way of appropriating the nation’s mode of self-
production; it enables a re-formation of nationality by insisting on the pres-
ent as a moment (of loss) that demands transformation.
In the novel, this sense of crisis is formally, as well as thematically, fash-
ioned: if the nation employs the gestures of lamentation to found itself,
Hatzis makes use of the fragmented, testimonial, and antiphonal gestures of
lamentation to found a difference within it.56 His is a creative—and perfor-
mative—reorientation of the lamentation’s sense of fractured cultural iden-
tity, another example of its usefulness for resisting assimilation. The Singrafeas’
death, moreover, can be read as the productive destruction of a certain

national imaginary, a dynamic reconception of the governing principle—“the
general equivalent”—of nationality. In speaking to the Singrafeas, the novel’s
characters start out speaking to, and being translated by, an invariable stan-
dard, but they end up addressing a dead body. This transformation could
hardly be more symbolically dense. The general equivalent has been remade
into an empty signifier, one receptive to all manner of inscription and appro-
priation. The novel’s characters end up speaking, like mourners, to and
through death: through the unknown and the indeterminate, the incom-
mensurate and immeasurable. On this interpretation, the body politic would
govern not by an abstract identity that commands conformity, but by a lim-
itless question: a Nietzschean politics, to be sure.57
It is the fragmented testimonies, then, rather than the Singrafeas’ conver-
sion of them, that ultimately comprise both the novel and its response to the
question of national identity. Those testimonies, moreover, produce a profli-
gate heap of waste material—knowledge that is unusable in, and disruptive
to, the process of national reproduction. Of the order of those “political and
discursive strategies” that Bhabha describes, “where adding-to does not add-
up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge,”58 the
novel’s testimonies do not provide the kind of evidence that the nation can
employ for assessing, intensifying, and refining its field of power. In part this
is because, unlike the grid of optional identities posed by the national census
(that, as Anderson puts it, are “intolerant of multiple, politically ‘transves-
tite,’ blurred or changing identifications”59), the question posed by the
Singrafeas is madly indefinite, an opening onto particular, provisional, con-
tradictory, and inconclusive divagations, an inarticulate materiality, and a
scandalous diversion of resources.
The Singrafeas’ informants also persistently impugn national exchange
value by both tarrying over a banal materiality that resists sublimation into
meaning and overtly “dis-identifying” with the nation. Insisting that govern-
ing representations of the romeiko are inadequate and inequitable (and that
Greeks have largely been cheated in the exchange), they repeatedly lament the
losses—of linguistic and regional identification, the self, and the materially
present—that the nation converts into value. Recalling the lamentation’s
refusal of compensation for loss and its reiterations of literality, Kostas regu-
larly chronicles a prosaic materiality—the Real occulted by the structure of
compensation. The novel opens, for example, with his enumeration of the
products made in the factory in Stuttgart, and the second chapter is largely a
catalog of the labor and materials of the lumberyard in Volos where he worked
before emigrating. Such passages antagonize that system of exchange that
“make[s] matter indifferent”60 and, in the context of the overriding inquiry of
the novel, construct a confrontation of material peoples with their ideality.
Further evidence of this repudiated exchange is characters’ disidentification
with the nation, of their resistance to replacing people with the “Sovereign
People.” The narrators of To diplo biblio repeatedly describe themselves as
foreign to such an image; Kostas is incredulous that the Singrafeas intends

to learn something about the romeiko from him: “to; romeviko zhta`~ na;
brei`~ ajpo; mevna; ’Apo; mevna;” (You’re going to find out about the romeiko
from me? From me?) (29).61 Indeed, departing for Germany, Kostas has
explicitly designated his nation alien—“Sullogivzomai mia; stigmh; —de;n
e[cw tivpota n’ajfhvsw ejdw`. De;n e[cw tivpota pou; na; foba`mai —tiv qa; brw`
sth; Germaniva— th; douleiav, to; kruvo, to;n xevno tovpo —ejtou`to~ ejdw` ei`nai
pio; xevno~ gia; mevna.” (I contemplate a moment—I don’t have anything to
leave here. I don’t have anything to fear—what will I find in Germany?—
work, cold, a foreign land—this land here is more foreign to me.) (58)—and
this sentiment is echoed five years later on his return: {Ena~ ejxovristo~ qav’-
mai me;~ sto;n dikov mou to;n tovpo, e{na~ provsfuga~, o{pw~ ei\nai o{loi tou~”
(I’ll be an exile in my own country, a refugee, as they all are) (194).62 One
root of this disidentification is the characters’ imbeddedness in an inescapably
transnational context and globalized economy that renders Greece at a loss
in developmental terms at the same time that it empties out its labor force.
Greeks are, in the Singrafeas’ terms, “`Ena~ kovsmo~ pou; feuvgei” (a people
that leaves).63 A metaphor incarnate—“kavnw th; metaforav” (I do transport
and delivery/I make metaphor) (21)—Kostas is a figure for Greece’s relation
to the industrialized world, for the products, profits, and modernity that are
transported elsewhere.64
Hatzis’s Requiem for an Unsymbolic Father
In the chapter entitled “Revkbiem gia; evna mikro; ravfth” (Requiem for a Little
Tailor), Kostas learns from the Singrafeas of his father’s activities in the
resistance and civil war. Hatzis’s evocation of the dead father is, significantly,
not the Symbolic Father that, idealized and transcendent, determines value
and resolves conflict—not a figure, that is, for the Patria—but rather an
example of both the suppression of testimony on which the Patria is built,
and the lives drained out by its expropriation of death.
It is during the occupation of Greece in World War II (by Germany, Italy,
and Bulgaria) that the “little tailor” first conceives of “sosialismo;~ kai;
dhmokrativa, patrivda k’ ejleuqeriva, ta; dikaiwvmata tw`n ajnqrwvpwn, hJ zwh;
tw`n law`n —kainouvrgia pravmata oJlovtela, to;n spavzan ejkei`no to;n kuvklo
k’ hJ mikrhv tou zwh; e[niwqe twvra na; eJnwvnetai me; th; megalosuvnh th`~ koinh`~
ajnqrwvpinh~ uJpovqesh~” (socialism and democracy, fatherland and freedom,
the rights of man, the life of the people—new things entirely, they broke
apart the cycle of his little life; he now felt part of a grand affair of the human
community) (92). But over the course of the occupation and ensuing civil
war, this newfound awareness is transformed into the disheartening recogni-
tion that freedom, human rights, and the life of the people are precisely what
the nation sacrifices to produce the imaginary “Sovereign People.” Kostas’s
father, a participant in the war in Albania and local secretary for the EAM
(Eqnikov Apeleuqerwtikov mevtwpo, National Liberation Front), is ultimately
imprisoned, forced formally to abjure his beliefs, and declare (falsely) that he
has denounced his comrades.65 This “testimony” extorted from Kostas’s
father is instructive on multiple counts: it produces nationally quite useful
meaning that is also entirely false; it evinces the national principle that the
imagined version of “fatherland and freedom, the rights of man, [and] the life
of the people” supercedes, and is more truthful than, the experience of indi-
vidual peoples; and it sets up a starkly suggestive contrast with the frag-
mented, provisional, and uncertain testimonies that comprise the bulk of the
novel. Following the execution of his comrades (a fate he has inexplicably
and agonizingly been spared)—
Tou;~ oJmolovghse tou;~ e{xh fovnou~ pou; de;n ei\ce kavnei, fortwvnontav~
tou~ stou;~ parapavnw pou; tou;~ ei[cane diatavxei, uJpovgraye th;
dhvlwsh pw;~ parasuvrqhke, aujto;~ de;n h[xere th;n ajlhvqeia, tou;~
ajpokhruvcnei twvra tou;~ paliou;~ sunagwnistev~ tou, ti;~ ijdeve~
ejkeivnou tou` kairou`, pouv, ftwco;~ a[nqrwpo~, mhvte ti;~ h[xere —kai; t’
a[lla pou; uJpogravfane tovte. ‘H dhvlwshv tou dhmosieuvthke me;
megavla gravmmata sti;~ ejfhmerivde~ th`~ Lavrisa~ kai; tou` Bovlou . . .
(He confessed to six murders that he hadn’t committed, blaming those higher
up who had ordered them; he signed the declaration that said he had been car-
ried away, that he didn’t know the truth, that he now denounces his former
comrades and his ideas of that time and that, being a poor man, he didn’t even
understand—and the other stuff they signed then. His declaration was pub-
lished, with capital letters in the newspapers of Larisa and Volos . . .) (104–5)
The evidence demanded by the nation is not genuine testimony, but assent
to a prefabricated knowledge with a guaranteed use value. Far from the
ambivalent, war-shattered reconstruction of self and world that the
Singrafeas relates on Kostas’s father’s behalf, this unambiguous declaration
of knowledge—permanent and technologically distributed—is a betrayal of
perception and identity that, from the nation’s perspective, are necessary and
negligible losses intrinsic to the production of national meaning. In a larger
historical context, moreover, Hatzis’s narration of the “little tailor’s” story is
also a memento of what has been systematically repressed from Greek
national memory, sent to the overburdened shredder of unusable pasts.66
If the “Requiem” chapter of To diplo biblio narrates the suppression of tes-
timony on which the Patria is constructed, it also interrogates the nation’s
mystification of death. It is a bitterly ironic version of the deathliness of patri-
otism that circumscribes the post-war life of Kostas’s father. Denied both a
nationally glorified death—however effective his part in the resistance, he
would, as a communist, be branded a traitor—and literal death itself, he car-
ries within him a deathliness neither triumphant, conclusive, nor meaningful:
Gi’ aujtovn, loipovn, de;n e[mene tivpota —kai; mhvte ki oJ qavnato~. Aujth;
ei[tan hJ dikhv tou hJ timwriva. ‘O ajpovhco~ th`~ megavlh~ trikumiva~
e[ftane livgo ki w}~ to; keliv tou. Nikhvqhkan —de;n ’evmeine tivpota. ‘H
geniav tou ajkevria nikhvqhke —tevlo~.
Aujto; to; tevlo~ douvleye mevsa tou mevra kai; nuvcta . . . {Ena~ a[nqrwpo~
pou; tou` klevyan to; qavnato kai; tou` klevyane kai; to; dikaivwma na;
peqavnei.
(For him, then, nothing remained —not even death. This was his punishment.
Only a little echo of the big storm made it to his cell. They were defeated —
nothing remained. His generation entirely defeated —the end.
This end ate away inside him day and night. . . . A man from whom they
stole death and the right to die.) (104)
An end without end, that destroys by refusing to kill. When the “little tai-
lor’s” belated death at last arrives, his manner of burial—“Me; th;n paliav tou
ajntavrtikh claivnh, diavtrhth ajpo; ti;~ sfai`re~ pou; xescivsane ta; kormia;
tw`n suntrovfwn” (with his old rebel’s cloak, riddled with the bullet holes that
ripped apart the bodies of his companions) (106)—emphasizes the anachro-
nism and meaninglessness of his death: he is shrouded in signifiers that point
to a non-existent event.
Nations, then, make regular use of lamentation to recognize and inter-
pret loss, sanctify origins, and retrieve lost identities, but lamentations also
present clear dangers: they may expose the losses sublimated by national
value, interrupt national identities, disrupt social order, or insist on radical
transformation of laws or economies. Yet as Hatzis’s antiphonal testimonies
teach us, such forces, however menacing from the nationalist’s point of
view, may precipitate a crisis that arrests the nation’s processes of reproduc-
tion, counteracts its anesthetizations of trauma, recuperates its waste prod-
ucts, and returns it to a point of creative origin—may function, that is, as an
antidote to the novel’s own requiem.
Chapter 6

L a m e n tat i o n a n d G e n d e r :
B e n Je l l o u n’s L’ E N FA N T D E S A B L E a n d
t h e ( D e ) C o l o n i z at i o n o f t h e B o dy
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s novel, L’enfant de sable is a lamentation for the body
colonized by gender: this chapter will attempt to explore this proposition, to
understand why such a reading is called for and what it would entail,
acknowledging that nearly every term in this proposition merits being taken
to task.1 I am less concerned with campaigning for this proposition as a crit-
ical shibboleth than with attending to the productive problems to which it
leads, exploring what it teaches us about the significance of lamentation to
two critical articulations of modernity: gender and colonization. The first
part of this chapter thus scrutinizes this proposition by exploring the novel’s
narrative construction of it, by placing it in a theoretical dialogue with post-
colonial and gender studies, and by considering it in the specific context of
Morocco. The second part of the chapter interprets these analyses in light
of the novel’s pervasive language of mourning and the tradition of lamenta-
tion we have been exploring throughout this book.
Body, Nation, Narrative
L’enfant de sable proposes that gender is a colonization of the body; it formu-

lates this proposition by melding together the troubled gender identity of its
main character with the (de)colonization of Morocco and a reticulate narra-
tive architecture of multiple and feuding storytellers, enigmatic journals, and
mysterious letters. Having fathered seven daughters and wishing to salvage
both his inheritance and dignity, Hadj Ahmed Suleiman decides to raise his
next child—whatever its sex—as a son. Thus commences the saga of Ahmed,
biologically female but gendered male, who the novel follows through a series
of life experiences: circumcision; gender lessons in the home, hammam,
mosque, and street; the onset of menstruation and the libidinal agonies of
adolescence; marriage to a disabled cousin; experiments with a feminine iden-
tity, the circus, drag performance, and global travel; and an uncertain rebirth
as a woman named Zahra.2
This tale of gender unrest unfolds, not insignificantly, in the context of
Moroccan decolonization. Tension between nationalists and officials of the
French protectorate flicker regularly in the novel’s background: in “le bruit
strident de l’appel à la prière . . . [qui] n’était plus un appel à la prière mais
une incitation à l’émeute” (the strident sound of the call to prayer . . . that
was no longer a call to prayer, but an incitation to riot) (8) or in the descrip-
tion of “ceux qui ont été chassés des campagnes par la sécheresse et les
détournements d’eau” (those chased from the countryside by the drought
and diversions of water supplies) (168)—both of which might depict the year
1937, when a drought devastated Morocco, famine and typhus ravaged the
population, and the French colonial administration, in an astonishingly bru-
tal response to protests, killed and injured numerous civilians.3 Fatouma also
narrates events that resemble “les semaines sanglantes” (the bloody weeks) of
1944; she describes “tous ces gamins des bidonvilles, renvoyés des écoles,
sans travail, sans toit, sans avenir, sans espoir. Ils était sortis dans les rues,
d’abord les mains nues, ensuite les mains pleines de pierres, réclamant du
pain. Ils hurlaient n’importe quel slogan . . . des femmes et des hommes sans
travail les rejoingirent . . . [et] l’armée a tiré dans la foule” (all these kids from
the shantytowns, turned away from school, without work, without shelter,
without future, without hope. They took to the streets, at first with empty
hands, then with their hands filled with stones, demanding bread. They
yelled any slogan . . . women and men without work joined them . . . and the
army fired into the crowd) (169). This passage evokes the events that fol-
lowed French arrests of Istiqlal leaders in January 1944, which were appar-
ently part of a deliberate strategy of provocation and repression and
succeeded in sparking a massive popular uprising that included a general
strike and the closing of shops, schools, factories, and worksites.4 In Rabat,
when protesters in front of the palais royal were ordered to leave, they were
bludgeoned by French police, who subsequently began shooting blindly into
the crowd. In Fez, a similar scene of civilian slaughter and mass arrest tran-
spired a few days later.
If the novel hints coyly at events of Moroccan decolonization, it also
reflects on decolonization allegorically. As Lisa Lowe has suggested, Salem,
Amar, and Fatouma (who narrate chapters 14, 15, and 16 respectively), in
their alternative conclusions to Ahmed’s tale, allegorize possible scenarios for
decolonization: a violent, suicidal struggle against a rapacious aggressor; a
slowly decaying, nostalgic isolation; or the piecing together of an eclectic
collage from the fragments of past and present, self and other, here and
L a m e n tat i o n a n d G e n d e r 149
elsewhere.5 Moreover, the uncertain brink of identity on which Ahmed seeks

to balance him/herself regularly allegorizes the bewilderingly complex
process of establishing national independence:
Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste? . . . de cette relation

avec l’autre en moi, celui qui m’écrit et me donne l’étrange impression d’être
encore de ce monde? . . . Alors je vais sortir. Il est temps de naître de nouveau.
En fait je ne vais pas changer mais simplement revenir à moi, juste avant que le
destin qu’on m’avait fabriqué ne commence à se dérouler et ne m’emporte
dans un courant. . . .
Quel soulagement, quel plaisir de penser que ce seront mes propres mains
qui traceront le chemin. . . .
(Today I seek to free myself. From what, exactly? . . . From this relation with
the other in me, who writes [to] me and gives me the strange impression of still
being of this world? . . . So, I shall go out. It is time to be born again. In fact,
I am not going to change, but simply to return to myself, before the destiny
that was fabricated for me begins to unroll and carry me off on its current. . . .
What relief, what pleasure to think that it will be my own hands that will
trace the path. . . .) (111–12)
The question Ahmed poses vis-à-vis his/her own body is, arguably, the ur-
question of decolonization: from what (political, economic, cultural, or mil-
itary forces) must I free myself to be truly liberated? And the figures in this
passage—of an other that has permeated the self and on whose discourse I
have come to depend for my very being, of a narrow escape from an engulf-
ing destiny and a heady chance to make my own way—trace a pattern very
similar to that of colonial disassembly and nation building. This entangle-
ment of corporal and political decolonization is also deepened by the
thwarted and inconclusive nature of Ahmed’s various attempts to “return to
the self,” which allegorize the simultaneous impossibility of returning to a
“natural” pre-discursive body and of recuperating an “authentic” native or
national identity.6
Ahmed’s story is infinitely complicated by the fact that it is differently nar-
rated by a professional storyteller, by Ahmed him/herself (ostensibly), by the
brother of Ahmed’s wife, by a man recently arrived from the South, by three
members of the audience who convene after the storyteller’s death (the
aforementioned Salem, Amar, and Fatouma), and by a blind troubadour with
an uncanny resemblance to Ben Jelloun’s literary mentor Jorge Luis Borges.7
This complex alloy of gender trouble, national unrest, and narrative revolt
form a kind of fluid triangulation in which the body is the nation, the nation
is the narrative, and the narrative is the body. Indeed, from birth, Ahmed’s
body is linked to the body politic. When s/he is born, his/her father runs the
following announcement in the national newspaper:
Dieu est clément

Il vient d’illuminer la vie et le foyer de votre serviteur et dévoué potier Hadj
Ahmed Souleïamane. Un garçon—que Dieu le protège et lui donne longue
vie—est né jeudi à 10h. Nous l’avons nommé Mohamed Ahmed. Cette nais-
sance annonce fertilité pour la terre, paix et prospérité pour le pays. Vive
Ahmed! Vive le Maroc!
(God is Merciful
He has illuminated the life and home of your servant and devoted potter Hadj
Ahmed Suleiman. A boy—may God protect him and bring him long life—was
born on Thursday at 10:00 a.m. We have named him Mohamed Ahmed. This
birth will bring fertility to the land, peace and prosperity to the country. Long
live Ahmed! Long live Morocco!) (30)
Not only does this announcement inaugurate the figural association of Ahmed
with Morocco, but it suggests that fertility, peace, and the prosperity of the
country are contingent upon the birth of sons, that the destiny of the coun-
try rests in men’s hands. It thus founds both the novel’s analogy between
sexual and political liberation—Ahmed’s attempts to decolonize the body
and Moroccans’ efforts to decolonize the body politic—and its implicit inter-
rogation of masculinist nationalisms.8
If Ahmed’s body is a figure for the space of the nation, so too is the nar-
rative, which is consistently depicted in terms of the geographical space of a
Moroccan city. The seven gates through which the primary raconteur organ-
izes his narrative are also the gates that separate the medina from the ville
nouvelle, the Arab from the European.9 The intricate circuitousness of the
narrative, moreover—its “ruelles tres étroites . . . [et] circulaires [qui] n’ont
pas de bout” (narrow little streets . . . endless and circular)—seem to identify
it expressly with the medina (20–21). Yet this narrative space is also, like the
body of Ahmed, inscribed by both genders, associated with both the public,
masculine space of the street and market, and with the interior, feminine
space of the home:10 “Le livre est ainsi: une maison où chaque fenêtre est un
quartier, chaque porte une ville, chaque page est une rue. . . . Nous allons
habiter cette grande maison. . . . ” (The book is a house in which each win-
dow is a quartier, each door a town, each page a street . . . . We are going to
inhabit this big house) (108).
To complete that triangular figure, the narrative is also figured as the
body—of both the storyteller and Ahmed. “Vous ne pouvez y accéder,” says
the storyteller of Ahmed’s narrative, “sans traverser mes nuits et mon corps.
Je suis ce livre. . . . J’ai senti le livre s’incarner en moi” (You can’t get to it
without traversing my nights and my body. I am this book. . . . I felt the book
embody itself in me) (13). Ahmed, similarly, describes the material, embod-
ied, and intimate reach of the anonymous correspondent’s “phrases [qui] me
caressent la peau, me touchent aux endroits les plus sensible de mon corps”
(sentences that caress my skin, touch me in the most sensitive parts of my
body) (96). And in a similar vein, the correspondent writes, “je vous entends
parler à vous-même ou vous coucher nue dans les pages blanches de ce cahier”
(I hear you speak to yourself and lie down naked in the blank pages of this
notebook) (60). This nakedness and blankness, this embodied narrative clad
in notions that se debarassent, might also be read as the nakedness of a story
(like that of the nation or the transgendered body) that is yet to be written,
that calls for an undressing or an erasure, a “decolonization” that entails con-
fronting oneself exposed.
It is through these figural, thematic and allegorical imbrications, that the
novel formulates the proposition that gender is a colonization of the body. And
the premise draws on a certain historicized logic. For not unlike the political
variant of colonization, gender is a practice of taking possession of, and discur-
sively occupying, putatively “undeveloped” bodies through an attachment to a
“parent state,” a practice that is cast simultaneously as natural development and
logical submission and that is carried out by disciplining desire, regulating
spaces and time, persuasion, negotiation, or force.
Both gender and colonization are imbedded in a language of natural
development that assigns the pre-gendered, like the pre-colonial, the status
of a child. Gender non-conformists, natives, and children are not subjects in
their own right, but, to borrow Judith Butler’s language, abjected beings not
yet properly gendered or civilized. They inhabit the uncontrollable and
chaotic boundaries of civilization and “their very humanness comes into
question; these excluded sites come to bound the human as its constitutive
outside, and to haunt those boundaries as the persistent possibility of their
disruption and rearticulation.”11 Conceived via negativa (as the uncivilized,
abnormal, undeveloped, inhuman), they are discursively associated with (fig-
urally related to and often conceptually undifferentiated from) the insane,
the poor, the ill, the physically disabled, the homeless, and the criminal, that
is, with other pathologized groups, with whom they are perceived to share
properties such as unreason, impurity, and social impropriety.12
For example, in one version of the story, Ahmed, reflecting on his/her
marriage to a disabled female cousin, makes the following journal entry: “Je
finis par penser . . . qu’elle avait accepté ce mariage en pensant que, si je
l’avais demandée, ce nétait pas par amour, mais pour un arrangement social,
pour masquer une infirmité ou une perversité” (I ended up thinking . . . that
she had accepted this marriage thinking that, if I had asked for it, it wasn’t
out of love, but for a social arrangement, to mask some infirmity or perver-
sity) (76). Gender non-conformity, as Ahmed recognizes, is perceived as
sickness or, like criminality, as a more willful deviation from normality;13 it
thus bears a striking resemblance to the pathologies attributed to natives
by colonial discourse, to the “Oriental” of European invention described by
Edward Said, to those inhabiting the negative side of the Manichean allegory
as elaborated by Abdul JanMohamed.14 Such pathologizing discourses oper-
ate, as Foucault has taught us, by submitting specific acts, practices, or char-
acteristics to a structural extrapolation that makes of them signs of a
condition. The colonial economy described by JanMohamed—“based on
a transformation of racial into moral and even metaphysical difference,” the

allegorical extensions of which “come to dominate every facet of imperialist
mentality”—is one example of this diffusion from specific characteristic to
essential character.15 At least three facets of this pathologizing language of
development merit our attention.
First, it disciplines the idiosyncrasies of phenomena into a taxonomy of
distinct and identifiable genres. “The European,” writes JanMohamed, “com-
modifies the native by negating his individuality, his subjectivity, so that he is
now perceived as a generic being that can be exchanged for any other
native.”16 It is no coincidence that genre and gender both derive from the
same Greek root, genos (race, kind, sort, class, genus), and connote a partic-
ular style or manner. Indeed, we might rephrase JanMohamed’s contention
to say that the native is perceived as a gender: for, negating individuality and
subjectivity, gender also makes beings into interchangeable parts. As if to
evoke reflection on this matter, the seminal word of Ben Jelloun’s novel—
the title of the first chapter—is “Homme” (Man): a term that may refer to
mankind, to men only, or to a particular man, a designation that is thus
inspecifically generic and that specifies by gender, that inscribes not only the
manner in which one gender eclipses the other, but the imperious power of
gender to say who one is without saying anything about one.
Second, the generic descriptors through which the native, the little boy,
or the little girl are “known” are also the pedagogy through which they are
taught to know themselves, and they are thus a formidable mechanism for
overriding experience. In other words, the colonized subject is counted upon
to take over the process of engendering: of making men, women, or natives,
much as the child is counted upon to assume the law of the father, or, as in
our narrative, Ahmed, at his/her father’s death, assumes the role of master of
the household. Addressing his/her sisters s/he declares:
A partir de ce jour, je ne suis plus votre frère; je ne suis pas votre père non plus,
mais votre tuteur. J’ai le devoir et le droit de veiller sur vous. Vous me devez
obéissance et respect. Enfin, inutile de vous rappeler que je suis un homme
d’ordre et que, si la femme chez nous est inférieure à l’homme, ce n’est pas
parce que Dieu l’a voulu ou que le Prophète l’a décideé, mais parce qu’elle
accepte ce sort. Alors subissez et vivez dans le silence!
(From this day on, I’m no longer your brother; I’m not your father, either, but
your guardian. I have the duty and the right to watch over you. You owe me
obedience and respect. Anyway, I don’t have to remind you that I’m a man of
order and that, if women are inferior to men here it’s not because God wished
it or the prophet decided it, but because women accept it. So submit, and live
in silence!) (66)
A model of both logical and vicious circularity, Ahmed’s speech simultane-

ously asserts his/her authority by fiat and insists that power operates by
consensus; s/he at once imposes an order and snatches away the consolation
of that order being god-willed or natural. Ahmed’s address to his/her sisters

not only, like the novel itself, juxtaposes a pervasive and rigid system of
gender relationships with a recognition that potentially undoes them, but
demonstrates the manner in which subjects take over the process of their
own and others’ colonization.
Finally, in both colonial regimes and the gender system, the body and its
coverings function as primary signs, as the style that identifies one’s genre.
What Fanon writes of a society in “Algeria Unveiled” applies equally to gen-
der: “The way people clothe themselves, together with the traditions of dress
and finery that custom implies, constitutes the most distinctive form of a
society’s uniqueness, that is to say the one that is the most immediately per-
ceptible.”17 Often, as Fanon notes of the veil, a single accessory suffices to
signify an entire gender or society, and, in its overdetermination, becomes a
site where much larger political and social issues are contested:
The officials of the French administration . . . committed to destroying the

people’s originality and under instructions to bring about the disintegration, at
whatever cost, of forms of existence likely to evoke a national reality directly or
indirectly, were to concentrate their efforts on the wearing of the veil, which
was looked upon at this juncture as a symbol of the status of the [Maghrebian]
woman.18
This logic, then, of natural development, of pathology and cure, and of fixed
genoi expressed in, through, and on the body governs the way in which both
gender and colonization have historically been conceived.19
If the proposition “gender is a colonization of the body” risks inflating the
meaning of colonization to the point of effacing historical or geographical
specificity, it might also be taken as an imperative to sort through the details
suppressed by the very category of “colonization.” Indeed, I take it here as
a spur to explore the story of Moroccan colonization imbedded in the novel,
to see how that story maps the refractory semantic terrain shared by gender
and colonization. The details of this story, it is perhaps worth emphasizing,
are the residue of colonization deployed as a generic term; and this is true as
much when the term is used “metaphorically” (gender is a colonization of the
body) as when it is used “literally” (Morocco was colonized by France).20 In
either case, such peculiarities are implicitly chased off to the unpacified terri-
tory of irrelevant exceptions where, like those “dissident tribes” forever trou-
bling the edges of empire, they do not cease to beleaguer the identity of
colonization as such. The most conspicuous of these specificities, in the
Moroccan case, is that, from the perspective of French political terminology,
Morocco was never a colony, but a protectorate. What, then, is obscured by
subsuming Morocco into a generalized theory—or history—of coloniza-
tion? How does the protectorate, as a form of political or economic inter-
vention, differ from colonization proper?21 What is the ideological work
done by this conceptual distinction? And, finally, how does the protectorate,
in its theoretical or materialized forms, refine, refute, or clarify the proposi-

tion that gender is a colonization of the body?
Casting France in the role of the benificent guardian—as more adult,
robust, and masculine—the notion of the “protectorate” concomitantly con-
stituted Morocco as immature, weak, and unsound; it represented French
intervention in Morocco as a kind of brace compensating for infirmity or
developmental deficiency.22 Depicting Morocco as “still in her infancy,”
Maréchal Lyautey, the theoretical and administrative architect of the Moroccan
protectorate, regularly blended the image of France as benign guardian and
emancipator—as Liberty unflinchingly leading the people—with a perfectly
clear recognition of the direction of colonial profit flows.23 Ostensibly count-
ing on rhetorical juxtaposition to pass for logic, he calls on France to play “the
role of a tutor, a beneficent big brother, to whom it will be in [Morocco’s]
interest to remain tied, and [who will] benefit from the advantage of having
made here . . . a nation whose emancipation will be effected under our tute-
lage and direction, and to our profit.”24 Here emancipation is not from but
through France, a formulation that handily disguises the threat posed by
France itself, which becomes the protector rather than the agressor from
which one needs protection, the liberator rather than the subjugator.
This depiction of colonization as a protective envelope is, I want to signal,
intriguingly similar to Ben Jelloun’s portrayal of gender, to the “voile de
chair” (veil of flesh) that, for Ahmed, “le séparait et le protégeait des autres”
(separated and protected him from others), that provides an asylum from the
“curiosité, méfiance et même une haine tenace” (curiosity, disdain and even
tenacious hatred), elicited by his strangeness (7). Performing a distinct gen-
der, this passage suggests, not only protects the good citizenry from the threat
of uncertainty—from confusion, anomaly, infirmity, defilement, hybridity,
fitna—but safeguards the gender non-conformist from the violence of oth-
ers.25 But in both these instances, the protector is really the aggressor: it is
France that is occupying Morocco; it is a rigid gender system that is oppress-
ing Ahmed; the protective envelope is a disguise of its own menace, the con-
sequences against which it “protects” are both of its own production and
among its most potent disciplinary mechanisms.26
If this ruse of protection performed smoothly enough in the metropole,
Moroccans were not so easily duped by it. A central and explicit demand of
the 1944 Manifeste de l’Indépendance was “the liberation of our sovereignty
from every form of tutelage.”27 Having handed the text of the Manifeste to
the Résident Général Gabriel Puaux, the Vizir de la Justice added, “We have
come to put an end to the relation of tutelage that was imposed on us by the
Treaty of Fez. . . . We, the people of the Makhzen, have lived since 1912 as
puppets and monkeys, manipulated by the protectorate administration.”28
The Vizir’s words—his commitment to eradicating manipulation, external
imposition, and paternalistic relations—propels Morocco, I would suggest,
directly onto the terrain of that irreducible question posed by Ahmed:
“Aujourd’hui je cherche à me délivrer. De quoi au juste?” (Today I seek to
liberate myself. From what, exactly?) In other words, the Manifeste de

l’Independence is implicitly as interrogative as it is declarative: from what
must we free ourselves to be truly liberated? To what degree is it possible to
liberate oneself from all forms of tutelage, externally scripted desires, and for-
eign manipulation? How does one sort out one’s own desire and identity
from this self-alienation? And by what mechanisms will this project be carried
out? The questions posed by (Ahmed’s interrogation of) gender turn out to
be highly correlative with the questions confronted at the moment of inde-
pendence from imperial rule.
If the rhetoric of the protectorate was one of benign guidance, the admin-
istrative structure, according to Lyautey, was to be one of indirect rule along
British lines, of association rather than assimilation:
The concept of the Protecorate is one of a country maintaining its institutions,

governing and administering itself with its own organs under the simple con-
trol of a European power that, replacing external representation, generally
takes charge of the administration of the army, finances, and the management
of economic development. What dominates and characterizes this conception
is the notion of control, as opposed to the formula of direct administration.29
More discreet, less obviously coercive, this mechanism of “simple control” is

a way of letting the natives play grownup. It is more or less a game of pretend
where, like dressing up in Mommy’s or Daddy’s clothes, one is guided into
genre-appropriate behaviors. Indeed another way of describing this indirect
rule would be by way of Amar’s narration in L’enfant de sable, which begins
with an excursus on corruption as hollowing out:
J’aime bien le mot arabe qui désigne la corruption— . Ca s’applique aux

matières qui perdent leur substance et qui n’ont plus de consistence, comme le
bois par exemple qui garde l’enveloppe extérieure, il garde l’apparence, mais il
est creux, il n’y a plus rien dedans, il a été miné de l’intérieur; des petites bêtes
vraiment minuscules ont grignoté tout ce qu’il y avait sous l’écorce.
(I love the Arabic word for corruption. It’s used for materials that lose their sub-
stance, consistency, or stability, like wood, for example, that retains its external
shell, it keeps its outward appearance, but it’s hollow, there’s no longer anything
inside, it’s been worn away from the inside; minute insects have gnawed away
the core.) (146)
Amar is describing Moroccan society, but much the same might be said of
the edifice of indirect rule, which, as instituted by the Treaty of Fez, set out
to “safeguard the religious conditions, the respect and traditional prestige of
the Sultan.”30 The wording could not be more “corrupt” in the sense elabo-
rated by Amar; it enacts the hollowing out of the sultan’s authority, reserving
his “respect and prestige,” but not his power; it keeps up the appearance of his
authority at the same time that it hands over formal “administrative, judicial,
educational, economic, financial, and military” control to the interests that
have already gnawed away the substance of his rule.31 Cloaked in the impec-
cable attire of “mutual respect”—the “essential characteristic” of the pro-
tectorate is, in Lyautey’s words, “close association and cooperation between
the autochtonous race and the protecting race, joined in mutual respect,
and the scrupulous safeguarding of traditional institutions”32—indirect rule
in essence gave the sultan “authority” over ceremonies, “tradition,” and
“Muslim affairs”; that is, over the symbolic, but not the material; the spiritual,
but not the wordly; the past, not the present or future; the cultural, but not
the political or economic. He, along with his chorus of vizirs, pashas, and
caïds, would function as a sort of poet laureate decorating—and legitimat-
ing—French rule with aesthetic beauty. This specifically Franco-Moroccan
rendition of colonialism, inserted into Ben Jelloun’s analogy, throws into
relief the degree to which gender may be conceived as a mechanism for
keeping up the appearance of authority—of agency, self-definition, and indi-
vidual expression—while substituting for such agency a well-guided identity
and desire, exchanging decorative accessories for power.
Trumpeted by Lyautey as a less expensive, more streamlined and efficient
form of imperialism, as well as a more “humane” one, indirect rule meant, in
practice, expanding the meaning of “supervision” to the point where it was
exceedingly difficult to distinguish from direct rule or colonization proper.33
When he needed to please the hard line colonial lobby in Paris, Lyautey
admitted as much: “The functions of supervision are in fact much more
extensive than the word seems to indicate,” he writes. “In effect, the con-
trôleurs civils not only have the mission of supervising the systems of native
justice and government per se; they are in truth the real administrators of the
country, charged with centralizing and coordinating in all matters.”34
“Indirect rule” also entailed simply removing native leaders who were unco-
operative, including the sultan himself: one of Lyautey’s first exploits in
Morocco was removing the disobliging sultan Moulay Abdelhafid and replac-
ing him with the more acquiescent Moulay Youssef. Similarly, while the “poli-
tique des grands caïds” ostensibly remained central to Lyautey’s method in
the Atlas mountains and the South, it too meant simple elimination of lead-
ers (like el-Hiba, Moha ou Hamou, or Abd al’Krim), who were not willing to
cooperate with the French.35 The role of the native intermediary was, more-
over, far from that of an equal partner; Lyautey expected the native leader to
function essentially as a conduit for French ideology and interests:
It is through the officer in permanent contact with the native leader that little
by little the latter’s horizons will expand and through him those of his people.
And it is through him as an intermediary that bit by bit we will introduce our
ideas of justice, humanity, and progress, that is to say, we will involve ourselves
in all that is beneficial and legitimate and stay away from all that is annoying
and unacceptable to people for whom our intervention disturbs all customs and
all traditions. This set-up has two characteristics which should make it incon-
testable: it is the only one that conforms to the reality of the situation and it is
the most economical.36
The slither in Lyautey’s language from “justice, humanity, and progress” to

the “economical” is both characteristic and telling; so too is the “little by lit-
tle” and “bit by bit” by way of which he describes colonial advance. This per-
severant stealth was, indeed, central to Lyautey’s conception of the
protectorate—a “method” that he depicted in terms of a “tache de huile”
(spot of oil). Developed on the basis of his experience in Vietnam and
Madagascar, and his association with Gallieni, the idea entailed spreading
French influence—unctuously, inevitably, imperceptibly—by gathering
knowledge of native politics and culture, colluding with tribal leaders, estab-
lishing civil institutions, and constructing desire: “I want to make us loved by
this people,” he wrote.37 As Pennell describes it, the basic strategy was that
“the army would build posts on the edge of as-yet-uncolonised regions.
These would show off French military power, and provide security, safe mar-
kets, and medical facilities that would win hearts and minds. Then French
control would spread forward and the process would begin again.”38 If, in
theory, this “tache de huile” was a peaceful and inevitable expansion of civi-
lization, it was, as Pennell is quick to add, “backed by superior weapons and
excellent intelligence.”39 While the metaphor of the “tache de huile” didn’t
entirely correspond to, and did much to obscure, the forms of coercion and
violence that took place on the ground, it did do an impressive amount of
ideological work: it represented the advance of French civilization as unstop-
pable, and figured cultural borders as permeable, shifting, and undefined.
The image, perhaps inadvertently, suggests that what is French or Moroccan
(be it territory, desire, culture, economic interest, or political structure) can
never be clearly distinguished; they will necessarily become blurred, indeed
indecipherable, at the edges. This conception suggests a kind of proto-
hybridity (where, as Bhabha would have it, cultures are not static entities but
dynamic processes), but it also demonstrates the degree to which such
“hybridity,” in circumstances of fundamental structural and material inequal-
ity, can function as the right hand of imperialism. Placed in the context of
Ben Jelloun’s narrative, its corporal and national uncertainties, as well as in
the company of Nietzsche and Derrida (and their progeny in gender and
postcolonial studies) it becomes clear that such indeterminacy is double-
edged, fraught with risk: it can function as a fashionable disguise for hege-
mony as much as a tool for dismantling the prisonhouse of identity.
Lyautey’s other viscous term for this method was “pénetration pacifique.”
He never intended to be a “hammer” pounding away at Morocco, he wrote
to a series of his colleagues, but a “drill which penetrates slowly but irre-
sistibly.”40 Despite his regular recourse to military force, he preferred to rep-
resent the colonial mission as progressing by “the economic and moral
penetration of a people, not by subjugation to our force or even our liberties,
but by a close association”: a gentler, friendlier rape.41 Advocating a combined
strategy of military force and political influence, he conceived this penetration
as an insemination of organization and order, a mastery of “resistant and war-
like populations” who, without the firm hand of the French, would inevitably
stray back to “the freedom of chaos, pillage, and oppression which had ben-
efitted them for centuries.”42
This imposition of order was also, for Lyatuey, coincident with the reign
of reason and understanding—“What is pacification in most cases anyway,”
he wrote, “if not the end of a misunderstanding?”—as well as the institution
of private property.43 Here, ostensibly, is the kind of “understanding”
Lyautey had in mind:
We are trying to convince them [the Moroccans], and we have already been
able to make them understand, that the only real form of property is individ-
ual, private property. And thus, as we transform collective tribal property into
private property, as we increase the value of the estate of each member of the
tribe, we ask in return to have a part of the collective tribal property transferred
to State ownership. It is on this same collective property that we are creating
sectors to be made ready for French colonization.44
This tacit series of equivalencies between colonial penetration, order, reason,

and the acquisition of property is the ideological bedrock of the protectorate.
A protectorate, then, bears relation to gender insofar as it functions as
control portrayed as benign guidance, as thoughtful parenting that is at
once a kind of protective envelope and the enabling condition of freedom
and individuality; insofar as it substitutes surface decoration for agency and
authority, abjecting, or simply eliminating, those alien to the decorative
scheme of the “centralizing and coordinating” power;45 and insofar as its
development, while undergirded by violence, is so insidious as to seem
inevitable—as synonymous with civilization, order, the reasonable, proper,
and human. The Moroccan protectorate, as sculpted by Lyautey, might
also—like the gender system—be described as a structure of difference intol-
erant to differences. It is a classifactory scheme, that is, that “safeguards” dif-
ferences by rendering them static, essentialized, immutable, distinct.
Lyautey’s valorization of association over assimilation, often touted as an
admirable respect for native customs and a particularly magnanimous form of
colonization, was also a kind of apartheid that, in the name of “natural dif-
ferences,” insisted that ethnicities be kept distinct and separate and that they
protect and perform their purity. In the domain of culture, as in that of gen-
der, such a system assumes the existence of already constituted groups,
rather than recognizing such categories as the effects of materially inter-
ested, and socially consequential, regulatory practices—as artifacts with a trace-
able and critiquable genealogy. It also erects normative ideals that abject,
pathologize, and punish those characteristics—and those characters—that do
not conform to the norms of the category.46 The entities underpinning
Lyautey’s system of segregation, moreover, are, in both structural and ideo-
logical terms, separate but not equal.
In Morocco, this hierarchized structure of difference functioned along
three axes: European/Moroccan, Arab/Berber, and elite/common. These
divisions bore similarities to other instances of colonization: the assumption of
an irreducible difference between Europeans and natives was characteristic
of many colonial environments; the “divide and rule” impulse behind the
distinction betweeen Arabs and Berbers resembled strategies deployed else-
where, as did the filtration of a cooperative native elite from the masses. But
the differential structure of the Moroccan protectorate, and Lyautey’s theo-
rization of it, also bore some intriguing pecularities. For example, Lyautey’s
radical reconstruction of Moroccan cities, carried out by Henri Prost
(“Lyautey’s Haussman,” as Hoisington calls him), was a strikingly literal
incarnation of the ideological separateness posited between Europeans and
Moroccans.47 Conceived as saving the medinas from destruction—preserving
a jewel of Moroccan tradition—the dual city design (where the French ville
nouvelle was built next to, but a safe distance from, the medina) had the
effect not only of fossilizing the medinas into impracticable museum pieces
(there was no provision in Prost’s plans, for example, for a growing Arab
population), but of reinforcing what Bouabid, one signatory of the Manifeste
de l’Indépendance, identified as “a colonial presence tending to institute, in
Morocco and the whole of North Africa, a regime comparable to that of
South Africa.”48
The second dyad of distinctions deployed in colonial Morocco was that
between Arabs and Berbers. Drawn partly from experience in Kabylia and
partly from Édouard Michaux-Bellaire’s publications on his Mission Scient-
ifique du Maroc, the received wisdom on Morocco was that there was a sharp
divide between bled-el Makhzen (territory controlled by the sultan) and bled-
el siba (territory outside the sultan’s control), which roughly corresponded
to the distinction between Arab and Berber.49 This theory, as Pennell puts it,
“divided Arabs from Berbers and assigned to each a series of characteristics
that were apparently based on scientific principles but which were really little
more than prejudices that justified colonial methods and created a hierarchy
of local populations.”50 Berbers, on this view, were seen as more assimilable
to French policy and direct rule because they were only superficially Muslim,
without loyalty to the sultan, and, as Rivet describes it, “fundamentally dem-
ocratic and ready to adopt French republicanism as soon as someone helped
detach them from the veneer of Oriental and Islamic civilization.”51 In this
bifurcated scheme of things, the tribes of the so-called “unpacified”
regions—those who had not fallen into the foreseen pattern of effortless
absorption into French political dominance—were designated “dissident”: in
disagreement, unorthodox, wayward.
Lyautey’s oft-proclaimed esteem for Moroccan culture was, it should be
stressed, respect for a specific elite sliver of Moroccan society, and it was
instrumental in intensifying perhaps the most consequential mode of differ-
entiation in colonial Morocco, that between an aristocracy and the “common
people.” “We must remind ourselves,” he wrote to his sister, “that in all
human society there is a ruling class, born to rule, without which nothing
can be done, and a class to be ruled.” In this instance, he cast this distinction
as a straightforward political and military expedient: “[We must] enlist the
ruling class in our service. Once the mandarins are our friends, certain of
us and needing us, they have only to say the word and the country will be
pacified, and at far less cost and with greater certainty than by all the military
expeditions we could send there.”52 But more often this view was integrated
into a romanticized view of a Moroccan elite capable of recuperating the
magesty of the Ancien Régime. Aptly characterizing Lyautey as “the great
lord captivated with tradition and hierarchy, passionately resistant to the indi-
vidualistic and egalitarian society ushered in by 1789,” Rivet contends,
This aristocractic mindset made him tremble with enthusiasm for the monarchy
and the elites that comprised the Makhzen. In a certain way, Lyautey was to
flourish in this old “fortuned empire” precisely because it was archaic . . . he
gives to his stay of thirteen years in Morocco the tone of time regained: that of
the Ancien Régime. . . . “This Moroccan race [he wrote] . . . has remained the
refuge of courtesy, moderation, elegant manners, noble gestures, respect of
social hierarchies, and all that which embellished our 18th century.”53
This distinction between an elite, authentic Morocco and a counterfeit, com-

mon one was produced and institutionalized by both French empowerment
of the Makhzen and its construction of the “Écoles des Fils de Notables,”
whose purpose, as Pennell puts it, was “to bind the fathers more closely to
the French system, and to produce in the sons a loyal class of young men
to help run the bureaucracy.”54 It also resulted, among Lyautey’s successors,
in French support of some of the most reactionary and oppressive charac-
ters in the country, such as El Glaoui and Abdelhay El Kittani.55
The hierarchized distinctions of the Moroccan protectorate, then, exhibit
significant resemblances to a binary system of gender differentiation: a struc-
ture of difference intoleratant to differences; discrimination (re)produced by
spatial segregation; a hierarchy, justified by a “science” of differences, that
constitutes its lower rung as “dissident”—at variance with, and prone to stray
from, the established order; a politically institutionalized and educationally
reinforced distinctivness, expressed through manners and guarded by an
ethic of “loyalty”; a reproduction of privilege based on a conception of inher-
ited, natural rights of domination in which the governing genre is also more
genuine (and neither the etymological connections between genre, gender,
genus, and genuine, nor the latter’s roots in conceptions of the native, free-
born, begotten, and natural, should be overlooked here).
Gender Wounds
Body, nation, narrative, indistinguishably superimposed: this troubling and

troubled spectacle is, in L’enfant de sable, expressed through the language of
lamentation, into which we are immersed from the novel’s opening paragraph:
Il y avait d’abord ce visage allongé par quelques rides verticales, telles des cica-
trices creusées par de lointains insomnies, un visage mal rasé, travaillé par le
temps. La vie—quelle vie? une étrange apparence faite d’oubli—avait dû le mal-
mener, le contrarier ou même l’offusquer. On pouvait y lire ou deviner une
profonde blessure qu’un geste maladroit de la main ou un regard appuyé, un

oeil scrutateur ou malintentionné suffisaient à rouvrir. . . . Il sentait passer [la
lumière] sur son corps comme une flamme qui brûlerait ses masques, une lame
qui lui retirerait lentement le voile de chair qui maintenait entre lui et les autres
la distance nécessaire. Que serait-il en effet si cet espace qui le séparait et le pro-
tégait des autres venait à s’annuler?
(First there was this face creased by vertical lines, like scars dug out by distant
insomnias, a badly shaven face worked by time. Life—what life? A strange
appearance made of forgetfulness—must have maltreated it, annoyed it or even
offended it. One could divine there a deep wound that an awkward gesture of
the hand or an insistent look, a scrutinizing or ill-intentioned eye would suffice
to reopen. . . . He felt the light on his body like a flame that would burn off
his masks, a blade that would slowly pull off the veil of flesh that maintained
the necessary distance between himself and others. Indeed what would he be
if this space that separated and protected him from others was suddenly
removed?) (7–8)
In the beginning there is already a past: images of scars, deep wounds that are
easily reopened, an embodied remembrance of things past, and a peculiar
forgetting situate the narrative in the paradoxical moment of lamentation, at
once oppressively present and irretrievably lost. This marked body is both the
evidence and object of lamentation; materially and symbolically remade, it
carries the memory of trauma and is itself traumatic. The novel’s opening, in
other words, poses the body itself as crisis, as that incomprehensible but insis-
tently significant materiality characteristic of the moment of lamentation.
The storyteller reemphasizes this trope throughout his overture, describing
the character’s retreat into solitude “pour ramasser ses membres” (to gather
up his members) (9), a retreat that “avait du s’imposer à lui parce qu’il n’ar-
rivait plus à maîtriser son corps” (must have been imposed on him because he
was no longer able to master his body) (10), a result of the fact that “entre
lui et son corps, il y avait eu rupture, une espèce de fracture” (there had been
a rupture, a kind of fracture, between himself and his body) (10).
This rupture between Ahmed and his/her body inaugurates the novel’s
multiple figures of estrangement and exile —“Moi-même je ne suis pas ce
que je suis; l’une et l’autre peut-être” (I am not myself what I am, the one
and the other perhaps) (53)—that resonate not only with the imagery of
lamentation and figures of trauma, but with the process of alienation
effected through colonial education, political disempowerment, and eco-
nomic domination. The novel is also replete with images of temporal
estrangement that evoke the arrested time of lamentation. Ahmed writes in
his diary, for example: “j’ai perdu la notion du temps. Curieusement mon
calendrier s’arrête fin avril. Des feuilles manquent. . . . Mon temps n’a rien à
voir avec celui du calendrier, achevé ou non” (I have lost the notion of time.
Curiously, my calendar stops at the end of April. Pages are missing . . . but
my time has nothing to do with that of the calendar, completed or not)
(105); and the storyteller describes the historical moment as one in which
“L’horloge est une mécanique sans âme; elle est arrêtée, altérée par la rouille
et l’usure, par le temps, respiration des hommes” (the clock is a machine
without soul; it is stopped, altered by rust and use, by time, and men’s
breathing) (126).
These figures of bodily and temporal alienation are underscored by the
fact that the agent of Ahmed’s wounds is “une étrange apparence faite d’ou-
bli,” a figure that seems to name Ahmed him/herself but is grammatically
alienated from him/her in the way we have found “inalienable” entities
(such as kin and body parts) incessantly estranged in the lamentation. We
should also not fail to hear the multiple nuances of foreigness in the word
étrange, which entangle Ahmed in a complex web of meaning, relegating
him/her to the status of philosophical impurity, associating him/her with a
discursively undistinguished heap of pathologies (including insanity, illness,
disability, homelessness, criminality, and childhood), and portraying his/her
appearance as the site of hermeneutic difficulty—a scandal.56 This latter con-
nection (between Ahmed’s étrangeté and interpretative difficulty) foreshad-
ows the novel’s extended analogy between its own narrative uncertainty and
the ambiguity of Ahmed’s gender identity, an analogy that frames one of the
novel’s central inquiries: how does one read the body? Is it legible? Does
Ahmed’s body become unreadable because of a “misassigned” gender? Or is
the novel’s suggestion more radical still—that gender itself makes the body
unreadable? The apparition figured here is made of forgetting (“faite d’ou-
bli”), but what is the forgetting that comprises him/her? Is it the biological
sex “forgotten” by her/his parents? Ahmed’s subsequent desire to forget
her/his own engenderment?57 Or is it that the body itself has been forgot-
ten—that gender is a forgetting of the body?
The simultaneous memory and forgetting embodied in the scars through
which Ahmed’s body is introduced also mime the lamentation’s reproduc-
tion of remembrance that, as we have noted, is also a form of forgetting. On
this analogy, then, gender is a performance that is both a commemorative
reenactment (of appropriate practices and comportment) and a ritual for-
getting (of unacceptable behavior, desires, and possibilities), a performance that
at once conditions the body’s “reality” and delivers it over to the Lethe
that engulfs it in oblivion. In not dissimilar fashion it might be noted, the
Moroccan protectorate was maintained by performances that, with increas-
ing desperation, simultaneously manufactured memory and induced forget-
ting. As Delanoë contends, under Résident General Alphonse Juin, Morocco
came to resemble a “Society of the Spectacle” in which the French public was
only allowed to witness events and discourses orchestrated by the Residence,
such as the “puppets . . . ordered by their Caids onto the Tizi N’Tretten
plateau for a grandiose ceremony celebrating Juin as hero” or the “theatrical
production” of “ten thousand Berbers united to affirm their solidarity with
le Glaoui and their love for France.”58 In 1951 and 1953, hoping to disguise
the deposition of the sultan as an indigenous uprising, Juin decided to:
have the tribes “descend from the mountains”—an action of course pre-
sented as “spontaneous”—in the hope of comforting Paris in its decisions. As
to the “spontaneity,” it helps to know that no Berber could take off to
“descend the mountain” as was the case in Rabat and Fez in 1951 and 1953
without having previously received, through his Caid and sometimes directly,
an order from the French authorities, much less possess arms without the
authorization of the Administration. Thus the “demonstration” of a whole
people demanding the deposition of the Sultan . . . is in fact nothing but a
manipulation by the French authorities.59
The protectorate is, like Ahmed, “une apparence faite d’oubli”—here a per-
formative “memory” of indigenous support for France that is also a forget-
ting of the increasing power of resistance movements.60
It is hardly surprising that the novel’s meditation on gender should be
expressed through a discourse of lamentation, for lamentation is, in some
sense, always about gender: it thematizes and foregrounds gender difference.
As we have seen, lamentations are almost exclusively assigned to women, sus-
tained by an intricate semantic web associating women with death, and often
a vehicle for expressing women’s experience and concerns. In L’enfant de
sable, women are everywhere associated with mourning; the storyteller
recounts that with the birth of each daughter, “(le) baptême fut une céré-
monie silencieuse et froide, une façon d’installer le deuil dans cette famille
frappée sept fois par le Malheur” (the baptism was a cold and silent ceremony,
a way of installing mourning in this family struck seven times by Misfortune)
(19), and Ahmed’s father affirms of his daughters that “leur naissance a été
pour moi un deuil” (their birth was a sorrow for me) (22). Ahmed does not
fail to recognize that “dans cette famille les femmes s’enroulent dans un
linceul de silence” (in this family the women are wrapped in a shroud of
silence) (53); he names his mother “le martyre d’une époque qui l’a humiliée,
blessée et simplement niée” (the martyr of an era that humiliated, wounded,
and simply negated her) (131). Alleging that she has always known Ahmed’s
“secret,” Fatima says to him, “Nous sommes femmes avant d’être infirmes, ou
peut-être nous sommes infirmes parce que femmes” (We are women because
we are disabled, or maybe we are disabled because we are women) (80). Along
similar lines, Ahmed writes in his/her journal, “Etre femme est une infirmité
naturelle dont tout le monde s’accommode. Etre homme est une illusion et
une violence que tout justifie et privilégie. Etre tout simplement est un défi”
(Being a woman is a natural infirmity that everyone accommodates. Being a
man is an illusion and a violence that everything justifies and privileges.
Simply being is a challenge) (94).61
Ben Jelloun’s narrative, its association of mourning with a particular gen-
der (woman) and with gender itself (as explored through the body of
Ahmed) leads us to a position akin to Butler’s proposition in “Melancholy
Gender,” that gender might be thought “as a kind of melancholy, or as one
of melancholy’s effects,” that “a melancholic identification is central to the
process whereby the ego assumes a gendered character.”62 Butler considers
this melancholic incorporation as transpiring primarily “through prohibitions

which demand the loss of certain sexual attachments, and demand as well that
those losses not be avowed, and not be grieved,”63 but the losses stipulated by
gender, I would argue—and I believe Ben Jelloun demonstrates—are even
more pervasive and diverse, foreclosing, for example, the right to bodily
pleasure or full societal participation (in certain versions of femininity), the
expression of pain or grief (in many constructions of masculinity), or engage-
ment in certain kinds of labor, pursuits, interests, or behavior.
If the storyteller’s language prompts us to read the novel—and Ahmed’s
body—in terms of lamentation, so too does the fact that Ahmed’s self-
expressions so often rely on mortuary images. In the journal (ostensibly con-
ferred to the storyteller at Ahmed’s death), Ahmed writes of “mon petit
cimetière intérieur” (my little interior cemetery) (44), of the mirror as “le
chemin par lequel mon corps . . . s’écrase dans la terre, creuse une tombe pro-
visoire” (the path by which my body crushes itself in the earth, carves out a
provisional tomb) (44), and of the family home as “une ruine dissimulant une
fosse commune” (a ruin disguising a mass grave) (44–45). Ahmed’s troubled
body, which functions as a metaphor for the body politic, is also repeatedly
described in terms of the incomprehensibility of death, as an illegible mate-
riality that, in numerous ways, recalls the language and moment of lamen-
tation. His/her deathly strangeness is figurally imbricated, morever, with
the novel’s recurring—and unsettling—image of a “fosse commune” (mass
grave) that not only evokes a certain political history, but, extending the tri-
angulation between body, nation, and narrative I have sketched above, weaves
a dense semantic association between the unknowability of death and the
plait of uncertainties between Ahmed’s gender, the novel’s narrative, and
Morocco’s future. This text of associations both evinces the society’s pan-
icked dread in the face of ambiguity and draws an analogy between the strug-
gle for narrative power in the novel and the struggle for political and social
authority in Morocco.
Conceived theoretically before being conceived physically (a sequence
that is not without its significance to gender), Ahmed first appears to his
father as death; in a dream, “la mort lui rendit visite. . . . Elle avait le visage
gracieux d’un adolescent. . . . L’adolescent était d’une beauté troublante.
Son visage changeait, il était tantôt celui de ce jeune homme qui venait d’ap-
paraître, tantôt celui d’une jeune femme légère et évanescente” (death paid
him a visit. . . . It had the graceful face of an adolescent. . . . The adolescent
was troublingly beautiful. His face changed, it was now that of a young man
that appeared, now that of a young woman, gentle and evanescent) (20). A
similar dream figure—revenant of a revenant—appears to the blind trouba-
dor in the Alhambra. In search of a woman who, we are led to suspect, might
be Ahmed, the blind troubadour encounters a figure who possesses the voice
of a woman and the body of a man, who engages him in a life and death
struggle reminiscent of the “night of solitude” after death (in which one wres-
tles with Azrain, the angel of questioning) and who, the blind troubadour
concludes, “devait être la mort ou son compagnon” (must have been death
or her companion) (196). What, then, is the significance of the fact that
Ahmed’s father bases him on a vision of death? That Death is a transgendered
figure? These semantic collusions not only suggest that Ahmed’s body, by
virtue of its gender ambiguity, bears the absolute, unthinkable strangeness of
death, that gender ambiguity is as threatening as death itself, but also that the
transgendered body, a form of radical solitude, is the site of an ultimate reck-
oning at once physical and psychical.
The incomprehensibility of Ahmed’s body, its illegible materiality, recalls
a number of our depictions of lamentation: its tentative and interrogative
language, its paradoxes and stunned reiterations of literality, its figures of
impossibility, and its nature as testimony that “cannot be constructed as
knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition.”64 The deathliness that
Ahmed bears, moreover, is both metaphorically and metonymically related to
the unsettling image of the “fosse commune” that reappears throughout the
novel as if an unremarkable detail of setting. From the outset, the storyteller
warns that “cette histoire . . . risque de nous enterrer tous dans le même
cimetière” (threatens to bury us all in the same cemetery) (24), and Ahmed,
as we have seen, describes his home as “une ruine dissimulant une fosse com-
mune” (45). Fatouma muses that it would be “facile de mourir piétinée par
cette foule et d’être ensuite jetée dans la fosse commune quotidienne” (easy
to die trampled by this crowd and then be thrown into the ordinary mass
grave) (164), and the blind troubadour describes rummaging in dictionaries
“pour narguer l’angoisse du temps qui creuse chaque jour un peu plus notre
fosse commune” (to thwart the anguish of time that every day digs out more
of our common grave) (181). But it is with the return of the storyteller (who
has disappeared when young urban developers clean up the public square)
that the image of the “fosse commune” shifts from evoking anonymity and
the dismal fate of the “common people,” to political terror. Pursued by
Death in the guise of Ahmed (as well as by a number of his other characters),
the storyteller falls asleep beneath a tree: “quand je me suis réveillé le lende-
main” (when I awoke the following day) he relates, “je me suis trouvé dans
une cimetière où il y avait une foule de gens en blanc qui enterraient dans une
grande fosse des adolescents sans linceul, nus. J’étais horrifié. Je me suis
approché de la fosse et j’ai cru voir le corps de mon fils” (I found myself
in a cemetery where there was a crowd of people in white who were burying
adolescents in a mass grave without shrouds, naked. I was horrified. I
approached the grave and thought I saw the body of my son) (204–5). If the
storyteller’s dreamlike experience echoes nightmarish realities of 1944 and
the years following, Fatouma’s subsequent rumination on the state of the
country makes the political context even more explicit: “C’est curieux ! Les
gens passent leur vie à encaisser les coups; on les humilie quotidiennement;
ils ne bronchent pas, et puis un jour ils sortent dans les rues et cassent tout.
L’armée intervient et tire sur la foule pour rétablir l’ordre. . . . On creuse une
grande fosse et on y jette les corps. ça devient chronique” (It’s strange!
People go through their life taking blows; they’re humiliated day in and day
out; they don’t flinch, and then one day they go out into the streets and
smash everything. The army comes in and opens fire on the crowd to
reestablish order. . . . A mass grave is dug and the bodies are thrown in. It’s
becoming chronic) (205). This turn in the signification of the “fosse com-
mune” from the common grave of paupers to the mass grave of war, from the
anonymously abject to the horrifying, not only reflects social reactions to
Ahmed’s increasing gender ambiguity, but colonial reactions within
Morocco: the shift from a contemptuous neglect of “the masses” (under
Lyautey) to a deliberate scheme of provocation and repression (under Puaux
and Juin) during which the army opening fire on demonstrating crowds did,
unfortunately, become chronic.
These figures of death and incomprehensibility that, in L’enfant de sable,
stretch across the narrative, gender system, and political context, evince an
intolerant recoil from ambiguity—from, for example, indefinite genders, nar-
rative irresolution, and national indeterminateness—that, I would argue,
impedes the work of (bodily, discursive, or political) decolonization. In addi-
tion to the daily distresses produced by “le regard inquiet” (worried look)
(115) of strangers, and by those “qui n’avaient cessé de le poursuivre de leur
curiosité, de leur méfiance et même d’une haine tenace” (who hadn’t ceased to
pursue him with their curiosity, suspicion and even tenacious hatred) (7), two
incidents, in particular, illustrate the horror, dread, and violence with which
society reacts to Ahmed’s gender “confusion.” Venturing out from the upstairs
room where s/he has long been enclosed, Ahmed initially encounters:
une vieille femme, mendiante ou sorcière . . . (qui) me barrait le passage. . . .

Ainsi, dans ses premiers pas sans masque, mon corps qui se voulait anonyme et
quelconque sous la djellaba affrontait l’épreuve matinale face à un visage bur-
iné et intransigeant.
La question fut incisive:
—Qui est-tu?
J’aurais pu répondre à toutes les questions, inventer, imaginer mille réponses,
mais c’était là la seule, l’unique question qui me bouleversait et me rendait lit-
téralement muette. . . . La question revint avec le même ton autoritaire:
—Que caches-tu sous ta djellaba, un homme ou une femme, un enfant ou
un vieillard, une colombe ou une ariagnée? Réponds, sinon tu ne sortiras pas de
cette rue, d’ailleurs ce n’est pas une rue mais une impasse; j’en détiens les clés
et je filtre l’air et la lumière qui la traversent. . . .
Comme j’hésitai, elle se précipta sur moi et, de ses mains fortes, déchira ma
djellaba, puis ma chemise. Apparurent alors mes deux petits seins.
(an old woman, a beggar or a witch, who blocked my way. . . . Thus, in its first
steps without a mask, my body that wanted to be anonymous and ordinary
beneath its djellaba confronted a morning ordeal in the craggy and intran-
sigeant face of this old woman.
The question was piercing:
—Who are you?
I could have responded to any question, invented or imagined a thousand

replies, but this was the one, sole question that threw me into utter confusion
and rendered me literally speechless. . . . The question came back with the same
authoritarian tone:
—What are you hiding under your djellaba, a man or a woman, a child or an
old person, a dove or a spider? Answer! If you don’t, you won’t get out of this
street which isn’t a street anyway, but a dead end; I hold the keys to it and fil-
ter the air and light that enter it. . . .
As I hesitated, she threw herself on me and, with her strong hands, tore off
my djellaba and then my underslip. Then my two small breasts appeared.)
(112–14)
An image of the grotesque intransigence with which society demands gender

clarity, this scene of confrontation and coerced exposure illustrates the
imperative of maintaining the mask of a determinate gender, an identity leg-
ible within the gender system. To resist this legibility is to be hermeneuti-
cally and socially scandalous, merely (and defilingly) material, to be suspected
of not being human at all (a bird or a spider), to be threatened with obstruc-
tion or even extinction. In even more violent fashion, the circus-mistress
Oum Abbas traps Ahmed in a dark alley and forces her fingers painfully
into Ahmed’s vagina. “J’avais un doute” (I had my doubts), she says, stifling
Ahmed’s screams. Although this dubiousness renders Ahmed largely offen-
sive elsewhere, Oum Abbas is more than happy to capitalize on it in the cir-
cus “où tout baigne dans la derision” (where everything is bathed in
derision) (120), and where Ahmed, not unlike the colonized people exhib-
ited at the Exposition Coloniale, is displayed as a safely caged freak.
Yet if—or perhaps because—Ahmed’s gender ambiguity commonly elicits
contempt, his/her primary act of bodily decolonization is to insist on its
value. To the anonymous correspondent, s/he writes: “Si j’ai accepté d’en-
tretenir avec vous un dialogue épistolaire, ce n’est pas pour que soit repro-
duite la morale sociale. La grande, l’immense épreuve que je vis n’a de sens
qu’en dehors de ces petits schemas pscyhologiques qui prétendent savoir
et expliquer pourquoi une femme est une femme et un homme est un
homme” (If I accepted to undertake a dialogue with you in letters, it wasn’t
to reproduce social morality. The great, immense ordeal that I am living has
no sense except outside these little psychological maps that pretend to know
and explain why a woman is a woman and a man is a man) (88–89). This
redrawing of psychological maps, like the reconstruction of imperial maps,
entails acknowledging and engaging a desire that exceeds categories like
masculine and feminine, colonizer and colonized, citizen and foreigner, that
envisions what Marjorie Garber calls “the third,” which is neither a sex nor
a term but “a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibil-
ity,” the sign of a productive “category crisis,”65 and what Ahmed describes
as the “echo d’une pensée pas encore formulée” (echo of an as yet unformu-
lated thought) (95).
This as yet unformulated thought designates not only Ahmed’s gender

and its unheard-of desire(s), but the political structure (and desires) of an
independent Morocco. A dynamic and sometimes precarious alliance between
a conservative monarchy, militant nationalists, religious zealots, radical revo-
lutionaries, and moderate proponents of democracy, Moroccan nationalism
is discursively evoked in the novel’s multiple narrators and their disputes over
who is authorized to speak and, thus, determine the outcome of the narra-
tive. The analog of the power struggle between the novel’s narrators—
who variously base their authority on seniority, personal relation, a privileged
subject position, textual veracity, experience, and logical development—is
the field of competing claims brought into dialogue and dispute in pre-
independence Morocco between an educated elite, an urban middle class, an
expanding and increasingly unionized working class, and an illiterate rural
peasantry. The conflicting and ambiguous field of desires and interests called
Moroccan nationalism was, in essence, a discursive and ideological struggle
over the identity of the nation—over how to integrate the sultanate with
democratic representation, how to transform the traditional system of caïds
into a centralized nation-state, what to do with both French colons and
business interests (which dominated the economy), and where exactly the
geographical boundaries of the nation were to be drawn.66 National inde-
pendence could hardly be a more ambiguous plot; nationalism could hardly
be a more “confused” desire.
Now from the standpoint of the colonizers, such ambiguity—which irre-
ducibly structures democracy taken in its literal sense—is a scandalous dis-
order, chaos, as unthinkable a possibility in the political order as Ahmed’s
gender identity is in the social order. The Moroccan protectorate had from
the beginning been subtended by a rhetoric of establishing regularity and
order—the Treaty of Fez insisted that it was “establishing in Morocco a reg-
ular regime founded on interior order and general security”67—and Lyautey
conceived this imperative of order as in explicit opposition to revolution,
democracy, and modernity: “Now, I will always be for order, wherever I
find it, even in our adversaries, against disorder and Revolution, wherever
I find it, even among our friends . . . I affirm with a growing conviction that
our strength and future in Morocco rests on a conservative, traditional, and
hierarchical politics, and not on a democratic and modernistic evolution,
quite the contrary.”68 By the later years of the protectorate, “maintaining
public order” had become the routine justification for crushing protest, dis-
sent, or national aspiration, evinced, for example, by the fact that the dead,
wounded, and incarcerated in the demonstrations of 1944 were, according
to French authorities, “necessitated by the imperative of maintaining order,”69
or by Juin’s ultimatum to the sultan: “If you do not immediately abdicate of
your own accord, I am charged with removing you from the country in order
to maintain public order.”70
Both Ahmed’s gender confusion and Morocco’s perceived political con-
fusion are, moreover, regulated through the body; indeed the body is as
crucial a signifier in the political sytem as it is in the gender system. Bouabid
(nationalist leader and signatory of the Manifeste) records the following

scene of his arrest and arrival at the commissariat in January 1944:
Nearly thirty other friends were already there, standing, completely undressed,
for the routine search, it was said. I was given the order to get naked like a
worm, as the others had done. Jeers and other vulgarities.
There, several meters away, the French population of Salé, men, women, and
children, were offered the spectacle of our humiliation. Some cheered sadisti-
cally. Hadn’t they, thanks to Leclerc’s soliders, escaped massacre, rape, multila-
tion, and pillage? An overexcited woman, owner of a café, declared: “Shoot
them all here, right in front of us!”71
This spectacle of naked Moroccan bodies, made to signify a wormlike humil-

iation and vulnerability, restricted in movement and threatened with destruc-
tion, contrasted with the well-protected French bodies secure from death,
rape, mutiliation, and discomfort, could hardly make more apparent the way
that colonial relations, like gender relations, are written on the body.
Enveloped in a language of lamentation, Ben Jelloun’s provocation to
consider gender as a colonization of the body beckons us into a dense thicket
of questions. The three broad branches of this thicket I have attempted to
follow here are a theoretical interrogation of this proposition through post-
colonial and gender studies, a historicized analysis of it from the site of the
Moroccan protectorate, and a reconsideration of it through the lens of lamen-
tation. The first branch of inquiry led us to a critique of the language of nat-
ural development common to both gender and colonization, as well as to an
examination of its processes of abjection, reliance on a taxonomy of distinct
genres, self-engendering capacities, and dependence on manner, style, and
ornamentation. My second branch of inquiry into the historical and political
specificites of Moroccan colonization disclosed some significant nuances in
the way the gender system operates: as a protective envelope from its own dis-
ciplinary effects, a safeguard from uncertainty, an inculcation of desire sub-
tended by violence, and as a structure of difference intolerant to differences.
The final branch of this thicket in which we have entangled ourselves
leads back to the lamentation. From the opening paragaraph, as I have
shown, the novel embeds its exploration of gender and colonization in the
language of lamentation, representing the body as crisis, describing it in
deathly terms, and portraying gender as a form of estrangement and uncer-
tainty. Associating mourning with both a specific gender (women) and gen-
der itself, the novel evinces the way in which gender and colonization both
function through a performative spectacle that, like the lamentation, is a
reproduction of forgetting as much as of memory. We have also found that,
in L’enfant de sable, both the body and the body politic are represented as a
significant but incomprehensible materiality, one that figurally overlaps with
lamentation in its mortuary images, interrogative propensities, indistinc-
tion, and defiance of impossibility. This examination of incomprehensibility
led us to a recognition of society’s intolerance of ambiguity, perceived as a
defiling and threatening disorder, regulated, sometimes violently, through

the body. But such ambiguity (like that generated by the structure of Ben
Jelloun’s novel) may be necessary, I suggested, for decolonization of both
body and nation.
L’enfant de sable thus stages a crisis in two crucial articulations of late
modernity—gender and colonization. If gender is customarily the kind of
sustained trauma left unlamented and unacknowledged, Ben Jelloun’s
lament for the body colonized by gender is one that aims to resposses both
the body and the body politic, to perform a new form of (sexual and politi-
cal) desire—a project that, like all lamentations, threatens to disrupt social
discipline as well as reason itself.

Epilogue
L et us return, briefly, to where we began: with descriptions of modernity as

an epochal transformation, a moment of traumatic loss, epistemological
upheaval, cognitive disorientation, and the radically new. What is at stake in
this language? What roles does it play in shaping modernity? What interests
does it serve? Inquiring into modernity’s languages of loss, it becomes quickly
evident that loss itself is a troubled and troubling phenomenon; it is unob-
servable, bears multiple and fluid meanings, varies in both degree and kind,
and is deployed for diverse and often contradictory ends. It may be used to
describe experience as incommensurate as that of the war widow, the
estranged worker, the political exile, the colonized subject, the gender non-
comformist, or the alienated poet. It may mark the loss of racial privilege,
national prominence, or personal prestige. Some of these losses are, of
course, more celebrated aspects of modernity than others, and the dis-
courses of lamentation we have been scrutinizing are centrally involved in
determining what varieties of loss are foregrounded in modernity, what kind
of suffering is legitimated, and what qualifies as “normal,” “pathological,”
“modern,” or “backward.” We have also noted that loss can be positively val-
ued: in the cathartic treatments of trauma, for example, or in the removal of
artifice, the regression to a more innocent or authentic time, or the construc-
tion of newness, purity, or truth.
I have taken the route of investigating modernity’s languages of loss
through the tradition of women’s lamentations. Conceiving of lamentation
as a mode—a kind of language with a specific history and conventions, but
susceptible to appropriation by other discourses—we have found the lan-
guage of lamentation to be highly adaptable, and its rich store of devices
widely distributed in discourses of modernity. A ritual performance as much
about producing grief as expressing it, lamentations reinforce, elaborate, and
172 EPILOGUE
may even fabricate a sense of loss or crisis. While regularly disciplined by

states, religious institutions, and modernity itself, the mode of lamentation, I
have endeavored to demonstrate, has played an influential role in both con-
structing and contesting modernity.
Exploring a number of ways such language has been deployed in specific
sites of late modernity, I have argued for ten primary functions of lamenta-
tion. We have found that lamentations regularly serve to establish an event of
loss, to formulate inchoate circumstances into a graspable event, and to mark
those circumstances as meriting recognition, mourning, or restitution. Such
a language is also necessary for establishing what precisely has been lost, as
well as the significance and value of the lost object. The lamentation’s com-
bination of improvised and formulaic idioms, that incorporate an incommen-
surate event into a structure of repetition, establish a traumatic event within
iterable history. Its invocations summon witnesses, appeal to social obliga-
tions, and make suffering public. We have seen, for example, the ways in
which the incipient Greek nation formulated the sustained losses suffered
under Ottoman rule into a demand for independent nationhood and memo-
rialized the deaths of Rigas, Grigorious V, and Byron to rally international
support, or the ways in which Faulkner’s narrators, like New South spokes-
men, relentlessly commemorate the passing of the “Old South.” But we have
also recognized that numerous kinds of losses—the economic and cultural
losses inflicted by colonization, Black Americans’ sustained deprivation of
selfhood, dignity, and property, losses sublimated in “exchange” for national
belonging, or the losses demanded and “naturalized” by gender conform-
ity—may be disregarded circumstances of the everyday: unmarked as loss or
as subject to mourning. Certain modernist texts perform laments for just
such disregarded losses, as does Hatzis’s requiem for communist resistance
fighters expunged from Greek national memory, or Ben Jelloun’s lament for
the body colonized by gender.
Lamentations also function in discourses of modernity as a form of retro-
active possession: language about loss lays claim to a prior possession. While
the rhetoric of possession in the lamentation is nearly always paradoxical—
grammatically asserting possession of what is semantically declared lost—it
nonetheless lays claim to rightful and proper possession of both material and
ideological forms of property. Because the possessions to which the lamenta-
tion lays claim are lost, it also has the capacity to construct possessions that
never existed, like the “Old South” imagined by New South entrepreneurs or
the undiluted Hellenic heritage “recovered” by modern Greek nationalists.
We have further recognized, via Faulkner, that ideological and material
property are often related, that possessions function as signs, and that such
sign systems serve to protect property and privilege. Indeed, disrupting
such sign systems may well take a catastrophe. The gestures of lamentation,
recording and constructing such a moment of catastrophe, may thus be
instrumental in effecting a redistribution of possessions—in laying claim, for
Epilogue 173
example, to the geographical territory of a homeland or the cultural and polit-

ical terrain of modernity.
The gestures of lamentation institute a logic of loss and continuity.
Sustained by illocutionary ambivalence, addresses to the dead, the disjunctive
nature of privatives, traumatic and obsessive repetitions of the past, and a
melancholic attachment to a lost object, this logic governs the cognitive
splitting of traumatic experience as much as the “remade property” that
characterizes the moment of lamentation: beings are there but not there, I
am me but not me, things are themselves but not themselves. This contradic-
tory logic has, as we have seen, conditioned various ill-fitting and fantastic
identities in modernity, like those of freedpeople in the New South or of sub-
jects caught in the Manichean mechanism of colonization. Such a logic also
allows for a simultaneous loyalty to, and negation of, an idea, identity, or
object and makes it possible rhetorically to substitute continuity for transfor-
mation or, conversely, disguise radical change as continuity. The former we
have seen in the New South’s maintenance of antebellum social relations
and its exclusion of freedpeople and poor whites from the South’s new
industries. The latter we have witnessed in the Moroccan protectorate, where
the sultanate was retained as a vestige of “Moroccan culture,” disguising the
country’s actual loss of sovereignty.
The appearance of lamentation in modernity might also be described as a
return of the repressed: of the anger and disorder repressed by political sys-
tems and law; of the irrational, material, and hyperessential repressed by phi-
losophy; of the semiotic repressed by the Symbolic; of a femininity repressed
by patriarchy; or of pagan rituals repressed by institutionalized religion.
Aesthetic modernism—through, for example, its shifting perspectives, illogi-
cal structures, and disordered forms, its privileging of material manipulation
over semantic coherence, its affinity for “primitivism,” and its explorations of
the unconscious—reintegrated into modernity aspects of experience and
thought that had been repressed by an earlier modernity’s insistence on
instrumental reason, autonomous and rational subjects, temporal progress,
disciplined and coherently classified bodies, and distinct, ordered thought. A
similar recrudescence of the repressed became manifest in the form of anti-
colonial movements that, from the perspective of much of Europe, appeared
as an angry disruption in the order of things, a return of the primitive and
irrational, a vulgar insistence on materiality, and an obscene exposure of
processes of production customarily camouflaged by bourgeois fetishism. In
both instances, these movements, appropriating gestures of lamentation,
were interpreted from one perspective as a frightening triumph of barbarity
and the absurd, but from another as libratory, a site of possibility—a signifi-
cant critique of, and corrective to, a repressive modernity.
The symptomatic eruption of modernity’s repressions might also be
traced through descriptions of trauma as a disorganization of cognitive and
linguistic faculties, as feminine weakness, or as regression to an infantile posi-
tion; in modernity’s moods of melancholy and anxiety, or its outbursts of
174 EPILOGUE
anger; through a philosopher like Nietzsche who grants significance to

uncertainty and untruth, critiques the suppression of affect, and pursues a
method (genealogy) that unearths what moral philosophy has buried; in
a thinker like Derrida who stages the return of the signifier and its (artificial,
supplemental, and foreign) materiality into the logocentric tradition that has
repressed it; or through a poet like Mallarmé who cultivates the material,
courts indistinction, and pursues a significance ulterior to logic.
Lamentations further function as a sign for newness and, insofar as moder-
nity is conceived as a rupture with the past, such a language is clearly instru-
mental in effecting (a sense of) such rupture and making things (seem) new.
The experience of constant revolutionizing through which Marx describes
modernity can also, I have argued, be fabricated through a language that per-
formatively reenacts loss. Indeed, we have seen in a number of instances that
the powerful performativity of lament practice, which signals a rupture in
time and a re-originating of the world, may function to indicate newness
whether or not it actually exists. This production of newness through rhetor-
ical destruction we have witnessed in Faulknerian narrators’ habitual “not . . .
but” sequence, for example, and in Mallarmé’s orchestration of a semantic
and syntactic crisis to elicit “un mot neuf.”
In similar fashion, and because purity is produced by loss or elimination,
lamentation functions as a sign of purity. But lamentation is also, ironically, a
scene of defilement: of trauma, dead bodies, material waste, anastasoi, con-
fusion. This apparent contradiction becomes comprehensible, however,
when we recognize, as Mallarmé and other theorists of purity show us, that
the passage through defilement—through deathliness, waste, disorder—may
be necessary to producing purity. This simultaneous dependence and oppo-
sition between purity and defilement perhaps begins to explain why trauma,
in certain theoretical formulations, is considered a form of deleterious excess
that must be undone by catharsis, and in others as erecting a citadel of
purity—a melancholic sacrality inaccessible to signification or a literality invi-
olable by interpretation or analysis. The lamentation’s processes of purifica-
tion, as we have seen, are employed in modernity toward various ends: in
Mallarmé, to resist assimilation, produce cultural distinction, and lay claim,
on behalf of both France and poetry, to aesthetic dominance; in Greece, to
construct a distinct and undiluted national character devoid of cultural,
linguistic, or architectural adulterations; or, in Ben Jelloun’s depiction, to
produce gender through a socially regulated taxonomy that disciplines and
purges ambiguity.
Lamentations also construct desire: for a lost object, for meaning or jus-
tice, or for a less aversive future, for example. Expressed in its ambivalent
rhetoric of possession, intensified and spread through its moods, the desire
created by lamentations has proven useful to women, philosophers, reformists,
colonizers, and nationalists. We have seen, for example, the way in which
Nietzsche spurs desire for writing new values on new tablets by portraying
the present as lost; the way in which “New South” advocates deployed the
Epilogue 175
imagery and negativity of lamentations to construct desire for commodities,

industrial development, and social change; the way in which Greek national-
ists portrayed the past as a lost object, prompting desire for a resuscitated
Hellenic identity, independence, and a national territory; and the way in
which Lyautey, in Morocco, aspired to colonial domination through the
cultivation of desire. We have also seen that the desire expressed by lamen-
tations may be creatively and productively ambiguous, as is Ahmed’s desire
for bodily liberation and Moroccans’ desire for independent nationhood.
The mode of lamentation further functions in modernity to disorder the
symbolic, resist logical resolution, and disrupt social discipline. In modernist
literary texts, these endeavors are often related: language as a symbolic sys-
tem is disarticulated precisely with the aim of resisting logical resolution, and
often with the hope of creating social change. Reenacting the disorganiza-
tion of speech and understanding, resistance to interpretation, and regres-
sion to an infantile state characteristic of trauma, as well as the inability to
concatenate that typifies melancholy, lamentation inhabits the border
between the articulate and unspeakable. Cultivating conventions that undo
the symbolic nature of language, resist indication, embrace incomprehensi-
bility, and welter in the tentative and interrogative, lamentations distinguish
themselves from other mortuary forms (such as the elegy) that resolve, and
offer consolation for, death and that tender compensation in the form of
public memory, artistic immortality, or national glory. This disarticulation
of the symbolic, and the strange usefulness of alexithymia, we have witnessed
at multiple junctures in modernity: in New South spokesmen’s disordering
of ideas, ideals, and identities in the interest of resignifying the South; in
Mallarmé’s poetic transformation of grammaire to grimoire, which disturbs
the literal meaning of words and constructs syntactic and semantic ambigu-
ity; and in Hatzis’s narrative of the death of the Singrafeas—of the transcen-
dental signifier, the center that synthesizes and subsumes—to stage a crisis in
the significatory substitutions through which the nation reproduces itself.
In many instances, this disarticulation is also a resistance to logical reso-
lution, a direct affront to the Enlightenment’s valorization of reason, nor-
malizing judgments, and dreams of mastery. This is why Nietzsche loves
catastrophe, because in it he finds a perpetual overcoming of logic, an
indispensable and significant uncertainty, and an exhilaratingly dangerous
“perhaps.” The language of lamentation, drawing on pre-philosophical
traditions, associated with the feminine, hysterical, irrational, and quasi-
magical, imbued by the incomprehensibility of death and potent moods that
escape reflection, is not only crucial to representations of central aspects
of late modernity—anomie, anxiety, subversion of mastery, the critique of
instrumental reason—but useful for liberating thought from the constraints
of metaphysics and exploring modes of experience and significance that do
not submit to logic. We have seen this aspect of the lamentation at work in
Faulkner’s incessant epistemological losses, his paradoxes, and his privative
devices that obsessively unmake knowledge; in Mallarmé’s cultivation of the
176 EPILOGUE
semantically foreign, confused, and anomalous, his collaboration with an

obstinately obscure materiality, and his construction of a significant incom-
prehensibility; and in the testimonies gathered by Hatzis’s Singrafeas that
won’t translate into a coherent national identity and that ultimately confront
idealist philosophy—in the form of the “sovereign people”—with the mate-
rial peoples that defy conformity to it.
The mode of lamentation, associated with social indiscipline—with disrup-
tive and unruly bodies, with the primitive, feminine, barbarian, Oriental,
hysteric, and infantile, and with the social unreliability of traumatized sub-
jects—has proven threatening as much to modern disciplinary societies as to
pre-modern hierarchical ones. This threat is evinced in the history of laws
prohibiting lament practices, as well as in their domestication by states and
religions, and their marginalization within modernity. The disruption of social
order performed by lamentations we have witnessed in the form of “shell-
shocked” soldiers (whose trauma, in the early twentieth century, was treated
with increased mental regulation and bodily discipline), in the “redemption”
of Southern states from Reconstruction, in the traumatic body of Ahmed
that elicits violence (and, for at least one narrator, represents a generalized
social disintegration), and in resistance to colonial order represented as a
menacing indiscipline, chaos, and barbarity.
Finally, lamentation ratifies discourse with the affective potency of death,
with the impact of traumatic wounding, and the inviolable intensity of grief.
To critique such a language, even to interpret it, might be a betrayal, would
certainly be improper, if not absolutely unethical. To interrupt it might elicit
an otherworldly rage and this threat provides a formidable protective shield.
The moods that mingle in lamentation, moreover—melancholy, anger,
dread—resist reflection; they are aggressive, threatening, and infectious. It is
advisable to flee from them before one is either swallowed up or becomes
their object. Such moods function in diversely powerful ways in modernity:
we have seen, for example, how nationalists sanctify their projects through
the horror of death; how social reformers and colonialists deploy melancholy
to effect redistributions of property; how societies unleash anger to discipline
bodies, their “race,” and gender; and how modernist texts construct a disori-
enting dread to perform cultural distinction, invalidate knowledge and histo-
ries, and open up (social, political, or bodily) possibilities.
The temporally and spatially dispersed fragments of modernity I have
explored in this book, then, illustrate the diverse ways the mode of lamenta-
tion functions in modernity: to mark an event as loss, lay claim to posses-
sion(s), deploy a contradictory logic of loss and continuity, invoke the
repressed, signal newness or purity, construct desire, disorder the symbolic,
resist logical resolution, disrupt social discipline, or infuse discourse with a
compelling mood. These conclusions, drawn inductively from my case stud-
ies, need to be investigated in other texts and contexts, and to be corrected,
expanded, and refined by them. But the evidence that has led to these con-
clusions leaves little doubt that the mode of lamentation is a significant and
consequential thread in the fabric of modernity.
N ot e s
Preface
1. Albeit in varied and nuanced ways, numerous works of the last decades interpret
modern texts as records of loss or crisis. See Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism:
Politics, Fiction, and the Arts Between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999); Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy
from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Richard
Stamelman, Lost Beyond Telling: Representations of Death and Absence in Modern
French Poetry (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Ronald Schliefer,
The Rhetoric of Death: The Language of Modernism and Postmodern Discourse
Theory (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); Peter Homans, The Ability
to Mourn: Disillusionment and the Social Origins of Psychoanalysis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989); Perry Meisel, The Myth of the Modern (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987); Stephen Dowden, Sympathy for the
Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986);
and Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
2. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 2. See also Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1994).
3. Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1984), 25, 36.
4. This nexus of meanings descends from Latin proprius (one’s own, special, par-
ticular, characteristic, what is lasting or permanent) and encompasses identity,
propriety, purity, literality, and property. I demonstrate how these nuances neg-
atively delimit foreignness in The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary
Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), chaps. 1, 3, and 7.
Chapter 1: Heavy Losses

1. Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in
Contemporary Social and Political Thought (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre
Dame Press, 1997).
2. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,
Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 41.
3. I am not particularly interested in combating “postmodernism” as a critical term
but rather in resisting the ways in which it homogenizes modernity and authen-
ticates Western imperialist culture as modernity. Frederic Jameson, for example,
178 N ot e s to C h a p t e r 1
depicting postmodernity as “the cultural logic of late capitalism,” astutely

describes this period from the perspective of contemporary Western culture
but tends to disregard those cultural productions systematically repressed by
transnational capitalism and relegate to belatedness and inauthenticity contem-
porary (or post-war) works that employ “modernist” techniques. See Fredric
Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1991). David Harvey’s reliance on a residual cate-
gory that conflates the “Enlightenment” and “modernism” is hard to reconcile
with much of the artistic emphasis of late modernity. His depiction of mod-
ernism, largely derived from analysis of urban space and the built environment,
cannot be simply transported from architecture to literature, the visual arts, or
performance, and indeed largely represents what aesthetic modernism reacted
against. See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into
the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). For similar
critiques of the term “postmodern,” see François Lyotard, La Condition post-
moderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979); Yack, Fetishism of Modernities, 4; Rita Felski,
The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995),
8ff; and Agnes Heller, A Theory of Modernity (London: Blackwell, 1999), 4.
On the difficulties of defining modernity, see also Susan Stanford Friedman,
“Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/Modernity/Modernism,”
Modernism/Modernity 8, no. 3 (2001): 493–513.
4. See Hall’s deft synopsis of this position in Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert,
and Kenneth Thompson, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies (London:
Blackwell, 1996), 8. See also ibid., 426–28; and Felski, The Gender of Modernity,
12–14.
5. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan
Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1977), 178, 210.
6. Anthony Giddens, Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1991), 18–19.
7. Ibid., 21.
8. Hall et al., Modernity: An Introduction, 4.
9. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 192.
10. Ibid., 192, 223.
11. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 38.
12. Ibid., 40.
13. Ibid., 3.
15. On the roots of this conception of the subject, see ibid., 603.
16. Virginia Woolf, “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown,” in The Captain’s Death Bed
and Other Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1950), 96.
17. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 4.
18. Ibid., 2.
19. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin,
1967), 83.
20. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959), 72–73.
21. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New
York: Norton, 1961), 38.
22. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 113, 100.
N ot e s to C h a p t e r 1 179
23. Ibid., 244. This sequestration, it should be noted, is far more characteristic of
Western societies than of the rest of the world.
24. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 174.
25. Qtd. Karl Löwith, “European Nihilism: Reflections on the Spiritual and Historical
Background of the European War,” in Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism,
ed. Richard Wolin, trans. Gary Steiner (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), 191.
26. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, “Manifesto of Futurism,” in The Modern Trad-
ition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, ed. Richard Ellmann and Charles
Feidelson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 433.
27. Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1982), 33–34.
28. Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1990), 47.
29. Taylor associates the acultural theory of modernity with an ideology of loss and
as echoing the conflicting value judgments of modernity we have just evoked.
See Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” Public Culture 27 (1999):
154–55.
30. Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African
Diaspora,” Public Culture 27 (1999): 252. On the temporal disparities of moder-
nity, see also James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988); Walter Mignolo, “Globalization, Civilization, and Languages,” in The
Cultures of Globalization, ed. Fredric Jameson and Masao Miyoshi (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Andreas Huyssen, “Present Pasts: Media,
Politics, Amnesia,” in Globalization, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2001), 58; Saskia Sassen, “Spatialities and Temporalities of the
Global: Elements for a Theorization,” in Globalization, 267; and Rebecca
Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue
(Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), chap. 4.
31. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Camb-
ridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44.
33. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, Modernism: A Guide to European
Literature 1890–1920 (New York: Penguin, 1978), 27. For more recent theo-
rizations of modernism within the same vein, see Stephen Dowden, Sympathy
for the Abyss: A Study in the Novel of German Modernism (Tübingen: Niemeyer,
1986); Art Berman, Preface to Modernism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1994); Astradur Eysteinsson, The Concept of Modernism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1990); Thomas Vargish and Delo Mook, Inside Modernism:
Relativity Theory, Cubism, Narrative (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1999); and David Ellison, Ethics and Aesthetics in European Modernist Literature:
From the Sublime to the Uncanny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001). On other aspects of modernism, see also Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism:
Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the World Wars (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1999); Ricardo J. Quinones, Mapping Literary Modernism:
Time and Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Perry
Meisel, The Myth of the Modern (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987);
David Hayman, Re-Forming the Narrative: Toward a Mechanics of Modernist

Fiction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); Peter Childs, Modernism
(New York: Routledge, 2000); and Tim Armstrong, Modernism: A Cultural
History (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
34. Berman, Preface to Modernism, viii.
35. Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, 10.
36. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2001), 45–46. LaCapra further aligns absence (on the
one hand) with structural trauma and the transhistorical, and loss (on the other
hand) with historical trauma and the historical itself. LaCapra’s argument, here
and elsewhere, is particularly significant for its elaboration of “a nonreductive,
sociopolitically and critically inflected notion of working-through” (LaCapra,
History in Transit: Experience, Identity, Critical Theory [Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 2004], 11) that develops the implications of working-through
for history, historiography, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, and functions as
an important corrective to certain “insufficiently qualified valorization[s] of
trauma, the traumatic sublime, symptomatic acting-out, melancholia, the repe-
tition compulsion, and endless aporias” (History in Transit, 142). See Writing
History, Writing Trauma, 65–76, 141–53; and History in Transit, 92–105 and
chap. 3.
37. On negativity, see Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Languages of the
Unsayable: the Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989); Giorgio Agamben, Language and Death:
The Place of Negativity, trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Slavoj Z̆iz̆ek, Tarrying with
the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1993); Simon Critchley, Very Little. . .Almost Nothing: Death,
Philosophy, Literature (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Diana Coole,
Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism
(New York: Routledge, 2000). On memory, see Dominick LaCapra, History and
Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Paul Antze
and Michael Lambek, eds., Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory
(New York: Routledge, 1996). On mourning and melancholy, see Julia Kristeva,
Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1989); Henry Staten, Eros in Mourning: Homer to
Lacan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); and William Watkin,
On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 2004). On disaster, see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the
Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986).
38. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, 46.
39. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 4.
40. Qtd. ibid., 88.
41. Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992),
21. See also D. Adrian and L. R. Yealland, “Treatment of Some Common War
Neuroses,” Lancet 1 (June 9, 1917): 867–72.
42. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 219.
43. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 26.
44. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 2. See also Abram Kardiner, The Traumatic
Neuroses of War (New York: P. B. Hoeber, 1941).
45. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed.
(Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 467. On PTSD, see
also Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 35ff.; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience:
Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1996), 57–58; and Kai Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” in Trauma:
Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1995), 183–86.
46. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 32.
47. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New
York: Grove, 1963), 249–50.
48. Ibid., 251.
49. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Constance Farrington (New York:
Grove, 1991), 60.
50. Ibid., 110–12. Fanon’s quotations in this passage are from Jean Lhermitte,
“L’Image de notre corps,” Nouvelle revue critique (1939): 17.
51. Ibid., 10–11.
52. Ibid., 105.
53. Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 309.
54. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 143.
55. Ibid., 149.
56. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 251.
57. It is only very recently that trauma studies in the academy have begun to focus
on the specificities of trauma in “non-Western” contexts. See, for example,
Antonius C. G. M. Robben and Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Cultures under
Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000); Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, Acts of Memory: Cultural
Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999);
Kim Lacy Rogers, Selma Leydesdorff, and Graham Dawson, Trauma and Life
Stories: International Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Rebecca
Saunders and Kamran Aghaie, eds., “Mourning and Memory,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005).
58. Ron Eyerman, Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1.
59. Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr
Sztompka, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), 21.
60. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223. Herman, Erikson, and Henry Krystal all
emphasize the social isolation of trauma victims. See Herman, Trauma and
Recovery, 115; Erikson, “Notes on Trauma and Community,” 186; and Henry
Krystal, “Trauma and Aging: A Thirty-Year Follow-Up,” in Caruth, ed.,
Trauma: Explorations, 76–99.
61. This “elsewhere” is embedded in the term abreaction, the prefix of which (ab-),
as LaPlanche and Pontalis note, signifies “distance in time, the fact of separation,
diminishment, suppression etc.” J. LaPlanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language
of Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 2.
62. Although Freud abandoned the strictly cathartic cure, it was revived during
World War II by William Sargant in conjunction with narcotherapy. Sargant
conceived abreaction as purely mechanical and dependent on emotional col-

lapse. See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 209ff.
63. Ibid., 86.
64. Ibid., 196.
65. Ibid., 124. On Leys’s reading of Ferenczi, see LaCapra, History in Transit,
89–93.
66. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 187.
67. The term was introduced by Peter Sifneos in 1972. Common in PTSD and reg-
ularly described in terms of a “deficit,” alexithymia entails an inability to cogni-
tively process and express emotion. See Graeme J. Taylor, R. Michael Bagby, and
James D. A. Parker, Disorders of Affect Regulation: Alexithymia in Medical and
Psychiatric Illness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Renỳ J.
Muller, “When a Patient Has No Story to Tell: Alexithymia,” Psychiatric Times
17, no. 7 (July 2000). Available at www.psychiatrictimes.com/p000771.html.
68. Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters
(New York: Norton, 1995), 94.
69. Ibid., 196.
70. On the relation of trauma to deconstruction, see also Dominick LaCapra,
Writing History, Writing Trauma, chap. 1 and 68–70; and History in Transit,
chap. 3.
71. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 4.
72. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 151.
73. Ibid., 5.
74. Ibid., 5. Caruth’s suggestive and often elegant work is, in my view, frustratingly
undercut by theoretical imprecision. As an example, in the sentence just quoted,
she seems to take “absolutely literal” as synonymous with “unassimilable to asso-
ciative chains of meaning,” which it is not. The literal is routinely integrated into
meaning; it is also regularly interpreted, as the history of literary criticism bears
out. It is also not the same thing to say that something can’t be interpreted as to
say that every interpretation involves distortion; indeed the latter assumes that
interpretation is regularly carried out. I also find it difficult to reconcile this insis-
tence on the literal with what Caruth elsewhere identifies as the literary; trauma
produces, she writes, “a language that is always somehow literary: a language that
defies, even as it claims, our understanding . . . a literary dimension that cannot
be reduced to the thematic content of the text” (Unclaimed Experience, 5). This
formulation seems particularly incongruous in a text that draws heavily on de
Man, for whom the literary is precisely the non-literal (i.e., the figural). I am
equally troubled by several other aspects of Caruth’s argument: the way in which
trauma becomes a site protected by absolute purity, a stronghold of the meta-
physics of the proper; her rejection of interpretative and integrative treatments,
the therapeutic efficacy of which many clinicians affirm; her implicit (though not
always consistent) rejection of traumatic symptoms aside from the literal dream
or flashback, which seems not only a dubious avoidance of the problems of con-
densation and displacement but contrary to much clinical evidence; and her
implicit rejection of sociocultural features in the way trauma is interpreted and
experienced—of, as Leys puts it, “subjective meaning, personal cognitive
schemes, psychosocial factors, or unconscious symbolic elaboration” (42). For a
detailed critique of the scientific evidence underpinning Caruth’s literality the-
ory and her interpretation of Freud, see Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 254ff.,
270–83. For further discussion of Caruth’s work, see LaCapra, Writing History,
Writing Trauma, 107–9n20, 181–84; and History in Transit, 119–24.
75. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.
76. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 6. See also LaCapra’s important analaysis of the
relation of traumatic memory to history in Writing History, Writing Trauma,
x–xii, chaps. 1 and 3; and History in Transit, Introduction and chap. 1. Also rel-
evant is LaCapra’s distinction between traumatic event and experience. See e.g.,
Writing History, Writing Trauma, 89ff.; and History in Transit, 55–56.
78. Ibid., 103.
79. Both Leys and Caruth stop short of reproaching Freud for this reversal, but fem-
inist therapists such as Judith Herman and Laura Brown are less indulgent. “Out
of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria,” writes Herman, “Freud created
psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of the next century was
founded on the denial of women’s reality” (Trauma and Recovery, 14). Brown
describes Freud’s terms as a “betray[al of] the truth of what we know of the
immediacy and frequency of traumatic events in daily life.” Laura S. Brown, “Not
Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Cathy
Caruth, ed. Trauma: Explorations, 110.
81. On work with the German Restitution Authorities, see Krystal, “Trauma and
Aging,” 89ff. On political gains conferred by a “victim identity,” see Antze and
Lambek, Tense Past. On “trauma envy” that, in the context of identity politics,
seeks a legitimating wound as guarantor of moral authority, see John Mowitt,
“Trauma Envy,” Cultural Critique 46 (Fall 2000): 272–97.
82. See Elizabeth Loftus and Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory:
False Memories and Allegations of Sexual Abuse (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996);
and Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 245–47.
83. Qtd. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 204. See also Dominick LaCapra, History
and Memory after Auschwitz, chap. 4.
84. Caruth, Trauma: Explorations, 153–54.
85. Caruth occasionally falls into an unnuanced version of deconstruction that replaces
critique of a categorical statement (“translation cannot be perfectly faithful”)
with another categorical statement (“all translation is betrayal”).
86. On the metaphysics of the proper, and the family of meanings inhabiting the
Latin root proprius, see my discussion of Derrida below and in Concept of the
Foreign, chap. 3.
88. Ibid., 152.
89. See Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy; Herman, Trauma and Recovery; and Bessel A.
Van der Kolk and Onno Van Der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of
Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Cathy Caruth, ed. Trauma:
Explorations, 158–82. See also E. Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver,
“Getting ‘Stuck’ in the Past: Temporal Orientation and Coping with Trauma,”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, no. 5 (1998): 1146–63.
90. Ferenczi (in Leys’s words) also “pictured the individual shattered by trauma as
dissociated into two distinct psychical systems, a subjective emotional system
which feels the emotions of a trauma that it cannot represent, and an objective
intellectual system which perceives a trauma that it cannot feel” (Trauma, 131).
91. Qtd. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 239. See also Bessel A. van der Kolk,
Alexander C. McFarlane, and Lars Weisath, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of
Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society (New York: Guilford,
1996); van der Kolk and van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past”; and Leys, Trauma:
A Genealogy, chap. 7.
93. Ibid., 265.
95. For an important critique of the sacralization of trauma, see LaCapra, Writing
History, Writing Trauma, 22–23, 92–95, 190–92; and History in Transit, 11,
120–23, 262ff.
96. While during World War I Freud set out to reconsider his position on infantile
psychosexual drives, many of his disciples treated the symptoms of the war neu-
roses as regression to an earlier, narcissistic stage of libidinal development.
Central to Freud’s thinking on trauma and regression is “Inhibitions, Symptoms
and Anxiety” (1926), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works
of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth
Press, 1953–74). See also Leys’s contextualized analysis of this essay, Trauma:
A Genealogy, 24–34.
98. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans. Joan
Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949): 152–70.
99. Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy, 124–25.
100. Van der Kolk and Van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past,” 172.
102. See Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, chap. 4.
103. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 132.
105. See ibid., 269–70.
106. Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 74, 64.
107. Ibid., 9.
108. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 101.
109. Ibid., 102.
110. Ibid., 103.
111. Ibid., 105.
113. See ibid., 298.
114. See Herman, Trauma and Recovery, 117; and Brown, “Not Outside the
Range,” 107.
115. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 103.
116. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 223.
117. Frederich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for None and All, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1954), 15–16. Hereafter cited as
“Zarathustra” in text.
118. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans. Walter
Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 326. Hereafter cited as “BGE”
in text.
119. While in this passage it seems clear enough that this creative suffering is to be
cultivated in oneself (as opposed to inflicted on others), the point is admittedly
murkier elsewhere, and everywhere beset by Nietzsche’s addiction to provoca-

tion. It does seem clear, however, that the struggle inherent to the will to power
is distinguishable from, and the inevitable overturning of, the Christian valoriza-
tion of suffering and its attendant pageants of pity. “Almost everywhere in
Europe today,” writes Nietzsche in a passage reminiscent of the gender mark-
ings we have noted in clinical descriptions of trauma, “we find a pathological
sensitivity and receptivity to pain; also a repulsive incontinence in lamentation,
an increase in tenderness that would use religion and philosophical bric-a-brac
to deck itself out as something higher—there is a veritable cult of suffering. The
unmanliness of what is baptized as ‘pity’ in the circles of such enthusiasts is, I
should think, what always meets the eye first” (BGE, 421).
120. These images, among others, attest to the porousness of lamentation and cele-
bration, to the way in which Nietzsche’s laughter mingles with mourning. As
Zarathustra evinces in the tomb songs of Part II, some losses may entail mourn-
ing and bear a significant testamentary trace.
121. Frederich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 597. Hereafter
cited as “Genealogy” in text.
122. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (New York: Verso,
1997), 29. This analog between uncertainty, disorder, and the foreign (or
“other”) reappears frequently in my analysis of the lamentation.
123. Nietzsche everywhere emphasizes the danger and risk of this undertaking. See
e.g., BGE, 199, 201, 242, 315, 324. It is the inverse and overcoming of moral-
ity as a species of timidity. See BGE, 303–4.
124. Giddens, Consequences of Modernity, 3.
125. Wai Chee Dimmock, Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997), 2.
126. More resistant to any schematic compatibility or opposition is the relationship of
the lamentation to ressentiment. It is quite possible that Nietzsche might class
lamentation among the reactive feelings, a “senseless raging of ressentiment
among the weaker powers” (Genealogy, 511). On the other hand, as we have sug-
gested, the lamentation is not without its affinities to the project of Überwindung
or the dangerous uncertainties of the philosophers of the future. This is less a par-
adox, in my view, than an indication of the sometimes razor-thin separation
between a value and its overcoming, between lamentation and celebration.
127. Dasein understands its world by manipulating things and putting them to use.
For Heidegger, this “circumspection” or skillful concern is our most familiar
and habitual state of mind, and is distinguished from theoretical reflection or
scientific observation.
128. Individual tools or pieces of equipment, according to Heidegger, blend into a ref-
erential whole. “Equipment,” he writes, “in accordance with its equipmentality,
always is in terms of its belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink,
paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These
‘Things’ never show themselves proximally as they are for themselves . . . [but
within] a totality of equipment.” Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans.
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row,
1962), 97. Hereafter cited as “BT” in the text.
129. On the way such breakdown refigures the Enlightenment subject, see Hubert L.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division I (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991), 76.
130. Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 123.
131. Martin Heidegger, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” in Basic
Writings (New York: Harper and Row, 1993), 437, 445.
132. Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of
Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1973), 1. Hereafter cited as “SP” in text.
133. Derrida also develops this argument in relation to the proper name. See Memoires
for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and
Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 49–50.
134. Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 20, translation modified.
135. Ibid., 9, translation modified.
136. Ibid., 18.
137. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gaytari Chakravorty Spivak
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 163. Hereafter cited as
“Grammatology” in the text.
138. See, e.g., ibid., 201–2, 255–58.
139. “Différance,” 159. This prohibition against nostalgia also appears elsewhere.
See, e.g., Derrida’s critique of Lévi-Strauss in “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences,” in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 278–93; and Gaytari Spivak’s
comments in “Translator’s Preface,” Grammatology, xvi–xx.
140. “Différance,” 135, translation modified.
141. See also Derrida, Grammatology, 25, 37.
142. See also ibid., 34–35, 77–81.
143. See also “La parole soufflée” on “the unity of the proper as the nonpollution of
the subject absolutely close to himself” in Writing and Difference, 183; and
“White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy” on the “explo[sion of]
the reassuring opposition of the metaphoric and the proper,” in Margins of
Philosophy, 270.
Chapter 2: “And the Women Wailed in Answer”

1. While all societies mourn their dead, and striking similarities in mourning prac-
tices can be found across cultures, there are also significant differences in mor-
tuary rituals not only between but within cultures. My portrayal of lamentation
is inductively constructed on ethnographic, historical, literary, theological,
and psychological literature on the lament tradition, as well as on transcripts and
recordings of lamentations. While I draw most heavily on the lament practices of
the Mediterranean (particularly from Greece and North Africa), I also reference
laments from Ireland, Eastern Europe, Finland, and the Baltic region, where
strong lament traditions remain. On the classical Greek tradition, see Margaret
Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1974); Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments
and Greek Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992); and Nicole Loraux, Mothers
in Mourning, trans. Corinne Pache (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1998). On the Biblical “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” see Claus Westermann,
Lamentations: Issues and Interpretation, trans. Charles Muenchow (Minneapolis:
Fortress, 1994); Delbert Hillers, The Anchor Bible Commentary on Lamentations
(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1992); Tod Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations:
Catastrophe, Lament and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2000); Alan Mintz, Hurban: Responses to
Catastrophe in Hebrew Literature (New York: Columbia University Press,
1984); Norman K. Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations (London:
SCM Press, 1954); and Francis Landy, “Lamentations,” in The Literary Guide
to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1990), 329–34.
On the history of lamentations for the Shi‘ite prophet Hussein, see Mahmoud
Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam: A Study of the Devotional Aspects of
Ashura in Twelver Shi‘ism (The Hague: Mouton, 1978); Shaykh Muhammad
Mahdi Shams al-Din, The Revolution of al-Husayn: Its Impact on the
Consciousness of Muslim Society, trans. I. K. A. Howard (London: Muhammadi
Trust of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, 1985); Annemarie Schimmel,
“Karbala and the Imam Husayn in Persian and Indo-Muslim Literature,” Al-
Serat 12 (1986): 29–39; Lynda Clarke, “Elegy (Marthiya) on Husayn: Arabic
and Persian,” Al-Serat 12 (1986): 13–28; David Pinault, The Shiites: Ritual and
Popular Piety in a Muslim Community (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993); David
Pinault, Horse of Karbala: Muslim Devotional Life in India (New York: Palgrave,
2001); Kamran Scot Agahie, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shi‘i Symbols and Rituals
in Modern Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004); Kamran Scot
Agahie, ed., The Women of Karbala: Ritual Performance and Symbolic Discourses
in Modern Shi‘i Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Ali Hussain,
“The Mourning of History and the History of Mourning: The Evolution of
Ritual Commemoration of the Battle of Karbala,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 78–88; and Laura Deeb,
“Living Ashura in Lebanon: Mourning Transformed to Sacrifice,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25, no. 1 (2005): 122–39. For
comparative studies of ancient near east lamentations, see Paul Wayne Ferris Jr.,
The Genre of Communal Lament in the Bible and the Ancient Near East (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1992); and F.W. Dobbs-Allsopp, Weep, O Daughter of Zion: A
Study of the City-Lament Genre in the Hebrew Bible (Rome: Editice Pontificio
Instituto Biblico, 1993).
On modern Greek lamentations, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament; Holst-Warhaft,
Dangerous Voices; Nadia Seremetakis, The Last Word: Women, Death and
Divination in Inner Mani (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992);
Loring Danforth, The Death Rituals of Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1982); Robert Garland, The Greek Way of Death (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1985); and Anna Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between
Worlds: The Greek Women’s Lament as Communicative Event,” Journal of the
American Folklore Society 93, no. 368 (April–June 1980): 129–57.
On North Africa and the Arab world, see Lila Abu-Lughod, “Islam and the
Gendered Discourses of Death,” International Journal of Middle East Studies
25 (1993): 187–205; Abdel Halim Hifni, “An Introduction to Al-Adid:
Lamentation in Arabic Folklore,” Folklore 26, no. 4 (April 1985): 61–67;

Mishael Maswari Caspi, “‘My Brother, Vein of My Heart:’ Arab Laments for the
Dead in Israel,” Folklore 98, no. 1 (1987): 28–40; Mishael Maswari Caspi and
Julia Ann Blessing, Weavers of the Songs: The Oral Poetry of Arab Women in Israel
and the West Bank (Washington, DC: Three Continents Press, 1991); Nagib
Khouri, Le Feu et la cendre: travail de deuil et rites funeraires dans un village
libanais: Abdilly-Batroun (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 1993); Benedicte
Grima, The Performance of Emotion Among Paxtun Women: “The Misfortunes
which Have Befallen Me” (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992); Zineb
Geurroudj, “Femmes en deuil,” Cahiers Intersignes 10 (1995): 181–86; J.
Delheure, Vivre et Mourir à Ouargla (Paris: SELAF, 1988). On Jewish commu-
nities in Morocco, see Elie Malka, Essai d’ethnographie traditionnelle des
Mellahs, ou Croyances, rites de passage et vieilles pratiques des israélites marocains
(Rabat, Morocco: Omnia, 1946); and J. Goulven, Les Mellahs de Rabat-Salé
(Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1927), chap. 13.
On Ireland, see Angela Partridge, “Wild Men and Wailing Women,” Eigse: A
Journal of Irish Studies 18, no. 1 (1980): 25–37; Angela Bourke, “The Irish
Traditional Lament and the Grieving Process,” Women’s Studies International
Forum 11: 4 (1988): 287–91; and “More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish
Women’s Lament Poetry,” in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture,
ed. Joan Newlon Radner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160–82.
On Eastern Europe, see Barbara Kerewsky-Halpern, “Text and Context in
Serbian Ritual Lament,” Canadian-American Slavic Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring
1981): 52–60; Raina Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” trans. D. Minkova
and A. L. Lloyd, International Folklore Review 2 (1982): 112–30. In the Baltic
region, see Elizabeth Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words: Symbolization of Affect
in the Karelian Lament,” Yearbook for Traditional Music 22 (1990): 80–105;
Aili Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” Temenos 17 (1981): 45–80; Aili
Nenola-Kallio, “Two Genres for Expressing Sorrow: Laments and Lyrical Songs
in Ingria,” in Genre, Structure and Reproduction in Oral Literature, ed. Lauri
Honko and Vilmos Voigt (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1980): 41–54; Lauri Honko,
“The Lament: Problems of Genre, Structure and Reproduction” in Genre,
Structure and Reproduction in Oral Literature, 21–40; and Patricia Arant,
“Aspects of Oral Style: Russian Traditional Oral Lament,” Canadian-American
Slavic Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 1981): 42–51.
For a comparative study of modern lamentations, see Nikolai Kaufman,
“Laments from Four Continents (Europe, Asia, Africa, and America),”
International Folklore Review 7 (1990): 22–29. Numerous historical, ethno-
graphic, and psychological studies of death also furnish valuable information on
lamentation rituals. See, for example, Phillipe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death,
trans. Helen Weaver (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); M. Bloch and
J. Parry, eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982); Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, Celebrations
of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); Louis-Vincent Thomas, Anthropologie de la mort
(Paris: Payot, 1980); Tobie Nathan, ed., Rituels de deuil, travail du deuil (Paris:
Éditions La Pensée Sauvage, 1995). On the musical aspects of lamentations, see
Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words”; Kaufman, “Laments from Four Continents”;
and Albert Lloyd, “Lament,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1980): 407–10.
2. See Ariès, Hour of Our Death, chap. 12; Colin Murray Parkes, Pittu Laungani,
and Bill Young, Death and Bereavement Across Cultures (New York: Routledge,
1997); Gail Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices; and The Cue for Passion: Grief
and its Political Uses (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); and
Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chap 1.
3. Such practices are indeed survivals of ancient (pre-Islamic and pre-Christian)
traditions. Although for many this means that they bear the imprint of the
“days of ignorance” or pagan superstition, it also means that lamentations par-
ticipate in the ambivalently valued realm of the primitive we have discussed
above. On the tensions between Orthodox Christianity and lament practices,
see Seremetakis, Last Word; between Islam and lament practices, see Abu-
Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death”; and Grima, Performance of Emotion;
in immigrant communities, see Parkes, Laungani, and Young, Death and
Bereavement. Despite such tensions, pagan and Christian, or Jahilic and Islamic
imagery often comfortably inhabit the same lamentation.
4. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 3.
5. The conception of the lamenter as pychopomp is widespread and found, for
example, in Greek, Serbian, and Finnish traditions. Musicologists note the way
in which the sound of the lament “engenders the trancelike state necessary to
make a succesful journey” to the underworld (Tolbert, “Women Cry with
Words,” 81). Different societies perform laments at different times. In Finland
and Soviet Karelia, laments accompany funeral preparations, washing the body,
or building a coffin; in rural Greece, they accompany the body to the grave,
whereas in North Africa and much of the Arab world (where Islamic law dic-
tates that the body be buried by sundown), it is only after burial that women’s
lamenting begins.
6. See Bourke, “The Irish Traditional Lament.” Similar claims have been made for
the elegy. Peter Sacks, for example, reads elegy as a genre commensurate with the
Freudian work of mourning in The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1985); and Ramazani as a “mimesis of mourning” (Modern
Elegy, 28). Holst-Warhaft, by contrast, argues that the written elegy, “articulated
by male poets removed from a ritual context . . . loses its functional quality as a
communal expression of grief” (Dangerous Voices, 9) and Tolbert speaks of the
written text as “a shadow of a lament, missing the improvisatory utterances
needed to make the lament truly efficacious” (“Women Cry with Words,” 92).
7. Numerous scholars have argued for the therapeutic value of the lament. Holst-
Warhaft contends that “the poetic expression of grief is perceived by the
lamenters themselves not only as an emotional outburst but as a means of medi-
ating that emotion and thereby avoiding the excesses of madness that death
might otherwise provoke” (Dangerous Voices, 28). Caraveli-Chaves emphasizes
the salutary effect of communal bonding through shared suffering. See Caraveli-
Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds.” While I do not want to underestimate the
therapeutic value of the lamentation, I think it is also necessary to acknowl-
edge that the very notion of recovery remains semantically foreign to it. It rejects
the idea of indemnification, restitution, consolation, does not semantically estab-
lish a re-equilibration of psychic forces, does not accept a return to normalcy.
8. This pain may be wholly other than the ostensible object of the lament and is
reminiscent of Sargant’s findings that abreaction from a fictional scene may be
as effective as from a “real” one. Tolbert notes in the Finnish context that
“although lamenters deliberately ‘fake’ signs of emotional intensity at the begin-
nings of their performances, this ‘faking,’ which consists of assuming the physical
attitude of sorrow, could be an extremely effective means of reaching an altered
perceptual state” (Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words,” 99).
9. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 2.
10. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 57.
11. Ibid., 57.
12. Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments,” 67.
13. Ibid., 78. See also Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco (London:
Macmillan, 1926), 440. On the problems presented to anthropology by emo-
tional performance, see Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, chap. 2.
14. See Seremetakis, Last Word, chap. 10.
15. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 518.
16. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 14–22.
17. In some parts of Greece it is considered bad luck to lament outside the context
of the funeral; it could even cause another death. Kerewsky-Halpern notes simi-
lar prohibitions in Serbia. See Kerewsky-Halpern, “Serbian Ritual Lament.”
According to Tolbert, however, no such interdictions exist in Finland and Soviet
Karelia. See Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words.” Nenola-Kallio records numer-
ous occasional laments composed in the Baltic region. See Nenola-Kallio,
“Ingrian Occasional Laments.” Many lament traditions associate death with mar-
riage or erotic abduction. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 10, 120–22; Ariès, Hour
of Our Death, 369–95; Emily Vermeule, Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and
Poetry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), chap. 5; and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, “Feminine Figures of Death in Greece,” in Mortals and Immortals:
Collected Essays, ed. Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1991), 95–110. On these associations in North Africa and the Arab world, see
Khouri, Le feu et la cendre, 84, 112–14; Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs,
132; Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 189–90; Westermarck,
Ritual and Belief, 448–53; and Terri Brint Joseph, “Poetry as a Strategy of
Power: The Case of Riffian Berber Women,” Signs 5, no. 3 (Spring 1980):
418–34. For other examples, see Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,”
130n14; and Metcalf and Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 13.
18. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 49.
19. Caspi, “My Brother, Vein of my Heart,” 35.
20. Caraveli-Chavez, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 153.
21. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 124.
22. Seremetakis, Last Word, 203–4.
23. Lamentations 2:18. On the differences between individual laments, communal
laments, and dirges in Hebrew, see Gottwald, Studies in Lamentations, chaps. 1–2;
Hillers, Anchor Bible Commentary, chap. 1; and Linafelt, Surviving Lamentations,
chap. 2. On the Homeric world, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 11–13.
25. See, for example, Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Laments for the Dead in Medieval
Narrative (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1966). On the relation
of lamentations to classical Arab poetry, see Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the
Songs; in relation to Greek tragedy, see Alexiou, Ritual Lament; Holst-Warhaft,
Dangerous Voices; and Loraux, Mothers in Mourning; to theories of orality, see
Arant, “Aspects of Oral Style”; to the Romantic sublime, see Linda M. Austin,
“The Lament and the Rhetoric of the Sublime,” Nineteenth-Century Literature
53, no. 3 (December 1998): 279–306.
26. Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 192.
27. Lamentations 5:22.
29. Ibid., 133.
30. Ibid., 108.
31. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 52.
32. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 104. Ramazani makes an argument for the modern elegy
as melancholic, as a mourning that is “unresolved, violent and ambivalent,” and
which thus might be read as a recrudescence of the (ritual and feminine) mode of
lamentation into the (more philosophical and masculine) genre of elegy. See
Ramazani, Modern Elegy.
33. Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 107.
35. Ibid., 120.
36. Ibid., 5.
38. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 494. Shi‘ite ta’ziya (lamentation) has been the
object of numerous suppressions; they were largely performed in secret during
the Ummayad period.
39. Ibid., 440, 441.
40. Abu-Lughod, “Gendered Discourses of Death,” 189.
41. Ibid., 193. Similarly, Grima records a Paxtun woman saying, “Death and
funerary rites are shari’at, but our weeping and lamenting is our own custom,
quite against the law in Islam” (Performance of Emotion, 46). She notes that the
women’s zhara (lament or formalized weeping) is “highly condemned in Islamic
shari’at. Mullahs often reiterate this in their sermons, and it is not uncommon for
men from the deceased’s family to remain in the women’s midst at mournings,
reprimanding them severely for this sung lament and, if necessary, ordering them
to cease their outbursts” (Performance of Emotion, 61).
42. See Bourke, “More in Anger,” 161; and Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 67.
43. Seremetakis, Last Word, 165, 167. The opposition between klama (lamentation
ritual) and kidhia (funeral), according to Seremetakis, is simultaneously an oppo-
sition between gender discourses, between orality and textuality, between person-
alized connection with, and depersonalization of, the dead, and between
household and public institution. See Last Word, 170. Bourke records the follow-
ing astonishing exchange from the Irish tradition. A mother admonished by the
priest to cease her keening responded:
Shut up, Priest, and stand up straight!
Read the Mass and you’ll get paid.
He didn’t spend nine months next to your heart,
Or nineteen years around your house. (“More in Anger,” 167)
44. Republic III, qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, 98. As Loraux interprets
these passages, “grief and lamentation [are] among the feminine forms of
behavior that are not to be imitated. . . . The object of the prohibition is the
potential threat that women’s mourning constitutes for civic order.” Loraux,
Mothers in Mourning, 11.
46. On Solon’s laws, see Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 19–25; Alexiou, Ritual
Lament, 14–20; and Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices, chap. 4.
47. On similar laws in Rome, see Loraux, who, in the following passage, quotes from
Seneca: “Since ‘women cry by nature,’ the city recorded that fact and assigned
time limits . . . ‘to compromise with the stubbornness of female sorrow by way of
a public decree’” (Mothers in Mourning, 31). According to Shi‘ite tradition,
Zaynab was exiled from Medina because of her inflammatory lamentations.
48. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 26.
49. See Alexiou, Ritual Lament, 6; Seremetakis, Last Word, 97; Metcalf and
Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 49; and Khouri, Le feu et la cendre, 49–50.
50. The phrase is from Plutarch, qtd. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 23.
51. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), 92.
52. Caraveli-Chavez, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 138.
54. Lamentations 1:15, 17.
55. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75. For some intriguing parallels, see Metcalf and
Huntington, Celebrations of Death, 90–94; and Thomas, Anthropologie de la
mort, 449–52.
56. The foreigner is often delineated precisely by his/her lack of the proper, and the
foreign is often conceived as disruptive of metaphysical categories and thus
philosophically impure. See Rebecca Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign:
An Interdisciplinary Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003), chaps. 7 and 3.
57. Seremetakis, Last Word, 75.
58. Qtd. Loraux, Mothers in Mourning, 30n1.
61. Grima rejects the idea of lamentation as protest in Paxtun society which she views,
rather, as socializing girls into an ethic of suffering. See Grima, Performance
of Emotion.
63. Ibid., 86.
64. Grima, Performance of Emotion, 40.
65. Westermarck, Ritual and Belief, 473. See also Thomas, Anthropologie de la
mort, 441.
66. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 8.
67. Anna Ivanova’s lament for her sister, recorded in Soviet Karelia by Honko, “The
Lament,” 36. This stanza is also an excellent example of the tortuous syntax and
indirection of many lamentations.
70. Augenblick is Luther’s translation of the Pauline phrase “ejn riph` ojfqalmou`” (in
the twinkling of an eye) (1 Corinthians 15:52).
71. See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), section 65; and Hubert L.
Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time,
Division I (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1991),
321–23.
72. Julia Kristeva, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, trans. Leon S. Roudiez
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 60.
73. For close analysis of the texts and contextual “moment” of the Hebrew
“Lamentations of Jeremiah” and of the lamentations of Hecuba from Greek epic
and tragedy, see Rebecca Saunders, Poetics of Loss: The Modern and its
Lamentations, PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1994, chap. 2.
75. Partridge notes the way in which lamenting women are described in the same
terms as Sweeney or other mad characters of Irish tradition. See “Wild Men and
Wailing Women.”
76. On these forms, see Gottwald, Studies in the Book of Lamentations, chaps. 1 and
2; and Hillers, Anchor Bible Commentary, chap. 1.
77. On formulaic elements in Karelian, see Honko, “The Lament”; in Ingrian see
Nenola-Kallio, “Ingrian Occasional Laments”; in Russian, see Arant, “Aspects
of Oral Style”; in Arabic, see Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs; in Paxtun,
see Grima, Performance of Emotion; in Serbian, see Kerewsky-Halpern, “Serbian
Ritual Lament”; in Bulgarian, see Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments.”
78. Lamentations 4:1–2, 5, 7–8.
79. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” trans. Richmond Lattimore, Euripides III, The
Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), lines
153–64. Hereafter referenced by line.
80. Honko, “The Lament,” 48.
82. For a discussion of repetition in the elegy, see Sacks, English Elegy, 23–26.
83. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), 66.
84. See “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations,
trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 217–51.
85. Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, Jonathan
Culler, Eduardo Cadava, and Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1986), 6.
87. See Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
89. Euripides, “Hecuba,” trans. William Arrowsmith, Euripides III, The Complete
Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 618–22. Hereafter
referenced by line.
90. Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” 115.
91. Ibid., 122.
92. Ibid., 122.
96. Ibid.
97. Tolbert, “Women Cry with Words,” 87.
98. Ibid., 93.
99. Lamentations 5:11–12.
100. Frederich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, trans.
Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), 226.
101. Heidegger, Being and Time, 217.
102. Lamentations 1:12. See, for example, Dante’s appropriation of these lines in La
Vita Nuova. Comparable are a number of early Greek tomb inscriptions that call
on the passer-by to take notice of, and remember, the dead. See Alexiou, Ritual
Lament, 138.
103. Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 133.
104. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 133–34.
106. Bourke, “More in Anger,” 169.
107. Katsarova, “Bulgarian Funeral Laments,” 122.
108. Honko, “The Lament,” 37.
109. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” lines 89–120.
111. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52.
112. Felman and Laub, Testimony, 5.
115. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 129–30.
116. Ibid., 127.
117. Bourke, “More in Anger,” 174.
118. See Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, 11, 117–18.
120. Qtd. Holst-Warhaft, Cue for Passion, 37.
123. Caspi and Blessing, Weavers of the Songs, 123. The idiom refers to the prohibi-
tion against charging interest on a loan to another Moslem.
124. Caraveli-Chaves, “Bridge Between Worlds,” 134.
125. Kierkegaard, Repetition, 212.
126. Kristeva, Black Sun, 21.
127. These moods correspond roughly to what Parkes, Laungani, and Young cite as the
most culturally ubiquitous emotions expressed in funeral rites and mourning: cry-
ing, anger, and fear. See Parkes, Laungani, and Young, Death and Bereavement.
128. The word melancholia, from mevla~ [black] and colhv [bile], is itself a metaphor of
darkness. See Stanley W. Jackson, Melancholia and Depression: From Hippocratic
Times to Modern Times (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 395–99.
129. On the history of melancholy, see Jackson, Melancholia and Depression; Wolf
Lepenies, Melancholy and Society, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and magazine littéraire 244
(1987), “Littérature et mélancolie.”
130. While lamentation may represent a stage in the work of mourning, as critics such
as Holst-Warhaft and Bourke contend, it does not, in my view, affectively resolve
or conceptually complete the mourning process, but remains in the mode of

melancholy. This is part of what is disturbing and threatening about the lamen-
tation, as compared to other mortuary forms, and why it is (unlike those other
forms) pathologized, criminalized, and otherwise disciplined by legal and med-
ical regimes of recovery.
131. Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” in Collected Papers, vol. 4, trans.
Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 155.
133. Ibid., 10.
134. Ibid., 13.
135. Ibid., 52.
136. Freud, “Mourning and Melancholy,” 158.
137. Ibid., 153.
138. Ibid., 155.
139. Ibid., 153.
141. Ibid., 22.
143. Ibid., 100, 98.
144. Seneca, “On Anger,” trans M. Russo, The Sophia Project, http://www.molloy.edu/
academic/philosophy/Sophia/Seneca/anger.htm. Aquinas’s comments on anger
can be found in Summa Theologica, Prima Secundae Partis, Sections 46–48,
trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province.
145. Richard Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (New York: Oxford University Press,
1991), 222. See also James R. Averill, Anger and Aggression (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1982); and Andrew Ortony, Gerald Clore, and Allan Collins, The
Cognitive Structure of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
146. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (1954). Or, as Aquinas
puts it, “those who excel in any matter, are most of all angry if they be slighted
in that matter” (Section 46).
147. Ibid.
148. Aquinas, Summa, Section 47.
149. See Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in
the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).
150. Seneca, Book 1, Section 9.
151. Ibid., Book 1, Section 12.
153. Ibid.
158. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 223.
159. Ibid., 218.
160. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3.
161. See Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, 226.
162. Aristotle, Rhetoric II, Book 3.
163. Seneca, Book 2, Section 15.
164. See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967); Søren
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting
Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Maurice Blanchot,
“From Dread to Language,” in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays,
trans. Lydia Davis (Barrytown, NY: Station Hill Press, 1981), 3–20.
165. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 41.
166. Blanchot, “From Dread to Language,” 15.
167. Ibid., 6.
168. Ibid., 6.
169. Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 44–45.
170. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 155–56.
171. Heidegger, Being and Time, 232.
Chapter 3: Lamentation and (Dis)Possession

1. The Old South, the Civil War, the Sutpen estate, and nearly all the novel’s char-
acters are ultimately “lost,” as are honor and pride as a result of the War, Rosa’s
youth and dreams, and, by her account, “life” itself. The novel, in addition to its
titular reference to Biblical tragedy, contains frequent mortuary metaphors—its
houses are “mausoleums,” the room at Harvard is “tomblike”—and allusions to
Greek and Shakespearean tragedy. Its central character falls from an Edenic ori-
gin and subsequently embodies the “Lost Cause,” while one of its principal nar-
rators (Rosa) is an elegist. On the thematic losses of Absalom, see Gail L.
Mortimer, Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss: A Study in Perception and Meaning
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983); Richard Godden, Fictions of Labor:
William Faulkner and the South’s Long Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997); Leon S. Roudiez, “Absalom, Absalom!: The
Significance of Contradictions,” The Minnesota Review 17 (1981): 61–62; and
Linda J. Holland-Toll, “Absence Absolute: The Recurring Pattern of
Faulknerian Tragedy,” Mississippi Quarterly 51, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 435–53.
On the relation of loss to Faulknerian language, see John T. Matthews, The Play
of Faulkner’s Language (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); and Linda
Kauffman, “Devious Channels of Decorous Ordering: A Lover’s Discourse in
Absalom, Absalom!” Modern Fiction Studies 29, no. 2 (1983): 183–200. On
uncertainty and the narrative structure of Absalom, see Peter Brooks, Reading
for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Vintage, 1984),
chap. 11; Robert Dale Parker, Faulkner and the Novelistic Imagination
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); James Snead, Figures of Division
(New York: Methuen, 1986); J. Hillis Miller, “The Two Relativisms: Point of
View and Indeterminacy in the Novel Absalom, Absalom!” in Relativism in the
Arts, ed. Betty Jean Craige (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983),
148–70; and Gerhard Hoffmann, “Absalom, Absalom!: A Postmodernist
Approach,” in Faulkner’s Discourse: An International Symposium, ed. Lothar
Hönnighausen (Tübingen, Germany: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), 276–92.
On the relation of loss to Faulkner’s creative process, see Matthews, Play of
Faulkner’s Language, 18–23; and John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/
Repetition and Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1975), 170–72. On the relation of the novel to the
Biblical tragedy of Absalom, see Ralph Behrens, “Collapse of Dynasty: The
Thematic Center of Absalom, Absalom!” PMLA 89, no. 1 (1974): 24–33; and
Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 149ff.
2. Rosa’s summoning of Quentin is paradigmatic of the call to witness, as is
Shreve’s invocation to Quentin to witness his own heritage. These scenes of tes-
timony, in addition to Shreve’s testimony to Grandfather Compson, Mr.
Compson’s testimony to Quentin, and the complex series of cross-examinations
between Henry and Charles Bon, are motivated by precisely the dual threat of
meaninglessness and unrequited injustice of which we have spoken above.
3. 2 Samuel 18:33.
5. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Random House, 1986), 5.
Hereafter cited in text. In the world of Absalom, in order to be perceived as legit-
imately owning material possessions, one must already possess respectability—a
tenet which accounts to a large degree for the outrage over Sutpen’s material
accumulations; yet it is often material possessions which, by their significatory
powers, acquire ideological ones. Rosa no doubt chooses Quentin as a reposi-
tory of her ideological property because he possesses apposite familial relations,
respectability, and an education. Sign systems, however, as the novel repeatedly
illustrates, are exasperatingly deceptive. The metal case that Judith gives to Bon,
for example, is a hermetic sign with a distressingly variable content: with Judith’s
picture in it, it is a sign of affection; with the octoroon mistress’s picture in it, it
is, according to Shreve, a (necessarily posthumous) sign that says, “I was no
good; do not grieve for me” (273). To Rosa, who reads it comparatively with
Judith’s lack of tears at Bon’s death, it is a (misread) sign of Judith’s indiffer-
ence; while to the reader, it is an unreadable sign that never discloses its con-
tents; like the lamentation’s reiterations of literality, it is a sign that merely points
back to itself.
6. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1984), 140.
Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), line
1158.
8. While there are distinctions to be drawn between the discursive styles of
Absalom’s various narrators, the demonstrative pronoun and privatives are among
those rhetorical patterns used in essentially the same manner by all narrators. For
arguments on the consistency of narratorial style in Absalom, see Matthews, Play
of Faulkner’s Language, 121; and Stephen Ross, Fiction’s Inexhaustible Voice:
Speech and Writing in Faulkner (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 220.
9. On Bon’s desire for recognition from his father, see Irwin, Doubling and Incest,
49ff., 93ff.; and Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 144.
10. Snead argues that “the most insidious operation of [racial] division is its self-
erasure as ‘nature’” (Figures of Division, 108) and that “the Sutpen story hides
its truths in seemingly guileless forms—everyday figures of speech, innocuous
habits of expression, sudden forgettings” (Figures of Division, 129).
11. Linguistics distinguishes between “alienable possession,” which describes an
alterable relation between entities and “inalienable possession,” which describes
a non-alterable relation. Cross-culturally, the most consistent linguistic examples
of inalienable possession are kin and body parts.
12. “The person in great pain experiences his own body as the agent of his agony.
The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain . . . contains not only
the feeling ‘my body hurts’ but the feeling ‘my body hurts me.’” Elaine Scarry,
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 47. “Even though [pain] occurs within oneself, it is at
once identified as ‘Not oneself,’ ‘not me,’ as something so alien that it must
right now be gotten rid of” (Body in Pain, 52).
13. While Rosa asserts that “there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which
abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous
ordering,” that makes to “fall all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color,” her
response to Clytie’s hand on her arm could not be a more brutal reinforcement
of caste and color: “Take your hand off me, nigger!” (112–12). Indeed, the only
respect in which this touch unsettles the grip of caste and color is that it is the
first and only moment in which Rosa refers to a part of Clytie’s body as her own:
“Take your hand off me.”
14. Grammatically, a privative designates an affix that expresses negation or priva-
tion; as an adjective the word means having the quality of depriving, tending to
take away, characterized by the loss or want of some quality (OED). It is pre-
cisely the relation between these two meanings that I am exploring below. I use
the term in its strict grammatical sense, as well as to name both words formed by
privatives and other forms of linguistic negation.
15. Euripides, “Trojan Women,” line 492. For an extended discussion of this
trope in relation to the novel, see Rebecca Saunders, “On Lamentation and the
Redistribution of Possessions: Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and the New South,”
Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 4 (1996): 750–53.
16. A helpful catalog of Faulknerian negating patterns can be found in Walter J.
Slatoff, Quest for Failure: A Study of William Faulkner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1960), chap. 8. See also Winfried Herget, “The Poetics of
Negation in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 33–37;
François Pitavy, “Some Remarks on Negation and Denegation in William
Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 25–32; Mortimer,
Faulkner’s Rhetoric of Loss, 77–78; and Ralph Flores, The Rhetoric of Doubtful
Authority: Deconstructive Readings of Self-Questioning Narratives, St. Augustine
to Faulkner (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 157ff.
17. On the latter, see Donald M. Kartiganer, “‘So I, Who had Never had a War . . .’:
William Faulkner, War, and the Modern Imagination,” Modern Fiction Studies
44, no. 3 (1998): 619–45.
18. See, for example, 105, 108, 111, 173.
19. On purity in Greek thought see Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and
Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983); Walter Burkert,
Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1985), 75–84; and chap. 4 below. See also Paul Ricoeur’s analysis of the word
katharos in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 25–46, and its
equivalence with “the essential purification, that of wisdom and philosophy”
(38). On Quentin’s struggle to possess authority through authoring narrative,
see Irwin, Doubling and Incest, 113ff. On Faulkner’s production of newness in
modernism, see Richard Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism: Rereading and
Rewriting (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), 4–5.
20. On the period of the New South, see Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New
South: Life after Reconstruction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); C.
Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge: Lousiana
State University Press, 1951); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study
in Southern Mythmaking (New York: Knopf, 1970); and James C. Cobb, The
Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional
Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), chaps. 3–6. On the relation
of Faulkner to New South ideology, see Wesley Morris with Barbara Alberson
Morris, Reading Faulkner (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989),
chap. 5; and Moreland, Faulkner and Modernism, 24, 75n10, 87. On the New
South and nostalgia, see Eric J. Sundquist, Faulkner: A House Divided
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1985), 98ff. On the life of the
Falkner family in the New South, see Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and
Southern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chaps. 1–5.
21. Henry Woodfin Grady, The New South and Other Addresses (New York: Maynard,
Merrill, 1904), 23. Grady’s speech, which followed an address by General
Sherman and a rendition of “Marching through Georgia” by the band, made a
strong appeal to national unity and garnered considerable sympathy for the New
South program. Generations of southern schoolboys, including no doubt
William Faulkner, were required to memorize it. See Gaston, New South Creed,
87–90.
22. Walter Hines Page, Raleigh North Carolina State Chronicle 16, no. 1 (February
4, 1886) and 2 (February 11, 1886).
23. Such a logic explains the apparently paradoxical fact that, as Woodward puts it,
“one of the most significant inventions of the New South was the ‘Old South’”
(155). The United Confederate Veterans, the cult of the Confederacy, town
monuments to Confederate soldiers, and the plantation romance are all prod-
ucts of the New South era.
24. Grady, New South, 30.
25. Ibid., 88–89.
26. The phrase is drawn from Eric Foner’s description of the Dunning School’s posi-
tion on Radical Reconstruction (1867–1877). See Reconstruction: America’s
Unfinished Revolution 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), xix.
27. Richard H. Edmonds, Facts about the South (Baltimore: Manufacturer’s Record,
1902), 12.
29. See Foner, Reconstruction, chap. 12; and Woodward, Origins of the New South,
chap. 1. Grady wrote his first article entitled “The New South” on the occasion
of Georgia’s redemption; Edmonds entitled his 1890 book on the New South
The South’s Redemption.
30. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 8.
31. According to Foner, the 1875 campaign, which sealed Mississippi’s redemption,
“quickly degenerated into a violent crusade to destroy the Republican organiza-
tion and prevent blacks from voting” (Reconstruction, 558). When the state leg-
islature assembled, it completed redemption by first impeaching black Lieut.
Gov. Alexander K. Davis (to prevent him from succeeding to the governorship)
and then compelling Governor Ames to resign and leave the state. See Foner,
Reconstruction, 558–63.
32. However, if it is Clytie that we witness being “destroyed” in this scene, Henry is
ostensibly consumed by the fire as well, while the partly black Jim Bond escapes.
33. Miller, “Two Relativisms,” 167.
34. Joel Chandler Harris, ed. Joel Chandler Harris’ Life of Henry W. Grady, Including
Writings and Speeches (New York: Cassell, 1890), 121–22.
35. Grady, New South, 79–81.
36. Matthews, Play of Faulkner’s Language, 60.
37. Benjamin Harvey Hill, “Education,” The Land We Love 1, no. 1 (May 1866),
1–11. For the continuation of this article, see The Land We Love 1, no. 2 (June
1866): 7–9.
39. Ibid., 38.
40. Hill, Land We Love (May 1866), 11. Along similar lines, William S. Speer, in The
Law of Success, declared,
The educator of the future . . . will teach his pupils what will pay best. He will
teach them the art of thinking, which, for the purpose at hand, I may define
to be the art of turning one’s brains into money. He will not teach dead lan-
guages, obsolete formulas, and bric-a-brac sciences . . . which are never used
in the ordinary transactions of the forum, the office, the shop, or the farm.
(Qtd. Gaston, New South Creed, 111)
On education in the New South, see Woodward, Origins of the New South,
61–64 and 153–54; and Ayers, Promise of the New South, 417–26.
41. Richard H. Edmonds, The South’s Prosperity Its Danger: Strength of Character
Needed as Never Before (Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record, 1907), 7.
42. Richard H. Edmonds, Facts about the South, 9, 11.
43. Qtd. Gaston, New South Creed, 73.
44. Atticus G. Haygood, D. D., “The New South: Gratitude, Amendment, Hope.” A
Thanksgiving Sermon for November 25, 1980 (Oxford, GA: n.p., 1880), 9.
45. A disproportionate quantity of the South’s material property was, however,
transferred into the hands of a new elite that consisted primarily of merchants,
industrialists, and planters. According to Woodward, “A strong tendency early
asserted itself for merchant and planter to become one—that is, for the mer-
chant to acquire the farms of the hapless landowner, and for the more fortunate
planters to move to town and become supply merchants” (Origins of the New
South, 184)—a tendency encouraged by the lien laws and lowered land levies of
Redeemer governments.
46. Ayers, Promise of the New South, 69–70.
47. On southern mill towns, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 5; and
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 222–27.
48. This reading follows and extends Herget, who reads negation as an “interplay of
norms and deviations” (“Poetics of Negation,” 34); and Pitavy, who argues that
negations “function as referential indexes” (“Negation and Denegation,” 27).
49. See via negativa descriptions of Bon, 100, 120; of Rosa, 55, 57, 61, 116; of
Ellen, 84; of Judith, 95; of Sutpen, 184, 199.
50. While Slatoff draws his thesis primarily from thematic readings and is concerned
with Faulkner’s “temperament,” my rhetorical reading is consistent with his
notion of the “polar imagination”: “a deep-seated tendency in Faulkner to view
and interpret experience in extreme terms and to see life as composed essentially
of pairs of warring entities” (Quest for Failure, 79).
51. On the fantastic and gothic elements of Absalom, see also Sundquist, A House
Divided, 98ff.; Olga Vickery, The Novels of William Faulkner: A Critical
Interpretation (Baton Rouge: Lousiana State University Press, 1964), 88ff.; and
François Pitavy “The Gothicism of Absalom, Absalom! Rosa Coldfield Revisited,”
in A Cosmos of My Own: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, ed. Ann J. Abadie and
Doreen Fowler (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1981), 199–226.
52. A number of widely read works of the period—such as The Negro a Beast, The
Negro, A Menace to American Civilization and Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman—
constructed a monstrous, “unnatural” identity for freedpeople much like the
selves constructed by Faulknerian privatives. On racial identity and race relations
in the New South, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 6 and 426–37;
Woodward, Origins of the New South, chap. 13; and Foner, Reconstruction,
chap. 12.
53. On labor relations in the New South, see Ayers, Promise of the New South,
67–72, 431. On pre- and post-war labor relations between blacks and whites as
depicted in Absalom, see Godden, Fictions of Labor.
54. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 206. The census of 1880 indicates that in 33
Georgia counties, not more than one in 100 black farmers owned land; seventeen
Mississippi counties reported the same proportion; “twelve others reported not
one in twenty, and many not one in fifty” (Woodward, Origins of the New South,
205). By 1900, blacks in the cotton South owned a smaller percentage of land than
at the end of Reconstruction. See Foner, Reconstruction, 597.
55. Qtd. Williamson, Faulkner and Southern History, 153. Whites were often out-
raged when blacks did acquire material possessions precisely because they func-
tioned as signs of social equality. “Just generally,” a black woman from South
Carolina testified, “if you were black, you were not supposed to have either time
or money, and if you did, you ought not to show it. Some of them did think col-
ored people oughtn’t to have a certain nice thing, even if they had money
enough to buy it” (Qtd. Ayers, Reconstruction, 88). Klansmen, who functioned
as the police force of Redeemer governments, often killed blacks’ livestock in an
effort both to deny blacks’ right to own material possessions and to make them
more dependent upon their white employers.
56. On the lien system, see Woodward, Origins of the New South, chap. 7; Foner,
Reconstruction, 594–96; and Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 8.
57. Richard H. Edmonds, South’s Redemption: From Poverty to Prosperity
(Baltimore: Manufacturers’ Record, 1890), 35, 24; and Facts, 27.
58. John Matthews makes a similar point about the political unconscious of The
Sound and the Fury:
What seems to be the simple passage from old to new turns out to be in The
Sound and the Fury the disguised reinvigoration of the dominant ideology.
Mercantile capitalism obscures its affinity with the exploitative mechanism of
agrarian, slave-holding capitalism precisely because it rests on the same foun-
dation of economic and racial exploitation. (“The Rhetoric of Containment in
Faulkner,” in Faulkner’s Discourse, 60)
59. Woodward, Origins of the New South, 212. On the convict lease system, see
Woodward, Origins of the New South, 212–15, 232–34, and 424–25; and Ayers,
Promise of the New South, 154–55.
60. On railroad industry, see Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 1; and Woodward,
Origins of the New South, 120–24, 292–99, and 379–84; on mining industry, see
Ayers, Promise of the New South, chap. 5; on lumber industry, see Ayers, Promise
of the New South, 123–31; and Woodward, Origins of the New South, 115–20.
Chapter 4: Lamentation and Purity

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1945), 366;
hereafter cited in text as OC. All translations mine.
2. Page duBois, Torture and Truth (New York: Routledge, 1991), 13.
3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 41.
4. See Walter Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, trans. J. A. Baker
(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1967), 162; and Emanuel Feldman, Biblical
and Post-Biblical Defilement and Mourning: Law as Theology (New York: Yeshiva
University Press, 1977). Concomitantly, the Hebrew word for defilement,
“tame,” originally meant “to be lacking or wanting” (Feldman, Defilement and
Mourning, 74).
5. Similarly, according to Gerhard von Rad, “In the life of Israel . . . every unclean-
ness was to some extent already a precursor of the thing that was uncleanness
out and out, death.” Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology, trans. D. M. G.
Stalker (New York: Harper, 1962), 277.
Complete Greek Tragedies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), lines
190–95.
8. Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 14.
10. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and
Taboo (New York: Praeger, 1966), 4, 40, 132. On situations in which pollution
beliefs uphold a moral code, see Douglas, Purity and Danger, 133. On the rela-
tion of defilement to blame and punishment, see Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, 31;
von Rad, Old Testament Theology, 266; and Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution
and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
11. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 94–95.
12. On the carnivalesque, see M. M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. H.
Iswolsky (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1968); and
Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), chap. 1. Kristeva contends that the speak-
ing subject, like other forms of purity, is simultaneously threatened and attracted
by defilement. See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans.
Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). Dread is a mood
that we have associated with defilement and that Kierkegaard describes as “free-
dom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of
Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue
of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1980), 42. Similarly, for Heidegger, the authenticity of Being is enabled by
the mood of anxiety that brings Dasein “face to face with its Being-free for.”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward
Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), 232.
13. Stéphane Mallarmé, Correspondance 1862–1871, ed. Henri Mondor and Lloyd
James Austin (Paris: Gallimard, 1959), 105, 240, 242. Hereafter cited in text as
C. All translations mine.
14. On Mallarméan negativity, see Charles D. Minahen, “Poetry’s Polite Terrorist:
Reading Sartre Reading Mallarmé,” in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary
French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter, England: University of Exeter Press,
1998), 46–66; and Amy Billone, “‘Cette Blanche Agonie’: Baudelaire, Mallarmé
and the Ice of Sound,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 27, nos. 3 and 4
(2001): 287–301.
15. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 11.
16. The full text of the poem appears in OC, 71, hereafter cited by line. My com-
plete translation of the poem appears in “‘Shaking Down the Pillars’:
Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ to Wagner,” PMLA 111, no.
5 (1996): 1110.
17. It would no doubt be revelatory to carry out a comparative analysis of this son-
net with the “Tombeau for Anatole,” which strives to express Mallarmé’s very
real anguish over the death of his son, and which (left in fragments that never
coalesce into a finished poem) perhaps does so most poignantly in its faltering
incompletion. See Jean-Michel Rabaté, The Ghosts of Modernity (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 1996), chap. 4.
18. On tum’ah produced by contact, see Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 14;
for a summary of arguments on the magical nature of tum’ah contact, see Jacob
Neusner, The Idea of Purity in Ancient Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 10ff. On
tum’ah and the Old Testament’s “concern with separating,” see Kristeva, Powers
of Horror, 93 ad passim. On miasma and agos produced by contact, see Parker,
Miasma, 3–4.
19. Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament, 134. See also Neusner, Idea of Purity,
13ff.; and Feldman, Defilement and Mourning, 72. See Parker, Miasma, 23, on
Greek rituals of purification after foreign incursion. For Kristeva, the foreignness
excluded by pollution beliefs is the feminine, which she defines as “an ‘other’
without a name, which subjective experience confronts when it does not stop at
the appearance of its identity” (Powers of Horror, 58). While theoretically com-
pelling, her argument is on several counts empirically problematic: it contains
misinformation on defiling substances in Hebrew; a questionable reading of the
cipher of blood stain (which she interprets as having first to do with menstrua-
tion and only subsequently with murder); unsupported divergences from
Douglas’s research regarding separation of the sexes; an untenable reading of
“relations” between items in Levitical lists, whose long redactive history she
does not take into account; and inaccurately categorical statements about
“maternal cults” and laws “converging on the maternal” (Powers of Horror, 64).
20. This list describes traditional Hebrew mourning practice. See Feldman, Defile-
ment and Mourning, 84–106; on Greek mourning and conceptions of defile-
ment, see Walter Burkert, Greek Religion, trans. John Raffan (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), 79.
21. Leviticus 19:19.
23. According to Parker, “there was, in Greek belief, no such thing as non-contagious
religious danger. Some dangers were more commonly seen as communicable by
contact, while others rather threatened the guilty party’s descendants; but the
difference was one of degree rather than of kind” (Parker, Miasma, 257). On the
Hebrew notion of sin as a social category, see von Rad, Old Testament Theology,
264. On separation from cultic activity as a result of defilement, see Neusner, Idea
of Purity, 15; and Parker, Miasma, 37. On scapegoat rituals, see Parker, Miasma,
24 and 258; and Burkert, Greek Religion, 82–84.
24. Qtd. Parker, Miasma, 104–5.
25. Several critics have explored the significance of English as a foreign language to
Mallarmé’s writing. See Françoise Meltzer, “Mallarmé and English,” in Literary
Imagination, Ancient and Modern: Essays in Honor of David Grene, ed. Todd
Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 256–68; Mary Lydon,
Skirting the Issue (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), chap. 2;
Rabaté, Ghosts of Modernity, chap. 5; and Jacques Michon, Mallarmé et Les mots
anglais (Montreal: Presses de l’Université de Montréal, 1978).
26. Albert Thibaudet, qtd. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,”
in OC, 1496.
27. Malcolm Bowie, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge: Cambridge
28. For a summary of controversy on this line, see Michael Wroblewski, “Stéphane
Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage à Richard Wagner,’” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 27,
no. 1 (1980): 103.
29. James Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” Yale French Studies 54 (1997): 92.
30. Serge Meitinger, “Baudelaire et Mallarmé devant Richard Wagner,” Romantisme
11, no. 33 (1981): 88. See also David Ellison, who reads the grimoire, and the
hiéroglyphes of the following line, as “textual mysteries inaccessible to the multi-
tudes” (48) that must be deciphered by the poet/priest. David Ellison, “A
Reading of Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ (A Richard Wagner),” Comparative and
General Literature 42 (1994): 46–56.
31. Gardner Davies, Les “Tombeaux” de Mallarmé: essai d’exégèse raisonnée (Paris:
José Corti, 1950), 141.
32. Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” 92. As Ellison points out, there are two distinct
nuances of “loss” at play in the poem: the destruction depicted in the opening
quatrain and the concealment evoked in the second. See Ellison, “Mallarmé’s
‘Hommage,’” 47–48.
33. Robert Greer Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1980), 180.
34. Lawler, “Three Sonnets,” 93.
35. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 53. Douglas is speaking here of the Levitical
dietary laws.
36. Descartes’s foundational precepts in the Discourse on Method are exemplary:
accept only the clear and distinct, divide difficulties into as many parts as possible,
think in an orderly fashion, make enumerations complete. See René Descartes,
Discourse on Method, trans. Desmond M. Clarke (New York: Penguin, 2000). On
purity and the Cartesian “passion for intellectual separation, demarcation, and
order” (77), see Susan Bordo, The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism
and Culture (Albany: State University of New York, 1987), chap. 5.
37. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 35. This is a position corroborated by Parker—“a
culture’s beliefs about pollution . . . are by-products of an ideal of order”
(Parker, Miasma, 325–26); by Ricoeur—“the dread of avenging punishment is
the negative envelope of a still more fundamental admiration, the admiration for
order” (Symbolism of Evil, 43); and by Kristeva—“it is not lack of cleanliness or
health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does
not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the com-
posite” (Powers of Horror, 4).
39. In the late nineteenth century, science conducted a similar purgative campaign
against ritual. “Indeed science only emerged as an autonomous set of discursive
values,” write Stallybrass and White, “after a prolonged struggle against ritual
and it marked out its own identity by the distance which it established from
‘mere superstition’—science’s label for, among other things, a large body of
social practices of a therapeutic kind” (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 174).
40. Davies, Les “Tombeaux,” 144.
41. On the disciplinary nature of syntax and Mallarméan resistance to it, see
Rebecca Saunders, “The Syntactic Panopticon and Mallarméan Resistance,”
Romanic Review 87, no. 3 (1996): 363–75.
42. Kristeva describes resemblances between ritual defilement, the semiotic infans
prior to (and within) symbolic language, and “the aesthetic task” thus:
In the contemporary practice of the West and owing to the crisis of Christianity,
abjection [defilement] elicits more archaic resonances that are culturally prior
to sin; through them it again assumes its biblical status, and beyond it that of
defilement in primitive societies. In a world in which the Other has collapsed,
the aesthetic task—a descent into the foundations of the symbolic construct—
amounts to retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its
dawn, to the bottomless “primacy” constituted by primal repression. (Powers
of Horror, 17–18)
43. On the complex relation between a poem and its occasion, see Marian Zwerling
Sugano, The Poetics of the Occasion: Mallarmé and the Poetry of Circumstance
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
44. We are here in the proximity of both Zarathustra’s celebration of the necessity of
destruction to creation and newness, and Nietzsche’s revaluation of uncertainty.
45. “[F]or all the varieties of Wagnerism,” write David Large and William Weber,
“its representatives had one important characteristic in common. They shared
deep reservations about aspects of their society and culture and were looking for
a vital new alternative.” David C. Large and William Weber, “Introduction,” in
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, ed. David C. Large and William
Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 16. Edouard Dujardin
writes of the objective of the Revue wagnérienne: “[Houston Stuart]
Chamberlain and I wanted to spread our discovery: Wagner a great musician? It
was too obvious; but Wagner a great poet; Wagner a great thinker; and above all,
Wagner creator of a new art form.” Edouard Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des
siens (Paris: Messein, 1936), 201. All translations from this text are mine. For a
discussion of Wagner’s social and musical transformations of nineteenth-century
opera, see Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” in Wagnerism
in European Culture and Politics, 28–71; and Barry Millington, The Master
Musicians: Wagner (London: Dent, 1984). On Wagner’s ideological transfor-
mations, see Alan David Aberbach, The Ideas of Richard Wagner: An
Examination and Analysis of his Major Aesthetic, Political, Economic, Social, and
Religious Thoughts (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988).
46. In 1849, Wagner participated in the Dresden revolt against the King of Saxony
and was subsequently exiled. His writings of the same period stress social regen-
eration through the music drama. Franz Brendel, editor of the Neue Zeitschrift
für Musik, was crucial both in spreading Wagnerian thought and in combining
it with a leftist social program. See Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical
Idealism,” 57–64. The ambiguities of Wagner’s thought, however, left it open
to the most diverse appropriations. For example, Louis-Napoleon’s order to the
Imperial Opera to perform Tannhäuser was apparently an attempt both to ingra-
tiate himself with the Hapsburgs, and particularly with Princess Pauline von
Metternich, and to court the domestic Left, whose support he needed in the
Assembly. See Gerald D. Turbow, “Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France,” in
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics, 147; and Elaine Brody, Paris:
The Musical Kaleidoscope 1870–1925 (New York: George Brazilier, 1987). On
Wagner, social reform, and politics, see Weber, “Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical
Idealism”; and The Wagner Compendium: A Guide to Wagner’s Life and Music,
ed. Barry Millington (New York: Schirmer, 1992).
47. Thibaudet, qtd. Mondor and Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,” OC, 1496.
48. This is thus a failure to reach the abstract and nontheatrical origin of represen-
tation that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe terms the “archi-theatre.” See Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner, trans. Felicia McCarren
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 76. Further investigation is
warranted into the relation of this ambivalence to what Freud, in his elaboration
of traumatic regression, describes as the “conflict of ambivalence,” in which one
loves and hates, identifies with while rejecting, an aggressor. See chap. 1 above.
While Mallarmé never saw a production of a Wagnerian music drama and appar-
ently had a limited technical understanding of the music, he nonetheless regu-
larly attended Lamoureux’s symphonic performances of Wagner and frequently
discussed wagnérisme at his “mardis” (Tuesday salons). Indeed, much of his
knowledge of Wagner, in addition to being “a result of his admiration of
Baudelaire” (OC, 1593), came through Dujardin, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and
Catulle Mendès. On Mallarmé’s knowledge of Wagner, see Dujardin, Mallarmé
par un des siens; Mondor and Jean-Aubry, “Notes et variantes,” OC, 1592–93;
and Suzanne Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1959). On
Mallarmé’s rivalry with Wagner, see Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé, 177;
Leo Bersani, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1981), 53–55; Wroblewski, “Mallarmés ‘Hommage’”; Meitinger,
“Baudelaire et Mallarmé”; and Ellison, “Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage.’”
49. In the table of contents of volume one of the Revue wagnérienne, Mallarmé’s
title is “Rêverie d’un poëte contemporain,” while the text itself bears the title
“Rêverie d’un poëte français” (Revue wagnérienne 1:4, 195).
50. On the history of the Lohengrin affair, see Revue wagnérienne 2:33–64.
51. Ibid., 2:53. All translations from the Revue wagnérienne are mine.
52. When Dujardin proposed creation of the Revue wagnerienne in 1884, “The
enthusaism was not great. I was asked if it wouldn’t be better to consecrate my
efforts to the new school of French music” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des
siens, 204).
53. See, for example, articles in the Revue wagnérienne by Dujardin (1:62–73);
Mendès (1:28–35); and Fourcaud (1:308).
54. According to Bernard, “an unedited letter of Mallarmé to Gustave Kahn . . .
allows it to be stated that in fact, the poet had not read this ‘bedside book,’ had
never had the time to read it: ‘I’ve been meaning all the time to study closely
Wagner’s volume—one of the books I must read—for fifteen years without doing
it, my nose always in my own work’” (Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 25). All
translations from this text are mine. It is equally arguable, I think, that having
perused it for fifteen years, even without “study[ing it] closely,” that Mallarmé
was well acquainted with this text.
55. Revue wagnérienne 1:211. I would thus argue against—or at least historicize—
Rabaté’s contention that Mallarmé “refuses . . . jingoist nationalism”; if this was
true in 1861, as Rabaté claims, it certainly was not by 1885.
56. The nationalism of both Wagner and Mallarmé contains an undeniable impulse
to universalize and a penchant for cultural imperialism. “La Cité, qui donna
pour l’expérience sacrée un théâtre,” writes Mallarmé in the “Rêverie,” no
doubt referring to Paris, “imprime à la terre le sceau universel” (The City that
offers the sacred experience of the theater imprints a universal seal on the earth)
(OC, 545). Similarly, Large writes of Wagner: “Wagner’s original conception of
the German mission was not narrowly nationalistic but quite cosmopolitan: in
‘healing’ themselves, the Germans would heal the world. In articulating this
vision of the Germans as the most ‘universal’ of peoples, Wagner was restating
one of the central tenets of German idealist thought” (David C. Large,
“Wagner’s Bayreuth Disciplines,” in Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European
Culture and Politics, 81).
57. Wagnerism as a movement arguably began in France, the term “wagnérisme”
preceding both “Wagnerismus” and “Wagnerism.” Wagner first came to the
attention of the French public through his writings published in the Revue et
gazette musicale de Paris between 1840 and 1842; two events at the end of the
decade spread his renown further: first, the publication of an article by Franz
Lizst, who had recently conducted Tannhäuser in Weimar, and second, François
Segher’s performance of the Tannhäuser overture at Sainte-Cécile in 1850.
From 1859–1861 Wagner lived in Paris, was received in a number of salons, and
received a motley assortment of devotées at his own salon on Wednesdays. See
Turbow, “Art and Politics,” 140–47; and Brody, Musical Kaleidoscope, 34–35.
Perhaps wagnérisme’s most famous moment occurred on March 13, 1861 at the
Imperial Opera when, at the ill-fated performance of Tannhäuser ordered by
Louis-Napoleon, members of the Jockey club rioted against both the emperor
and the absence of a ballet in the second act. On April 1 of the same year,
Baudelaire published his “Richard Wagner et Tannhäuser à Paris” in the Revue
européene, and throughout the 1860s wagnérisme was significantly furthered
by Léon Pasdeloup’s orchestral “Concerts Populaires” at the Cirque Napoléon, by
Parnassian poets, and by Judith Gautier’s articles in La Presse. As we have noted,
the Franco-Prussian war embroiled wagnérisme in heated nationalisms in the
1870s. On the history of wagnérisme in France, see Turbow, “Art and Politics”;
Richard Sieburth, “1885, February: Symbolist Poets publish La revue wagnéri-
enne: The Music of the Future,” in A New History of French Literature, ed.
Denis Hollier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Raymond
Furness, Wagner and Literature (New York: Manchester University Press,
1982), chap. 2; Alain Satgé, “Wagner rêvé par Mallarmé: ‘Le Chanteur et la
Danseuse,’” Romantisme 19, no. 57 (1987): 65–73; and Bernard, Mallarmé et
la musique, 29ff.
58. “The central theme in musical idealism,” writes Weber “was a suspicion of mode
and fashion” (“Wagner, Wagnerism, and Musical Idealism,” 34).
59. Turbow, “Art and Politics,” 147.
60. Revue wagnérienne 3:293–94
61. See Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1974), 193–95.
62. This resistance to assimilation can also be read as a resistance to the Revue wag-
nérienne and its attempt to fuse wagnérisme with Symbolism. Indeed the irra-
tional significance of Mallarméan defilement subverted the journal’s very
existence, for it was in part the patron’s outrage over the issue that contained
Mallarmé’s “Hommage”— an outrage over Dujardin’s use of the Revue as a
journal of Symbolist poetry, and particularly over the obscurity of the poems by
Verlaine and Mallarmé—that initiated the patron’s displeasure with Dujardin’s
handling of the Revue. Dujardin writes of the January 1886 issue: “The reper-
cussions over it were enormous; at a dinner of journalists that took place at the
time, over which Auguste Vitu presided, nothing was spoken of but Mallarmé’s
sonnet—to figure out, of course, whether one should laugh at it or be angry
over it” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 41). Musicologists, moreover,
complained directly to two of the journal’s patrons, Lascoux and Bossier: “The
musicologists were not content to be indignant; several of these gentlemen had
already secretly met; someone had gone to see Lascoux; someone had drawn his
attention to the harm done to wagnérisme by this manner of championing it;
one of the gentlemen, who combined his musicographic skill with composition,
even wrote to Agénor Boissier” (Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens, 221). On
the history of the Revue wagnérienne, see Dujardin, Mallarmé par un des siens;
Isabelle de Wyzewa, La revue wagnérienne: essai sur l’interprétation esthétique de
Wagner en France (Paris: Librarie Académique Perrin, 1934); and Brody,
Musical Kaleidoscope, 52–55. Precedents for my reading of the poem include
Cohn’s and Wroblewski’s.
63. Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica Ficta, 49, translation modified.
64. Large and Weber, Wagnerism in European Culture, 16.
66. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of
Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1985), 273.
67. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 474–75.
68. This reading of Mallarméan poetic practice as contagious defilement suggests,
then, a position that differs from both Terdiman’s reading of Mallarméan resist-
ance as a failed exclusion of dominant discourse and Kristeva’s equation of liter-
ary with political revolution. I would argue that Mallarméan purity, rather than,
as Terdiman contends, a necessarily contradictory attempt to exclude a domi-
nant discourse by which it is always contaminated, is itself an act of contamina-
tion—a language that, in addition to miming a moment that threatens culture,
appropriates the defilements of that moment to contaminate culture. As Minahen
puts it, Mallarmé’s strategy “is to wage a kind of guerilla warfare from within the
bourgeois system of authoritarian values and received ideas, which is the true
object of his attack and which he will attempt to undermine by discreet acts of
linguistic sabotage” (Minahen, “Poetry’s Polite Terrorist,” 65). Taking issue
with Kristeva’s position that “the infraction of formal literary codes of language
is identical to challenging official law,” Stallybrass and White quite rightly con-
tend that “Not only is this very rarely the case, but unless one addresses the
domain of discourse and the degree to which carnivalesque practice has actually
shifted or realigned domains, then the equation is politically meaningless”
(Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 201).
69. The passage of the letter to which I make reference reads as follows:
Je viens de passer une année effrayante: ma Pensée s’est pensée, et est arrivée
à une Conception pure. Tout ce que, par contrecoup, mon être a souffert,
pendant cette longue agonie, est inénarrable, mais, heureusement, je suis par-
faitement mort, et la région la plus impure où mon Esprit puisse s’aventurer
est l’Eternité, mon Esprit, ce solitaire habituel de sa propre Pureté, que n’ob-
scurcit plus même le reflet du Temps.
(I have just passed a terrifying year: my Thought thought itself, and arrived
at a pure Conception. All that my being has consequently suffered during this
long agony is laughable, but fortunately I am perfectly dead, and the most
impure region where my Mind can venture is Eternity, my Mind, this habit-
ual hermit of its own Purity, that no longer even darkens the reflection of
Time.) (C, 240)
70. I use the term hyperessential to designate the accidental, the nondefinitive, or
nonidentical, the inconsistent or contradictory, in short, the detritus of meta-
physical categories. Also relevant would be the irrecoverable différance in signi-
fication signaled by Derrida.
71. “The relation between these two forms of purification, by rite and by medicine,”
writes Parker, “is a delicate one to define. To see the one as a secular transposi-
tion of the other would make it seem secondary, whereas there is, in fact, noth-
ing advanced about the use of purgative drugs. Rather, the two methods both
derive from an undifferentiated idea of purity, physical and metaphysical, neces-
sary both for health and for proper relations with the gods” (Miasma, 215).
73. On idolatry, see Eichrodt, Theology of the Old Testament; and Neusner, Idea of
Purity, 13. Kristeva argues that “if language, like culture, sets up a separation
and, starting with discrete elements, concatenates an order, it does so precisely
by repressing maternal authority and the corporeal mapping that abuts against
them” (Powers of Horror, 72). See Ricoeur, 38ff. on the Greek conception of the
soul exiled in the body.
74. Indeed, this exclusionary gesture might be said to correspond to the pattern
described by Stallybrass and White in which “the ‘top’ attempts to reject and
eliminate the ‘bottom’ for reasons of prestige and status, only to discover, not
only that it is in some way frequently dependent upon that low-Other (in the clas-
sic way that Hegel describes in the master-slave section of the Phenomenology), but
also that the top includes that low symbolically, as a primary eroticized con-
stituent of its own fantasy life” (Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 5). This fig-
ure also appears in Derrida’s analysis of the materiality of writing, and of its
subordination to the purity and presence of the voice. See Chapter 1.
75. While the sonnet form of the “Tombeaux” and the “Hommage” might be said
to visually construct the solidity of a monument, Mallarmé’s more explicit
explorations of the significance of the visual are to be found, for example, in the
“Eventails,” “Oeufs de Pâques,” and “Un Coup de dés,” and the “Hommage”
is, not inappropriately, more remarkable for its aural significance. Quoting a
phrase from Mallarmé’s early writings—“il faut penser de tout son corps—ce
qui donne une pensée pleine et à l’unisson” (one must think with the whole
body, which affords a full, unified thought)—Heather Williams argues that
Mallarmé conceives a form of thought in which sensory experience is no longer
seen in opposition to philosophical thinking. See Heather Williams, “Mallarmé
and the Language of Ideas,” Nineteenth Century French Studies 29, nos. 3 and
4 (2001): 311.
76. Bernard, Mallarmé et la musique, 24. Bernard divides Symbolism’s concern with
music into three phases: “an impressionistic and anti-conceptual Verlainean
phase; an instrumental and scientific phase; and a Wagnerian phase aspiring to
‘total art’” (Mallarmé et la musique, 12).
77. Qtd. ibid., 23.
78. This is to argue against Bernard, who, following Schopenhauer and her own ide-
alist reading of Mallarmé, reads music as non-material, as not “tied to matter,
nor to space, such that it puts us in direct communication with the essence of
things”; she argues that, “escaping the servility of the material,” Mallarmé was
able through music “to liberate himself from the material world” (Mallarmé et
la musique, 38). This view, however, which describes music as philosophy, seems
to overlook the fact that sound is material that makes contact with, and produces
sensation in, the body. For further symbolic readings of the sounds of Mallarmé’s
poetry, see Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 209–63. On Mallarmé’s relation to
other twentieth-century musicians (particularly Pierre Boulez and John Cage),
see Kate van Orden, “On the Side of Poetry and Chaos: Mallarméan Hasard and
Twentieth-Century Music,” in Meetings with Mallarmé, 160–79.
79. Cohn, Poems of Mallarmé, 178.
80. Numbers 19:15.
81. Qtd. Neusner, Idea of Purity, 47.
82. Qtd. ibid., 49.
83. Ibid., 79.
85. Ibid., 42.
86. Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 212.
87. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 95.
Chapter 5: Lamentation and National Identity

1. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983), 24.
2. While my focus is on modern Greece (which, like all nations, exhibits ungeneral-
izable specificities), theoretical studies of nations and nationalism, as well as his-
torical evidence from multiple locales, suggest that these sites of loss are far from
unique to the Greek context. Among the theoretical works considered here are:
Anderson, Imagined Communities; Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983); Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell,
1993); E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme,
Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); John Breuilly,
Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); and
Hugh Seton-Watson, Nations and States: An Enquiry into the Origins of Nations
and the Politics of Nationalism (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1977).
3. Dhmhvtrh~ Catzh~, Tov diplov biblivo (Aqhvna: [Ekdosei~ Kastaniwvth~, 1977)
(Dimitris Hatzis, The Double Book [Athens: Kastaniotis Editions, 1977]).
Hereafter referenced in text; all translations are my own. Throughout this chap-
ter, I have transliterated the title of the book (To diplo biblio), proper names,
Singrafeas (Author), and romeiko (modern Greek).
4. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 7.
5. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 40.
6. Qtd. Kedourie, Nationalism, 45.
7. Qtd. ibid., 47.
8. Qtd. ibid., 48.
9. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 20.
10. “One key factor initially spurring the drive for independence” in Latin America
“was the fear of ‘lower-class’ political mobilizations” (Anderson, Imagined
Communities, 48).
11. Ibid., 99.
12. Hobsbawm contends that “the modest middle strata” perceived themselves to
be threatened “from workers, from foreign states and individuals, from immi-
grants, from the capitalists and financiers so readily identifiable with the Jews,
who were also seen as the revolutionary agitators” (Nations and Nationalism
since 1780, 120–21).
13. See Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1992), 14. Under the Ottoman empire, populations were
grouped into millets based on religion. Greeks belonged to—and dominated—
the millet-i Rum, presided over by the patriarch of the Orthodox Church. See
also Victor Roudometof, “From Rum Millet to Greek Nation: Enlightenment,
Secularization, and National Identity in Ottoman Balkan Society, 1453–1821,”
Journal of Modern Greek Studies 16, no. 1 (1998): 11–48.
14. Straddling these two groups, the Philiki Etairia (Friendly Society), established
in Odessa in 1814 and committed to a militant liberation of Greeks from
Ottoman rule, was comprised largely of “marginalised members of the mercan-
tile diaspora” (Clogg, History of Greece, 32). The Phanariots, influential Greeks
in positions of power in the Ottoman state, largely identified their interests with
the preservation of the empire. Although the patriarchate had actively discour-
aged revolutionary activity, the execution of Patriarch Grigorios was ostensibly
in retaliation for his inability to control it.
15. The decisive battle in establishing the Greek state was fought at Navarino in 1827
by a combined British, French, and Russian fleet that defeated the Ottoman navy.
The ensuing state, which contained less than a third of the Greek inhabitants of
the empire, was established as an independent monarchy in 1832 and was com-
prised of the Peloponnese, southern Roumeli, and a handful of islands.
16. Ernest Renan, “What is a Nation?” in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K.
Bhabha (New York: Routledge, 1990), 19.
17. Strongly influenced by the French revolution, Rigas envisaged establishment of
a republican version of Byzantium. See Clogg, History of Greece, 29–32; and
John S. Koliopoulos and Thanos M. Veremis, Greece the Modern Sequel: From
1831 to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2002), chap. 10.
18. Philhellenic societies, which sprouted up in numerous European cities, collected
funds and raised loans for Greek resistance and nation building. The society in
London, under the influence of Byron, was particularly notable. Numerous
Romantic writers such as Byron, Shelley, Goethe, Schiller, and Hugo rallied to
the Greek cause. Byron died of a fever in April 1824 before he could actually
join the war.
19. Michael Herzfeld, Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern
Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982), 60. See also 60–68; Koliopoulos
and Veremis, Greece the Modern Sequel, chap. 11; and Rodanthi Tzanelli,
“Haunted by the ‘Enemy’ Within: Brigandage, Vlachian/Albanian Greekness,
Turkish ‘Contamination,’ and the Narratives of Greek Nationhood in the
Dilessi/Marathon Affair (1870),” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002):
47–74.
20. Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” in Nation and Narration, 300.
21. Vassilis Lambropoulos, Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of
Modern Greek Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 8. On
the fictionality of such “retroactively possessed” national identities, see Gellner,
Nations and Nationalism, 49; and Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since
1780, 65. Kedourie contends that the performance of “recuperated” ethnicity is
a compensatory formation that represses the reality of loss. The relentless devel-
opments of modernity, he argues, have
worked to debilitate and destroy tribalism and its social and political tradi-
tions. The consequence is an atomized society which seeks in nationalism a
substitute for the old order, now irrevocably lost. Its members find for them-
selves a link with obscure and mysterious kingdoms, seeking solace in archaeo-
logical speculations; or else, in search of the fulfillment which reality denies
them, they re-enact with conscious and deliberate frenzy tribal practices which
anthropologists had surveyed and recorded and which Western rule, by
destroying their social context, had robbed of significance. (Nationalism, 107)
On this interpretation, see also Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 117; and
Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 41.
22. On neohellenism, see Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic
Culture: Inventing National Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1991); Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the
Homeland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Stathis Gourgouris,
Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern
Greece (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); Clogg, History of
Greece, 216–17; Herzfeld, Ours Once More; and Lambropolous, Literature as
National Institution.
23. Qtd. Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 86.
24. Qtd. ibid., 44. Zísimos Lorentzátos, similarly, spoke of “a low voiced super flu-
mina Babilonis whispering through the most secret cells of the nation: in the folk
tales, the dirges, or the songs of our people, of our poets and prose-writers . . . an
indefinite tone of spiritual anguish, a sense of catastrophe harking back to some
lost paradise; the deep awareness of some great tribal longing which remains
unanswered through the ages” (Qtd. Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism, 92).
25. On the formation of the modern Greek literary canon, see Jusdanis, Belated
Modernity; on its appropriations and transformations of Hellenism, see Leontis,
Topographies of Hellenism, Part II; and Mary N. Layoun, ed. Modernism in
Greece? Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement (New York:
Pella, 1990).
26. Qtd. F. Rosen, Bentham, Byron, and Greece: Constitutionalism, Nationalism, and
Early Liberal Political Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 15.
27. Anderson notes the way in which “the new (European) nationalisms almost
immediately began to imagine themselves as ‘awakening from sleep’”—a
metaphor that allowed the intelligentsia “who were becoming conscious of
themselves as Czechs, Hungarians, or Finns to figure their study of Czech,
Magyar, or Finnish languages, folklores, and music as ‘rediscovering’ something
deep-down always known” (Imagined Communities, 195, 196).
28. Herzfeld notes books such as Evlambios’s The Amaranth: the Roses of Hellas
Reborn and Hantseris’s A Collection of the choicest poems of Reborn Greece that
titularly reinforced this metaphor.
29. The teaching of katharevousa was heavily emphasized in the educational system
and was seen as central to the project of developing Hellenic identity. Inaccessible
to most Greek speakers, it deepened class distinctions between the elite and une-
ducated. While various compromises were made with demotiki throughout the
twentieth century, katharevousa remained the official language of state adminis-
tration until 1977. For a brief history of the Greek language controversy, see
Keith Legg and John Roberts, Modern Greece: A Civilization on the Periphery
(Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 96–99; on the role of linguistic purity in Greek
nationalism, see Kedourie, Nationalism, 119; on linguistic nationalism in gen-
eral, see Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 108ff.
30. See Effie F. Athanassopoulou, “An ‘ancient’ landscape: European ideals, archae-
ology, and nation building in early modern Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek
Studies 20, no. 2 (2002): 273–305. The use of antiquity for inculcating national
identity has a fascinating history in Greece. In Makronisos, the concentration
camp set up during the civil war (1946–1949) to reeducate political dissidents,
inmates were obliged to build, and reflect upon, replicas of classical monuments;
a similar strategy was adopted by the Metaxas dictatorship and the junta of
1967–1974. See Yannis Hamilakis, “‘The Other Parthenon’: Antiquity and
National Memory at Makronisos,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 20 (2002):
307–38; and Philip Carabott: “Monumental Visions: The Past in Metaxas’s
Weltanschauung,” in The Usable Past: Greek Metahistories, ed. K. S. Brown and
Yannis Hamilakis (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 23–37.
31. Qtd. Athanassopoulou, “An ‘ancient’ landscape,” 13.
32. The Megali Idea dominated Greek policy from 1843 to 1922 and envisioned
a Greek nation territorially based on Byzantium, with Constantinople as its
capital. Ioannis Kolettis, prime minister from 1844 to 1847, first articulated
the Megali Idea, though its great champion was Eleftherios Venizelos. During the
latter part of the nineteenth century, the state undertook significant educational,
linguistic, and cultural endeavors aimed at inculcating a sense of Hellenic identity
in residents of Macedonia and the Greek populations of Asia minor. While by

1913 Greece had added 70 percent to its original land area, dreams of conquer-
ing Asia minor came to a crushing end with the Turkish recapture of Smyrna in
1921. In what Greeks refer to as “h katastrofhv” (the catastrophe), the newly
nationalized forces of Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) massacred 30,000 Greek and
Armenian Christians and devastated the Christian parts of the city. The ortho-
dox archbishop was hacked to death by a mob. Panic-stricken and destitute
refugees flooded the Aegean islands and mainland.
33. On the lamentations for Constantinople, which date from shortly after the fall
of the city in 1453, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 85–90; on the relation of
these lamentations to irredentism, see Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 128–35.
34. Ibid., 129.
35. Ibid., 93.
36. Qtd. Kedourie, Nationalism, 32.
37. Qtd. ibid., 80.
38. These advantages explain why, in Gellner’s terms, most ethnic groups “go
meekly to their doom, to see their culture (though not themselves as individu-
als) slowly disappear, dissolving into the wider culture of some new national
state. Most cultures,” he writes, “are led to the dustheap of history by industrial
civilization without offering any resistance” (Nations and Nationalism, 47).
39. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 133. Gellner makes a similar
point about the populations of eastern Europe; see Nations and Nationalism,
100–101.
40. Legg and Roberts, Modern Greece, 83. The exchange of populations signifi-
cantly altered Greece’s ethnic makeup. The census of 1928 shows that almost
half the inhabitants of Macedonia were of refugee origin; many of the new
Orthodox arrivals were Turkish speaking. See Renée Hirschon, Heirs of the
Greek Catastrophe: The Social Life of Asia Minor Refugees in Piraeus (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1989); and Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion
Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta, 2006). On the population
exchange contextualized within European immigration history, see Saskia
Sassen, Guests and Aliens (New York: New Press, 1998), 88–90.
41. On national self-reproduction through mass media, see Anderson, Imagined
Communities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 126–27; and Hobsbawm,
Nations and Nationalism since 1780, 142; through national education systems,
see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 121ff.; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism,
34; and Kedourie, Nationalism, 78. On Greek national education, see Yannis
Hamilakis, “‘Learn History!’ Antiquity, National Narrative, and History in Greek
Educational Textbooks,” in The Usable Past, 39–67; and Ephe Avdela, “The
Teaching of History in Greece,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 18, no. 2
(October 2000): 239–53.
42. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer
Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9.
43. Ibid., 58.
44. Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, 57; and Anderson, Imagined Communities,
56.
45. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 43. While Goux has signaled that “the genesis of
the money form represents a theoretical homology to the genesis of political
representation” (39), I am revising his account of the general equivalent as
monarchy to a correlation with the nation (which is also more consistent with his
citations from Marx).
46. Ibid., 33.
47. Ibid., 10.
48. See also de Certeau’s description of the construction of belief in The Practice of
Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 188-89.
50. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 19.
51. Ibid., 18.
52. Ibid., 49–50.
53. I analyze a similar formation in processes of globalization in Rebecca Saunders,
“Uncanny Presence: The Foreigner at the Gate of Globalization,” Comparative
Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 22, no. 2 (2002): 88–98.
54. Herzfeld, Ours Once More, 38. As Herzfeld notes, the Hellenic version of
national identity was more influential in gaining European support for the war
for independence, while the romeic version was crucial in irredentist claims to
Constantinople. See Ours Once More, 18–21. He also notes that “When a Greek
wishes to make an affectionate or a disparaging comment on some aspect of the
national culture—in other words, on something very familiar—the object is appro-
priately described as romeiko; this is equally apt for the ills of the bureaucracy, the
crafty antics of the shadow-theater antihero Karagiozis, or the stereotype of
the sexually aggressive male” (Ours Once More, 20).
55. Similarly, the “Diotima” of the novel (Anastasia), rather than inspiring profound
thought in the Singrafeas, functions as an inspiration to defeat. On Hatzis’s novel
as a critique of nostalgia for a classical past, see Mary Layoun, Travels of a Genre:
The Modern Novel and Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1990), chap. 5.
56. Layoun reads the provisionality of Hatzis’s narrative as an exposure and disinte-
gration of the individual, bourgeois subject. See Travels of a Genre, chap. 5.
57. Perhaps most radically, Hatzis’s witnesses declare the nation of the romeiko
non-existent: it is atopic, a nowhere, a conspicuous absence. Kostas’s father, for
example, advising him to leave the country and seek work elsewhere, says sim-
ply, “De;n ei`nai tovpo~ aujtov~” (This isn’t a country/place) (33). And the place
to which Skouroyannis returns after his years in exile is similarly void: “Kai;
tovte~ oJ Skourogiavnnh~, gurivzonta~ sto; Ntomprivnobo pouv’ce ejrhmwvsei,
mporou`se pia; na; to; xevrei pw;~ oJ tovpo~ aujto;~ ei[tan oJ tovpo~ th`~ teleutaiva~,
th`~ teleiwtikh`~ ejrhmiva~. ’Anuvparkto~ tovpo~. Pw;~ ei[kosi crovnia
paideuvthke, ojneireuvthke, s’aujto;n to;n ajnuvparkto tovpo na; ftavsei” (And then
Skouroyannis, returning to Dobrinovos, which had been deserted, could now see
that this place was the last place, the last solitude. A non-existent place. That
twenty years he had struggled, dreamed, only to arrive at this non-existent
place) (137).
58. Bhabha, “DissemiNation,” 312.
60. Goux, Symbolic Economies, 50.
61. Narrating his life in Stuttgart and refusing to generalize, Kostas advises the
Singrafeas to solicit other Greeks as informants: “phvgaine brev~ tou~ –mporei` na;
sou` pou`n aujtoi; perissovtera gia; to; romeviko pou; zhta`~. ’Egw; –gia; mevna sou`
levw.” (Go find them. They can tell you these things about the romeiko that you
ask. Me, I speak for myself.) (63).
62. This sense of the nation as foreign entity is reinforced by witnesses’ evident sense
of regional identity. Skouroyannis, for example, describes himself as a Dobrinovitis
(not a romeiko), and Anastasia perceives herself to be moving to a different land
when she migrates to a different part of the country.
63. See, for example, 183, 184, 202. Greece has long been a labor exporter; in the
1960s, Greece became a major labor-supplying country to Northern Europe, a
trend that peaked in the early 1970s. Approximately one-fifth of the population
has sought work or education outside of Greece. Eighty-six percent of Greek
immigrants in Europe are in Germany. See Sassen, Guests and Aliens, chap 6; and
Layoun, Travels of a Genre, 166. Because Greece was formed as a nation largely
in the absence of industrialization and the attendant social factors out of which,
according to Gellner, nations originally emerged, it has been characterized by
a series of losses similar to many nations of the “developing” or “third” world: a
deficit in relation to the concept of nationality and in relation to “first world” or
industrialized nations, as well as a literal loss of its work force.
64. Hatzis’s witnesses also repeatedly employ figures of uprootedness, emptying out,
and non-existence. Kostas, for example, describes himself as orphaned, identifies
with stray animals, and insists on his own social, economic, and emotional vacu-
ity. “Ta; logavriase~ povsa de;n e[cw;” he says to the Singrafeas, “Ta; qhma`sai;;
Tivpota de;n evcw. Kai; mporei`~, loipovn, na; mou` pei`~ ejsuv, poiov~ ei`mai, poiov~
mporei` nav’mai —e{na~ a[nqrwpo~ pou; de;n e[cei tivpota;” (Have you accounted
for how much I don’t possess? Do you remember? I don’t have anything. And
can you, then, tell me who I am, who I can be —a man who has nothing?) (87).
In Anastasia’s testimony, this emptiness is explicitly contrasted with national sen-
timent; when she moves to a new region, it is not longing for a homeland that
she feels, but a melancholy over the absence of any sentiment: “De;n ei[tan hJ
nostalgiva tou` dikou` th~ tou` tovpou. Gi’ aujto; to; livgo pou; mevnei sto;n a[nqr-
wpo — gi’ aujto; melagcovlhse.” (It wasn’t nostalgia for her homeland. For that
little that remains in people—for this she grew melancholy) (162).
65. Coerced declarations of repentance, renunciations, and denunciations of com-
rades had been instituted by the Metaxas dictatorship (1936–1941) as a way of
combating communist opposition. This practice was intensified during the civil
war (1946–1949), which saw communist-led groups, particularly the EAM
(which had mounted by far the most significant resistance to the occupation),
struggling for power against right-wing forces, former fascists, and monarchists.
The obsession of Greece’s post-civil war governments became the containment
of communism.
66. Layoun signals that Hatzis himself (like nearly two hundred thousand of his
compatriots) was exiled as a result of the civil war and that the role of Greek
resistance fighters in WWII remained officially unacknowledged by the govern-
ment until six years after the publication of To diplo biblio and “some thirty-five
years after Hatzis’s first novel, E fotia (The Fire), which recounted the Greek
resistance to Fascist occupation” (Travels of a Genre, 165). Hatzis remained in
exile for 26 years; approximately one hundred and fifty thousand refugees of the
civil war still remain exiled.
Chapter 6: Lamentation and Gender

1. Tahar Ben Jelloun, L’enfant de sable (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985). Hereafter ref-
erenced in text. All translations are my own, but I have consulted Alan Sheridan’s
for guidance. See Tahar Ben Jelloun, The Sand Child, trans. Alan Sheridan
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
2. This name merits consideration as allusive to both the Madinat Al-Zahra, the
tenth-century caliphate of Andalucía built by Abd al-Rahman III and, at least as
legend has it, named after his beloved, and Zarah Leander, the German actress
and chanteuse, gay icon, and role model for generations of transvestite and drag
performers. On the latter, see Alice A. Kuzniar, “Zarah Leander and Transgender
Specularity,” Film Criticism 23 (1999): 74–93.
3. The French administration militarily occupied the medina of Fez, dissolved the
Parti National, exiled nationalist leaders Allal El Fassi and Mohammed
Ouazzani, and declared that reformist movements would be hunted down and
crushed. See Bernard Lugan, Histoire du Maroc: des origins à nos jours (Paris:
Critérion, 1992), 256–60; and Guy Delanoë, Lyautey, Juin, Mohammed V: fin
d’un protectorat (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), 195; the larger economic and
social scene is sketched in C.R. Pennell, Morocco since 1830: A History (New
York: New York University Press, 2000), 239–53. Similar scenes transpired in
Rabat, Casablanca, and Salé. Water rights were one of the first issues around
which Moroccan nationalism coalesced. See Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 211–16;
and William A. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco (New
York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 121–23.
4. In an attempt to crush the power of the newly formed independence party,
Istiqlal, the Résidence Général accused its leaders (absurdly) of collusion with the
Axis and arrested A. Balfrej, Mohamed Lyazidi, Ahmed Mekkour, Hachemi Filali,
and Abdelaziz Ben Driss. The action was clearly a reprisal for the Manifeste de
l’Indépendance which Istiqlal leaders had presented to the sultan, the consulates of
Great Britain and the United States, and the Résidence Général. The manifeste
rejected a reform of the protectorate “treaty,” and, referencing the Atlantic
Charter, demanded independence. See Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref aperçu sur le
Maroc avant le protectorat, sous le protectorat et les aspirations du peuple maro-
cain (NP: Bureau de Documentation et d’Information, ND); Marvine Howe,
“The Birth of the Moroccan Nation,” The Middle East Journal 10, no. 1
(1956): 1–16; Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 209–17; and Pennell, Morocco
since 1830, 264–68. A copy of the manifesto can be found in Lugan, Histoire du
Maroc, 265–66.
5. Lisa Lowe, “Literary Nomadics in Francophone Allegories of Postcolonialism:
Pham Van Ky and Tahar Ben Jelloun,” Yale French Studies 82 (1993): 43–61.
Lowe analyzes these endings in terms of (anti)colonialism, nativism, and
nomadism. The three narrations are rich in allegorical detail. In Salem’s narra-
tive, Ahmed/Zahra’s transformation into a caged circus freak is reminiscent of
the exhibition of Africans at European colonial expositions; his/her loss of lan-
guage associates him/her with the barbarian and the infantile—standard images
of the colonized. His/her method of simultaneous homocide and suicide is,
in a perverse reworking of the “demonstration effect,” appropriated from the
Indochinese war. Amar’s narrative is replete with images of self-negation—of,
for example, mirrors that don’t return an image—which figure the erasure of
indigenous identities under colonization, or the méconnaissance of Fanon’s
“split self.” Fatouma’s first-person narrative of travel, gender crossing, and imag-
ined voyages, while shaped by historical events and material conditions, is in
many ways a fantasy of freedom, boundary transgression, and self-determination.
On the latter, see John D. Erickson, “Veiled Woman and Veiled Narrative in
Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sandchild,” boundary 2 20, no. 1 (1993): 55–59.
Wishing to maintain Ahmed’s gender ambiguity, I retain the awkward construc-
tions of “he/she” and “his/her” throughout this chapter.
6. See Lowe, “Literary Nomadics,” 56.
7. On the narrative structure of L’Enfant de sable, see Mustapha Marrouchi,
“Breaking Up/Down/Out of the Boundaries: Tahar Ben Jelloun,” trans.
Patricia Geesey, Research in African Literatures 21, no. 4 (1990): 71–83;
Robert Elbaz, Tahar Ben Jelloun ou l’inassouvissement du désir narrative (Paris:
Editions L’Harmattan, 1996), 44–66; and Valérie Orlando, Nomadic Voices of
Exile: Feminine Identity in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb (Athens: Ohio
University Press, 1999), chap. 2. On the connection with Borges, see Marie
Fayad, “Borges in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de sable: Beyond Intertextuality,”
The French Review 67, no. 2 (1993): 291–99; and Robert Harvey, “Purloined
Letters: Intertextuality and Intersexuality in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Sand
Child,” in Articulations of Difference: Gender Studies and Writing in French, ed.
Dominique D. Fisher and Lawrence R. Schehr (Stanford, CA: Stanford
8. On the centrality of producing male children to Maghrebian masculinity, see
Lahoucine Ouzgane, “Masculinity as Virility in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Work,”
Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 4 (1997): 1–13. On the rela-
tions of compulsory heterosexuality, patriarchy, and national identity in the
Maghreb, see Jarrod Hayes, Queer Nations: Marginal Sexualities in the Maghreb
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On gender role expectations in
Morocco, see Daisy Hilse Dwyer, Images and Self-Images: Male and Female
in Morocco (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978).
9. On the number seven, see Elbaz, Tahar Ben Jelloun, 45–48; and Erickson,
“Veiled Woman,” 63.
10. On the gendered division of space in North Africa, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyond
the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987), chap. 8; and Dwyer, Images and Self-Images, chap. 2.
11. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York:
Routledge, 1993), 8.
12. See Rebecca Saunders, ed., The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary
Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), chap 3.
13. “Gender identity disorder” is classified as mental illness by the DSM-IV. See
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV, 4th ed.
(Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994), 532–38.
14. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); and Abdul R.
JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial
Difference in Colonialist Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 78–106.
On the pathologization of natives, see also Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the
Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove, 1963); Sander Gilman,
Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1985); Chistopher Miller, Blank Darkness:
Africanist Discourse in French (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986);

and Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of
Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995). Such pathologization has also made its way into readings of the
novel. Odile Cazenave, for example, judges Ahmed’s transgendered identity as
a resistance to “the natural order,” a species of “infirmity,” and a a falsification
of his/her “true subjectivity.” See Odile Cazenave, “Gender, Age, and Narrative
Transformations in L’Enfant de sable by Tahar Ben Jelloun,” The French Review
64, no. 3 (1991): 437–50.
15. JanMohamed, “Economy of Manichean Allegory,” 80.
16. Ibid., 83.
17. Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled,” in Studies in a Dying Colonialism, trans.
Adolfo Gilly (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965), 35.
18. Ibid., 37.
19. Elsewhere I analyze ostensible differences between gender and colonization,
distinguish Ben Jelloun’s proposition from feminist arguments on the “double
colonization” of women, and consider whether Ben Jelloun’s proposition
untenably inflates the meaning of colonization in a manner that obliterates its
historical and political specificities. See Rebecca Saunders, “Decolonizing the
Body: Gender, Nation, and Narration in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’enfant de sable,
Research in African Literatures 37, no. 4 (2006): 143–44.
20. Acknowledging the necessary error of such a focus, I am concentrating here on
the French protectorate (1912–1956), established by the Treaty of Fez in 1912.
However, it should be recognized that both Spain (officially) and Britain (unof-
ficially) had their hand in imperial control of Moroccan commerce and adminis-
tration, and that such control began long before 1912. Earlier manifestations of
this influence include the 1904 Entente Cordiale between France and Britain
and the 1906 Conference of Algeciras. The history of the Spanish protectorate
(1913–1956), as well as its relation to the French regime, is well elaborated by
Pennell, Morocco since 1830.
21. The nature of the protectorate, while theorized and heavily inflected by
Maréchal Lyautey, its first Resident General, was redefined on the ground by his
successors, generals in the field, and French colons. By the time of the events of
1937 alluded to above, for example, the protectorate as governed by Charles
Noguès was a very different creature than that conceived by Lyautey. A good
review of the transformations effected by Lyautey’s successors can be found in
Daniel Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat français au Maroc, 3 vols.
(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1988), chap. 4.
22. We should also bear in mind the instability in the entities we are calling “France”
and “Morocco.” In numerous instances, French officers in the field acted inde-
pendently of the dictates of the Résidence Général; in equally numerous instances,
the Résidence Général acted independently of instructions from Paris. There was
also significant contention regarding Morocco throughout the period of the pro-
tectorate between the Quai d’Orsay, the président de la republique, the ministre
de l’étranger, the colonial lobby, and French public opinion. Similarly, national-
ism in Morocco was less a unified political program than a contestatory struggle
between actors with very different ideas about the identity of the nation. Many
Moroccans and other Africans were, moreover, fighting on the side of the
“French.” On such collaboration, see Moshe Gershovich, “Collaboration and
‘Pacification’: French Conquest, Moroccan Combatants, and the Transformation

of the Middle Atlas,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle
East 21, no. 2 (2004): 139–46.
23. Qtd. Alan Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: Protectorate Administration, 1912–1925
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 40–41. France’s first Resident
General in Morocco, a disciple of Joseph-Simon Gallieni, and among the most
renowned of French colonial administrators, Maréchal Lyautey was also known
as a military theorist who argued for military officers to play an active social role
in France and the colonies. See Maréchal Lyautey, Le rôle social de l’officier
(Paris: Christian de Bartillat, 1994). He was general commissioner of the
1931–1932 Exposition Colonial, which, as Miller contends, was largely an arti-
fact of Lyautey’s ideology and career. See Christopher L. Miller, Nationalists
and Nomads: Essays on Francophone African Literature and Culture (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68–69. He was also a royalist aristocrat con-
temptuous of the bourgeoisie, whose vision of North Africa was heavily influ-
enced by the Arabian Nights and Romantic Orientalism. See Hoisington,
Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco; Scham, Lyautey in Morocco; Daniel
Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat; Benoist-Méchin, Lyautey
l’Africain ou le rêve immolé (Lausanne, Switzerland: Clairefontaine, 1966); and
André Maurois, Marshal Lyautey, trans. Hamish Miles (London: Bodley Head,
1931). For a trenchant indictment of Lyautey’s “politics of a smile and tea,” see
the 1945 text of exiled nationalist Mohamed Hassan Ouazzani, Le Protectorat
crime de lèse-nation: Le cas du Maroc (Paris: Fondation Mohamed Hassan
Ouazzani, 1992).
24. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 33. All translations from this text are mine.
25. On defilement and hybridity, see chap. 4 above. On fitna (disorder or chaos)
and its gender entanglements, see Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female
Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1987), chaps. 1 and 2; and Orlando, Nomadic Voices, 80–81.
26. It should be emphasized that in neither of these cases is the represented threat
not “real.” In pre-colonial Morocco, the Makhzen operated through an intri-
cate system of caïds, patronage, and reciprocity in which rivalries against the sul-
tan were not uncommon. Similarly, a parent guiding a child into the gender
system is protecting him/her from very real contempt and violence aimed at the
differently gendered. On the former, see Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 98–100,
114–15, 126–29. On the latter, see Steven J. Onken, “Conceptualizing
Violence Against Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Intersexual, and Transgendered
People,” Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 8, no. 3 (1998): 5–24; and
Patrcia Gagné and Richard Tewksbury, “Conformity Pressures and Gender
Resistance Among Transgendered Individuals,” Social Problems 45, no. 1
(February 1998): 81–101.
27. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 203.
28. Qtd. ibid., 203. See also Ouazzani, Le protectorat, chaps. 1–3.
29. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 29. Lyautey was particularly influenced by
British examples in India and Nigeria. On the political structure of the protec-
torate, see Abdellah Ben Mlih, Structures politiques du Maroc colonial (Paris:
L’Harmattan, 1990); and Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref aperçu. Pennell notes that even
in the “Islamic ministries, Moroccans had little control, for a parallel administra-
tion, the Secrétariat-Général du Gouvernment Chérifien, shadowed them and
ran the technical services. Every department of modern government—finance,

public works, health, communications, education, justice, agriculture, land use
(Eaux-et-Forêts), commerce, industry and mines, labour, social affairs, public
security and ancient monuments—was run by French administrators. The two
systems ran in parallel and the boundaries between them were the boundaries of
modernity” (Morocco since 1830, 162). See also Hoisington, Lyautey and the
French Conquest of Morocco, 48–53; and Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, chap. 2.
31. This is the precise wording of the treaty: “les réformes administratives, judi-
caires, scolaires, économiques, financiers et militaries que le Gouvernement
Français jugera utile d’introduire sur le territoire marocain.” Qtd. ibid., 17.
32. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 29. All translations from this text are mine. See
also ibid., 224; and Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco,
48–49.
33. Indeed, this was increasingly a rhetorical, rather than an actual, distinctiveness.
By 1944, the concerted Moroccan position was that France had substituted
direct rule for protection. See Ouazzani, Le protectorat, 15; Parti de l’Istiqlal,
Bref apercu, 11; Howe,“The Birth of the Moroccan Nation”; Delanoë, Fin d’un
protectorat, 27–33; and Mohamed Lahbabi, Le Gouvernement marocain à l’aube
du vigntième siècle (Rabat, Morocco: Les Éditions Maghrébines, 1975).
34. Memo to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, October 1917. Qtd. Hoisington,
Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 51.
35. See Ibid., 46–47.
36. This letter dates from 1902, when Lyautey was serving under Gallieni in
Madagascar. Qtd. ibid., 20.
37. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 25. See also Lyautey’s 1922 lecture to the Institut
Colonial, qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 40–41.
38. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 130. See also Miller, Nations and Nomads, 68; and
Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 7.
39. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 130. Lyautey saw this violence as regenerative
destruction, in terms similar to that of New South spokesmen and not entirely
alien to Nietzsche. In Rabat, opening the third trade fair, he opined that “While
the terrible European War is heaping up ruins and daily destroying the work of
centuries, the grandeur and beauty of the colonial war—which our troops are
engaged in here—is that soon, on the very day following the cessation of fight-
ing, it begins to create life, and instead of leaving the earth dead behind it wher-
ever it goes, it makes it productive, and cities and harvests arise, thus making
available all sorts of possibilities for the future in regions until now bogged
down in inertia” (Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 34).
40. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 27. As Hoisington
points out, Lyautey essentially developed “a new language of conquest to
describe the army’s colonial mission” (Lyautey and the French Conquest of
Morocco, 16). On the diversity of fronts through which this “penetration” was
enacted, see Ben Mlih, Structures politiques, 192–204.
41. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 224. See also Ouazzani’s polemic against the
euphemism “pénetration pacifique,” Le protectorat, 90–92.
42. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 73. See also
Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 214–33.
43. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 92.
44. Qtd. Scham, Lyautey in Morocco, 118. For a Moroccan account of expropria-
tion, see Ouzzani, Le protectorat, 66–69.
45. These are Lyautey’s terms for the supervisory functions of the protectorate.
46. In “Decolonizing the Body,” I develop this analysis via three similarities in the
work of Butler and Bhahba: their conceptions of gender and culture as effects of
regulatory practices; their elaborations of the concept of performativity; and
their location of a transformative space of agency in iterative practices. See
“Decolonizing the Body,” 142–43.
47. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 110. On the remaking
of Rabat, see Hoisington’s excellent analysis in chap 6. Hoisington notes that
“Almost everywhere in the Rabat that Lyautey remade and Frenchmen ruled,
Moroccans lost prestige, influence, and authority as well as land and money”
(Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 134).
49. See Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 158–60 and chap. 6.
50. Ibid., 159.
51. Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat, 42. All translations from this text
are mine. This (mis)conception led to the rather disastrous “Berber policy” that,
institutionalized in the Berber dahirs of 1914 and 1930, assumed Berbers could
be de-Islamicized (if not Christianized), resulted in a war that lasted thirty years,
and created an issue around which Moroccan nationalism could solidify. On the
1930 dahir, see Parti de l’Istiqlal, Bref apercu, 30ff.; and Howe, “The Birth of
the Moroccan Nation.”
52. Qtd. Hoisington, Lyautey and the French Conquest of Morocco, 6.
53. Rivet, Lyautey et l’institution du protectorat, 36.
54. Pennell, Morocco since 1830, 177. On the divisiveness of colonial education, see
also Ouazzani, Le protectorat, 69–82.
55. Pashas and caïds in such positions opposed independence because it represented
for them a significant loss of power.
56. On these associations, see Saunders, Concept of the Foreign, chaps. 3 and 7. In
medieval hermeneutics, scandal—derived from Hellenic skandalon (snare, trap,
or cause of moral stumbling)—signifies a point of obscurity, ambiguity, or
exegetical difficulty.
57. This desire is evinced in Amar’s version of the journal. See 157.
58. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat, 103.
59. Ibid., 113–14.
60. See Zaki M’Barek, Resistance et armée de libération: portée politique liquidation
1953–1958 (Rabat: n.p., 1973).
61. Numerous readings of L’enfant de sable focus on the treatment of the
Maghrebian, Arab, or Islamic woman. See, for example, Marrouchi, “Breaking
Up/Down/Out”; Erickson, “Veiled Woman”; and Abbes Maazaoui, “L’Enfant
de sable et La Nuit sacrée ou le corps tragique,” The French Review 69, no. 1
(1995): 68–77.
62. Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 132–33.
63. Ibid., 135.
64. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge, 1992), 5.
65. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 11.
66. Pennell is particularly helpful at untangling this dense web of nationalist con-
tention; see Morocco since 1830, chap. 6. See also M’Barek, Resistance et armée
de libération; Howe, Birth of the Moroccan Nation”; and Charles-André Julien,
“Morocco: The End of an Era,” Foreign Affairs 34, no. 2 (1956): 199–211.
67. Qtd. Delanoë, Fin d’un protectorat , 17.
69. This is Bouabid’s characterization, qtd. ibid., 211.
70. Qtd. ibid., 178. I do not mean to suggest either that pre-colonial Morocco was
democratic or that post-independence Morocco lived up to the imperatives of
radical democracy, but merely that the colonial argument for the necessity of the
protectorate as well for the destruction of independence movements was based
on the regulation of disorder.
71. Qtd. ibid., 216–17.
INDEX
abreaction, 12, 16–17, 46, 182, 190 authenticity, 139, 149

Absalom, Absalom!, xii, 83–100, 102, of lamentations, 46–48, 190
103–5, 172, 196–98, 200 Martin Heidegger, 34–38, 60,
See also demonstrative pronouns; 67–68, 80–82
dispossession; New South; and trauma, 19–23, 25, 183
possession; privatives Walter Benjamin, 63–64
absence, x, 10–11, 39, 65–66, 180 Ayers, Edward L., 103, 201–2
Abu-Lughod, Lila, 52, 191
adequation, 46, 78 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 111
See also equivalence barbarians, 8–9, 24, 53, 55–58, 73–74,
affect, 18, 22, 57, 84, 96, 174, 176, 182 78, 116, 118, 127, 136–37,
See also mood 176, 218
aletheia, 38, 95, 110 Ben Jelloun, Tahar, 147, 149, 154,
See also truth, formulations of 156–57, 163–64, 169–70, 172,
Alexander, Jeffrey, 15 174, 220
Alexiou, Margaret, 46, 51, 61, 187, See also L’Enfant de sable
189, 191–92, 194 Benjamin, Walter, 63–64
alexithymia, 18, 182 Berman, Art, 10, 180
Algeria, 13–14, 25–27 Berman, Marshall, 8, 179
alienation, 2, 6, 18, 35, 38, 67 Bernard, Suzanne, 124, 211
ambiguity, 35, 123, 165–70, 207 Bersani, Leo, 8, 179
See also ambivalence; defilement, betrayal, 20, 40, 47–48
philosophical; indistinction Bhabha, Homi, xi, 47, 64–65, 133,
ambivalence, 66, 166–70, 224 143, 157
See also uncertainty Blanchot, Maurice, 80, 81, 186–87
Anderson, Benedict, 130, 131–32, 138, body, 14, 19, 98–99, 105, 175–76,
143 198, 210
anger, x, xii, xiv, xv, 33, 50, 52, 77–80, gendered, 147–56, 158, 160–70,
129, 173–74, 176 172, 222
anomie, ix, 2, 6, 67, 175 of language, 123–26
antiphony, xi, 45, 61–63, 68, 71, 130, and nationalism, 142–43
140–46 and possession, 89–91, 198
antithesis, 61–62, 67, 83, 89, 104 role in lamentation, 45, 52–54,
anxiety, 6, 35–38, 65, 67–68, 73, 56–57, 61, 64, 70, 73, 113
80–81, 129, 173, 175 Bourdieu, Pierre, 209
See also dread Bourke, Angela, 46, 192
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 77–78, 126, 196 Bowie, Malcolm, 115, 205
Aristotle, 19, 32, 59, 75, 77–79 Bradbury, Malcolm, 9–10, 179
augenblick, 59–60, 80, 193 Brown, Laura, 26–27, 183
226 INDEX
Butler, Judith, xi, 47, 64–65, 151, 163–64 decolonization, x, xiii, 147–51, 166, 170
Byron, George (Lord), 132–33, 172, 213 See also colonization
defilement, xiii, 40, 56, 60, 109–11,
Calinescu, Matei, 2, 10, 67 162, 174, 177, 202, 203, 209
capitalism, 3, 4, 7, 9, 27, 78, 130, 178 and contagion, 112–16
Caraveli-Chaves, Anna, 49, 55, 190–92 philosophical, 112, 115–18, 123–27,
Caruth, Cathy, 19, 21, 182–83 206, 210
catastrophe, xiv, 14, 18, 41–42, 47, 51, uses of, 117–23
56, 85, 92–94, 96–97, 99, 102, See also indistinction; Stéphane
106, 117, 131–32, 42, 172–73, Mallarmé; purity
175, 196, 202, 213–14 demonstrative pronouns, 86, 87–92,
See also crisis 99, 198
catharsis, 16–17, 41, 46, 171, 174, 182 Derrida, Jacques, x, 31, 38, 63, 139,
Certeau, Michel de, 85, 198 157, 174
Chianis, Sotirios, 48 deathliness in signs, x, 39–43
Christianity, 30, 52–53, 78, 132–33, différance, 41–42, 210
136, 185, 189, 214–15, 222 interior voice, 42–43, 177
Civil War nostalgia, 41, 64, 186
American, 92–93, 96, 103–4, 196 self-presence, 39–40, 42–43
writing, 41–43, 210
Greek, 58, 141, 144, 214, 217
See also signification
colonization, 4, 9, 18, 68, 156–63,
Descartes, René, 123, 205
166–67, 170, 175, 176, 218–22
desire, xiv–xv, 86–87, 93, 100–1, 129,
and gender, 147–55, 168–69, 172
135, 156–57, 174, 196
and genre, 152–53, 155
Dimmock, Wai Chee, 32, 185
Manichean structure of, 151–52,
discipline, 2, 23, 27, 206
173, 219–20
disciplinary society, 3, 4, 12, 16,
and “normalcy,” 24–27
27, 35, 67, 77–78, 110, 176
and trauma, 13–15, 181
of gender, 152–56, 158, 160,
See also decolonization; Morocco
174, 176
contagion, xiii, 16, 113
of laments, 52–54
and mood, 45, 53, 55, 68, 75, 79 See also pathologized groups
semantic, xiii, 112, 114–17, 123, dispossession, xii–xiii, xiv, 74, 83–92,
127, 209 97, 101, 105, 196–97
See also defilement See also possession; privatives
creative destruction, xiv, 28–31, 67, dissociation, 17, 21–22, 35, 41, 47,
94–96, 118, 206 55–56, 70, 184
crisis, x, 5, 10, 16, 18–20, 34, 37, 46, See also trauma
76, 90–91, 112, 116, 117, 120, distinction, 11, 122–23, 176, 209
130–31, 140–42, 162, 169, 172, See also Pierre Bourdieu
174, 177 Douglas, Mary, 110–11, 115, 203–5
See also catastrophe dread, x, xii, xv, 6, 7, 50, 52, 60, 80–82,
83, 111, 176, 186–87, 203
Darwin, Charles, 4, 9 See also anxiety
death, xv, 7, 37, 39–40, 43, 45–46, 48, dual-memory hypothesis, 21, 22–23,
50–52, 54–57, 59, 61–63, 69, 70, 25, 124
73, 80, 113, 116, 129, 132–33, duBois, Page, 109–10, 203
163–65, 169, 173, 175–76, 190 Dubois, Paul-Charles, 12, 20
See also lamentation; mortuary Dujardin, Edouard, 112, 206–7, 209
metaphors Durkheim, Émile, ix, 6, 30
INDEX 227
elegy, 50–51, 96, 118, 129, 141, 175, freedom, 81–82, 96, 106, 111, 137,
189–91, 193, 197–98 144–45, 158, 202, 218
L’Enfant de sable, xiii, 147–55, 160–70, Freud, Sigmund, ix, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11–12,
174–76, 219–20 16–17, 20, 23, 41, 42, 75–76, 182,
See also gender; Morocco 183, 184, 207
the Enlightenment
the autonomous subject, 4–5, 9, 18, Garber, Marjorie, 167, 223
24, 86 Gellner, Ernest, 130–31, 138, 213, 217
and nationalism, 130–31 gender, 156, 167, 176
reason, 2, 3–4, 5, 12, 24, 27, 67, 175 as colonization, 147–55, 168–69, 172
epitaphios logos, xi, 51, 129 and genre, 152–53, 160
equivalence, 32–34, 41, 50, 72, 78, and lamentation, xi, xii, xiii, xv,
137–43, 158, 172, 190, 215 51–52, 54–59, 63, 160–66,
See also adequation 169, 185
Erikson, Kai, 18 as protective envelope, 154, 158,
European culture, 7–9, 14–15, 24, 30, 169, 221
45, 78, 134–37, 141, 151–52, 155, transgression, 58–59, 147–55, 158,
159, 173, 185, 216 161–68
excess, 16–17, 52, 67, 102–7 and trauma, 12–13, 20, 23–27, 52,
Eyerman, Ron, 15 54–55, 173–74, 185
See also L’Enfant de sable
false memory syndrome, 20, 22 Giddens, Anthony, 3, 4, 6, 7, 18, 31,
Fanon, Frantz, 13–15, 18, 25–26, 68, 45, 54, 67
153, 181, 184, 218 Gilroy, Paul, 9, 179
See also race; racism Goux, Jean-Joseph, 138–39, 215
Faulkner, William, xii–xiii, 83, 86, 87, Grady, Henry, 95–101, 199–200
89, 92–95, 98, 104, 172, 174–75, Greece
196, 200, 202 and architecture, 135–36, 214
See also Absalom, Absalom!; demon- communism, 58, 141, 144, 214, 217
strative pronouns; negation; laments, xi, 45, 48–49, 51, 52–54,
privatives 57–58, 61–63, 65, 69, 70, 71,
Felman, Shoshana, 47, 190 73, 86, 92, 93, 110, 133–37,
Felski, Rita, 5, 178 190, 213, 215
femininity, xi, xii, xv, 51, 53, 54–56, 58, language (katharevousa), 135, 137,
74, 78, 150, 154, 164, 167, 173, 141, 214
175, 185, 192, 204 Maniat women, 48–49, 57, 63, 73
See also hysteria; lamentation Megali Idea (Great Idea), 136–37, 214
Ferenczi, Sándor, 17, 18, 19, 23–24, 184 nationalism, 132–43, 172, 174–75,
foreign, xiii, 24–25, 32, 34, 36–37, 42, 212–17
56, 73–77, 80, 112–18, 120, neohellenism, 134–37, 172, 175,
122–23, 127, 129, 162, 167, See also Civil War, Greek; nationalism;
174–76, 185, 192, 204 To diplo biblio
See also contagion, semantic Grima, Benedicte, 191–93
Foucault, Michel, 3, 4, 27, 35, 114, 151
See also also discipline, disciplinary Hanchard, Michael, 9, 179
society; pathologized groups Harvey, David, 178
France, 153–60, 162–63, 168–69, 174, Hatzis, Kostas, 130, 140–6, 172,
220–22 175–76, 216, 217
See also Stéphane Mallarmé See also To diplo biblio; Greece
228 INDEX
Heidegger, Martin, x, 24, 42, 60, Islam, 52, 58, 132, 156, 159, 189,
75, 203 191–92, 222
and anxiety, 35–38, 67, 73, 80–82,
203 Janet, Pierre, 18, 21, 24–25, 41, 55, 116
“being-towards-death,” x, 37, 80 JanMohamed, Abdul, 151–52, 219–20
breakdown, 34, 67–68, 80, 117, Johnson, Frederic, 178
185–86 justice, 32–34, 41, 72, 78
das Man, 34–35, 37, 60
See also mood Kardiner, Abram, 13, 19, 21
Herget, Winfried, 201 Kedourie, Elie, 130–31, 213
Herman, Judith, 12–13, 26–27, 32, 68, Kerewsky-Halpern, Barbara, 190
183–84
Kierkegaard, Søren, 6, 35, 60, 64, 75,
Herzfeld, Michael, 133, 136–37, 140,
80, 81, 111, 203
213, 216
See also anxiety; freedom; repetition
Hill, Benjamin Harvey, 95, 101, 200
Hobsbawm, Eric, 131, 137, 212 Kirillova, Okkuli, 66
Hoisington, William, 159, 222–23 Kristeva, Julia, 60, 67, 75, 76, 111–13,
Holst-Warhaft, Gail, 51, 57–58, 190–93 122, 126, 193, 203–6, 209–10
Husserl, Edmund, 39–40, 42
hysteria, 11–12, 20, 23, 24, 54–55, LaCapra, Dominick, 11, 39, 63, 180,
175, 183 182–83
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 207, 209
identity, 5, 9, 15, 56, 65, 67, 77, Lambropoulos, Vassilis, 134, 213
85–95, 98–99, 102–4, 109–10, lament traditions
114–15, 120, 127, 129–30, Arab, 48–49, 58, 59, 68–70, 193
133–46, 149, 155, 157, 168,
Eastern European, 45, 47, 65
176–78, 216, 220
Baltic, 45
incomprehensibility, 18, 21, 37, 46–48,
56, 61–62, 65–66, 74–75, 106–7, Bulgarian, 65, 69
114–16, 133, 166, 169–70, 174 Egyptian, 50, 52
in Absalom, Absalom!, 83, 104, Finnish, 45, 49, 190
186–87 Greek, See also Greece
of moment of lamentation, 34, 59–60, Hebrew, 49, 50, 56, 61–63, 66, 67,
73, 76, 78, 113, 124–26, 161, 68, 71, 74, 84, 110, 113,
164, 173 191, 194
Stéphane Mallarmé, 112–17, Irish, 45, 46, 49, 52, 59, 69, 72, 74,
124–26, 175–76, 205 192, 193
indistinction, 11, 122–23, 174, 209 Moroccan, 48, 52, 59
See also distinction; Pierre Bourdieu North African, 45, 48, 50, 52, 54,
infantile, 23–25, 40, 60, 67, 78, 116, 58–59
117–18, 151, 175–76, 184,
Palestinian, 48–50, 59, 70, 72
206, 218
Russian Ingrian, 47, 51, 55,
See also primitive
66–67, 74
interestedness
of language of lamentation, 47–48, Shi‘ite, 49, 53, 58, 71, 191–92
86–88, 92, 99–100, 158 Soviet Karelian, 49, 62, 66–67, 70,
of trauma, 19–22 189, 193
irrational, 5, 7, 10, 12, 23–25, 31, 36, lamentation
53–58, 73–74, 78–81, 117, and the body, 160–62
173–74, 187–88 and celebration, 8, 41, 48, 185
INDEX 229
communal and public, xiii-xiv, 38, questions, 7, 31–32, 65–68, 71,

45–46, 50, 58, 62, 68, 172, 76, 80
175 and recovery, 37, 40, 50, 71, 80, 190
and consolation, 65, 129, 175, 189 regulation of, 7, 51–54, 57, 61,
and contamination, 45, 53, 75 129, 173, 176, 191–92
and cultural assimilation 113, 142 religion, relation to, 52–53, 61, 71,
and the East, 73–74, 116 173, 191–92
and equivalence, 33, 41, 50, 72, as ritual performance, xi, xii, 46–54,
139–40, 190 61, 64, 73, 171, 177
and event, xiii, 40, 47, 172 social discipline, disruption of, xiv-xv,
fantastic, 73–75, 99, 104–7 7, 51–52, 56, 129, 170, 175–76,
formulae and improvisation, xii, 60–65 192
genres, 49–50 social functions, 33, 48–49, 51, 172
goos, 61 and the state, 7, 43, 46, 50–53,
and identity, 60, 65, 67, 91, 104, 115, 57–58, 61, 77, 129–30, 146
129, 177–78 Symbolic, disordering of, xi, xii, xv,
and insanity, xv, 61, 73, 193 31, 65, 66–67, 73, 117, 129,
as invocation, 68–72, 80 173, 175
and justice, 32–34, 40–41, 46, as therapy, 46, 67–68, 190
71–72, 79 threnos, 61, 65
knowledge, resistance to, xiv, 47, 52, as time, xii, 59–60, 62, 85, 103,
70–71, 104, 106, 110 161–62, 174
and literality, 67, 165, 198 trauma, xi, 15, 46–47, 61–64, 66–68,
and literary traditions, xii, 10, 25, 80, 161, 172–73, 175–76
49–51, 182 the unutterable, xi, xii, 31, 55–56,
logic of loss and continuity, xiv, 96, 61, 67, 73, 116, 117, 175, 190
103, 161, 173, 200 witness, xi, xii, 32, 45, 63, 68,
and logical resolution, 64, 175, 187 70–72, 75, 172
moods, 75–82, 195 and women, xi, xii, xiii, xv, 45–59,
“musical masking,” 66–67, 73 63, 73, 85
and newness, xiv, 60, 86, 93–94, See also abreaction; adequation; anger;
115, 117, 129, 130, 135, 174, antiphony; antithesis; anxiety;
196, 214 death; defilement; desire; dread;
and normalcy, 171, 190 elegy; gender; lamenters; melan-
oral tradition, 43, 49, 60–61 choly; modernity
as pagan, 45–46, 52, 74, 173, 189 lamenters, xi, 45–46, 50, 52, 55–57,
performativity, xi, xv, 10, 47, 49, 64, 61, 69, 70, 173, 189–90
68, 77, 98–99, 142, 162–63, communication with dead, 46, 50,
169, 171–72, 174 52, 56, 61, 69, 173
as political tool, xi, 57–58 pain of, xi, 50, 55–56, 70
and the primitive, xv, 45–46, 54–56, Lanzmann, Claude, 20
73–74, 171, 173, 176, 189 Large, David C., 206
privatives, 92–95, 104, 173 Laub, Dori, 47, 70–71, 190, 194
and property, xi, xii-xiii, 48, 53, 56, Lazarus, Richard, 77, 79, 195
84–85, 134, 177 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 43, 64
proportionality, 74–75 Leys, Ruth, 17, 19–20, 22, 55, 182–84,
proprius, 56, 80, 177 192
and purity, xii, xiii, xiv, 109–10, 112, libidinal theory, 22, 184
129, 135, 174, 177, 202 literality, 19, 21, 23, 182–83
230 INDEX
logos, 43, 55–56, 73, 116 incomprehensible materiality of

Loraux, Nicole, 53, 57, 64, 75, 77, lamentation, xiv, 67, 126–27,
192–93, 195 139–40, 161, 169, 173
loss, ix, xi, xiii–xiv, 1, 2, 3, 16–18, 27, of body, 56, 123–6
33, 35, 38, 41, 70–71, 83–85, Stéphane Mallarmé, 112, 123–26,
97–98, 109–10, 171–72, 174, 196 174–76
and desire, xvi–xvii, 79, 100–101, Matthews, John, 202
103, 134–35, 162, 174–75 McFarlane, James, 9–10, 179
distinguished from absence, x, 10–11, melancholy, x, xii, xiv, xv, 11, 50, 60,
39, 65–66, 180 75–77, 80, 83, 163, 173, 175,
and recovery, 15–18, 32–33, 37, 50, 176, 195
55, 72, 75, 135, 137
memory, 46, 77, 125
See also privatives; trauma
commemoration, 49, 63, 162
Lowe, Lisa, 148–49, 218–19
in lamentation, 46–47, 60, 63–64,
Lyautey, Maréchal, 153–60, 166, 168,
67, 70–71, 162–63
175, 220, 222
See also Morocco national, 49, 145
traumatized, xv, 12–13, 15, 16–17,
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 125–26, 174, 19–23, 41, 47, 60, 63, 67, 124,
204–5, 207–208 161, 182–83
“crise de vers,” xiii, 112, 117, 120, See also false memory syndrome
124 Miller, J. Hillis, 98–99, 200
cultural assimilation, resistance to, modern (the term), 7, 30
113, 120–23, 174, 204 modernism, 2, 5, 9–10, 24–25, 27, 35,
defilement, 109–12, 114–18, 120, 67, 173
122–27, 175–76, 202, 209–11 modernity, ix-xv, 17, 29–31, 34, 36–37,
and foreign, xiii, 112, 114–18, 120, 40–41, 45, 78, 80, 114, 120, 130,
122–23, 127, 175–76 133, 137, 147, 173–74, 176, 178
“Hommage à Wagner,” xiii, 112, “early” modernity, 2, 43
114, 118, 120, 122, 124, as epistemology, 3–4
209, 210 as Euro-American hegemony, 8–9
and loss, 109–12 experience of, 5–7, 35, 38
and materiality, 123–27, 210–11 institutions of, 2–3
and newness, 112, 118, 120, 123 “late” modernity, 2, 3, 5–7, 9–11,
nationalism, 118–21
28, 42, 67, 172, 175
poetic purity, xiii, 109–12, 114–16,
as ontology, 4–5
122–23, 202, 209–10
and the primitive, 24–25
“Rêverie d’un poëte français,”
as time period, 2, 8
118–21
See also contagion, semantic; Revue and trauma, 1, 11, 19, 22–25, 27, 171
wagnérienne; Troisième and trust, 6–7, 18
Republique; Richard Wagner; See also colonization; gender;
wagnérisme nationalism; “time-space distan-
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7–8 ciation”
Marx, Karl, ix, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 18, 29, 174 mood, x, xii, xv, 35–38, 41, 67, 68,
masculinity, xi, 5, 12, 26, 29–30, 41, 75–83, 186–87, 195
51, 53, 54–55, 58–59, 129–30, See also anger; anxiety; dread;
150, 154, 164, 167, 191, 185 melancholy
See also elegy; shell shock Morocco, xiii, 147–48, 153–60,
materiality, 4, 56, 75, 80, 112, 143 164–65, 224
INDEX 231
national independence, 149–50, newness, xiii, xiv, 29, 60, 86, 93–97,
168, 175 103, 107, 112, 115, 117–18, 120,
protectorate, 153–60, 162–63, 122–23, 129, 130, 135, 142, 171,
168–69, 173, 221–22 174, 196, 202, 214
See also L’Enfant de sable; Lyautey, Nietzsche, Friedrich, ix, x, 1, 4, 7,
Maréchal 37–38, 41, 42, 67, 143, 157,
mortuary metaphors, 95–97, 100–1, 174–75, 206, 222
164–66, 169, 175, 197 and justice, 32–34, 72
mourning, 8, 10, 23, 45–73, 76, 84, modernity, 29–31, 185
112–13, 115, 129–30, 147, 172, “the perhaps,” 31
185, 187, 191–92 ressentiment, 34–35, 185
See lamentation the tensed bow, 30, 75, 185
Überwindung, 29–31, 185
nationalism, 29, 58, 118–20, 129, See creative destruction
144–46, 157, 168, 176, 208, “normalcy,” 25–27, 33, 171, 190
213–14, 220
and death, 132–33 Old South, xii, xiv, 95–96, 197
as exchange relation, 137–43, 172, myth of, xiv, 84, 172, 200
See also New South
215
Ottoman Empire, 132, 172, 212
inaugural crisis, 130–33, 142
losses in, 130–46, 172, 211–12, 215
Parker, Robert, 204–5, 210
and masculinity, 150
pathologized groups, 7, 24–27, 52–54,
and materiality, 139–40
114, 151–54, 158, 162–63, 171,
See Greece, nationalism; nationalism;
176, 219–20
Stéphane Mallarmé; Morocco
Philo, 126
negation, 10, 74, 76, 77, 84, 86,
philosophy, ix, x, 28, 30–36, 39–43, 46,
92–98, 104–6, 109, 111, 151,
56, 59, 80–81, 132, 173, 187
173–74, 180, 199, 201
and defilement, 115–18, 122–25,
See New South; privatives; William
205, 206
Faulkner metaphysics, 37, 38, 43, 64, 67–68,
Nenola-Kallio, Aili, 47, 66, 190, 73, 127, 175, 192
193–94 philosophers, 18, 29, 53, 174, 185
New South, xii–xii philosophical idealism, xiv, xv
freedpeople, 95–98, 103, 105–7, Pitavy, François, 201
173, 200–2 Plato, 30, 40, 53, 54, 122, 123
possessions, redistribution of, 101–4, Plutarch, 53, 54, 57
106, 201–2 possession, xii–xiv, 34, 94, 174–75
program, 96, 101–2, 196–97, of affliction, 91–92
199–200 and defilement, 110–11
rhetoric of, 98–101, 103, 105–7, 173 and destruction, 95–97, 100, 102–4
and Southern identity, 102–3, 105–6 Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 30–31, 142
spokesmen, xiii, 86, 93, 95–103, (in)alienable, 89–91, 198
105–7, 172–75, 222 and identity, 84–89, 91–94, 102–3,
See excess; Henry Grady; mortuary 110, 197–98
metaphors; Old South; ideological, 33, 83–85, 87–89, 102,
privatives 109–10, 196–98
232 INDEX
possession (continued) and destruction, xiv, 95

retroactive, xii–xiii, xiv, 74, 84, 86, and the foreign, 112–14
87–88, 92, 129, 134–35, laws, 113, 126
172, 213 and loss, 109–10
redistribution of, xii–xiii, 33, 60, as order, 115–16
84–87, 92–93, 95, 101–4, 106, poetic, See Stéphane Mallarmé
130, 172–73, 176, 201–2
See demonstrative pronoun; race, 4, 5, 8–9, 27, 32, 90, 176
dispossession “racial time,” 8–9
possibility, 7–8, 30–1, 35–7, 57, 60, racism, 13–15, 18, 88, 90, 96–8,
81–2, 95–7, 100, 102–4, 110–11, 105–6, 172, 198, 200–2
117–18, 142, 193, 203 See Frantz Fanon
and defilement, 110–11 Reconstruction, 86, 93–8, 176
Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 30–31, 142 See also “Redemption”
Martin Heidegger, 35–37, 60, recovery, xv, 12, 15–21, 25–6, 32–4,
193, 203 55, 78, 135, 137
and destruction, 95–97, 100, 102–4 “Redemption,” 98, 107, 176, 200
and ritual, 117–18 Reformation, 130–31
Søren Kierkegaard, 60, 81–82, 203 regression, 23–25, 37, 55, 60, 61, 67,
See augenblick 116, 171, 173–74, 207
Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Renan, Ernest, 132, 212
11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 26, 41, 182 repetition, 41, 55, 81, 125
See dissociation; trauma of lamentations, 40, 45, 63–65, 75,
postmodernism, 2, 40–41, 178 76, 172–73
the primitive, xv, 24–25, 45–46, 54–56, Søren Kierkegaard, 64, 75, 194
73–74, 115, 118, 127, 171, 173, Walter Benjamin, 63–64
176, 189 repression, 174, 206
privatives, 92–98, 101–5, 107, 173, lamentation (as return of repressed),
175, 199 46–47, 173, 190
See New South; Reconstruction traumatic, 13, 46–47
progress, 131 Revue wagnérienne, 112, 119, 206–9
modern conceptions of, 3–4, 6–8 Ricoeur, Paul, 80–81, 110, 114, 116,
in New South, 99–100, 102–3, 123, 205
105–7 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 42–43, 137
property, xi, xii–xiii, 48, 53, 56, 78, 84, sacred, 121, 125, 130, 133, 205
92, 98, 106, 134, 176–78 mood of lament, 45, 75
and identity, 85–89, 93–94, 102–3, sacralizing of trauma victims, 23, 184
202 Said, Edward, 74, 151
ideological, 85, 106, 172, 197–98 Sargant, William, 182
re-made, 86, 92, 94, 173 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 42
See also identity; lamentation, and Scarry, Elaine, 70, 198
property; possession; proprius; Seneca, 77–79
purity Seremetakis, Nadia, 52–53, 56–57, 61,
proprius, xii, 21, 56, 80, 90, 177, 183, 63, 71, 73, 190–93
192 shell shock, 11–13, 54–55, 176
See identity; literality; property; purity signification, x, xii, xiv, 39–43, 63, 64,
purity, x, xii, xiii, 42, 111, 122–23, 129, 76, 85, 123, 139, 140, 174–75,
135, 158, 171, 174, 177, 209–10 197–98
and defilement, 109–10, 115–16, simulation, 19–20, 22, 40, 47–48
202 Slatoff, Walter J., 201
INDEX 233
Terdiman, Richard, 122, 209 primitive; recovery; regression;

testimony, 19, 70–71, 145, 176, 197 shell shock
See witnessing Troisième République, xiii, 112, 120
“time-space distanciation,” 3, 6, 54 See also France
To diplo biblio, xiii, 130, 140–46, 172, truth, formulations of, 4–6, 17, 19–23,
175–76, 216, 217 31–33, 38, 47–48, 63, 87–89, 92,
See also Greece, nationalism 94–95, 98, 102, 104–6, 110, 174
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 6 See also aletheia
Tolbert, Elizabeth, 49, 73, 190, 194
trauma, ix, xi, xv, 10, 28, 34–35, 37, uncertainty, 2, 4, 10, 67, 88–89
46, 52, 56, 62, 66–67, 73, 80, 98, Friedrich Nietzsche, 7, 31–32, 37,
116, 124, 130–31, 133, 161, 174, 185, 206
173–76, 180, 182, 185, 207 and gender, 148–49, 154–55, 161,
collective, 15, 18 163–68
combat, 11–13, 23, 25–27, of lamentation, 31–32, 80, 84,
54–55, 68 185–87
and disciplinary society, 12, 16, 27 See also ambiguity; ambivalence
interpreting, 18–21, 22, 40
and justice, 16, 32–33, 41, 72 van der Kolk, Bessel A., 22, 24, 184
as loss, x, 1, 11, 15–18, 27, 41, 85 Velestinlis, Rigas, 132, 172, 212
and “normalcy,” 25–27
and racism, 13–15, 91, 181 Wagner, Richard, xiii, 112, 114–15,
and recovery, 15–21, 25, 129 118–21, 124–25, 206–8, 211
and repetition, 19, 21–22, 41, 63, 64 wagnérisme, xiii, 120–21, 125, 206–9
and signification, 40–41, 63 Weber, Max, ix, 4, 6, 8
social history of, 11–14 Weber, William, 206
sustained versus exceptional, xiii, Westermark, Edward, 48, 52, 59,
12–15, 22, 91, 172, 181 190–91, 193
as temporal disorder, 24, 60 Williams, Heather, 211–12
the unutterable, 18, 21, 31–32, Williams, Raymond, 7, 179
40–41, 55 witnessing, xi, xii, 19–21, 32, 45,
victims, 11, 12–13, 16, 20–24, 63, 68, 70–72, 75, 80, 83, 140,
26–27, 41, 47, 61, 68, 183 172, 197, 216
witnessing, 19–21 Woodward, C. Vann, 106–7, 201–2
See catharsis; dissociation; Woolf, Virginia, 5
dual-memory theory; gender; World War I, 9, 12, 17, 20, 55, 137, 184
hysteria; lamentation; memory; World War II, 2, 12–13, 58, 73, 144,
modernity; PostTraumatic 182, 217
Stress Disorder (PTSD); the wrath, See anger

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Lamentation and Modernity in

Literature, Philosophy, and Culture

First published in 2007 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Scribe Inc.

First edition: October 2007

Printed in the United States of America.

Des bateaux j'en ai pris beaucoup

1 Heavy Losses: Modernity, Trauma, Philosophy 1

2 “And the Women Wailed in Answer”:

3 Lamentation and (Dis)Possession:

4 Lamentation and Purity: Mallarmé’s “Hommage,”

5 Lamentation and National Identity: Hatzis’s To diplo

6 Lamentation and Gender: Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant

the Pillars’: Lamentation, Purity, and Mallarmé’s ‘Hommage’ to Wagner” in

Nietzsche’s notorious announcement of the death of God depicted God’s

This book investigates the relation of modernity to loss through a study of

The traditional language of lamentation also bears an uncanny resem-

appropriated the gestures of lamentation to kindle communal mourning,

altering it. This devaluation of the present often coincides in modern

A swarm of contested meanings, inferences, and affects, modernity is a

The Culture of Modernity

Modernity designates neither a homogenous or clearly defined time period

Modernity as a Time Period

Circumstances are routinely unfaithful to temporal containment, and the

Modernity as a Complex of Institutions

The traditional sociological depiction of modernity narrates the rise, and

Two recent theorists of modernity, Michel Foucault and Anthony Giddens,

Fundamental to the dynamism of modernity, this time-space distanciation

In Weber’s depiction of modernity, the formation of capitalism is governed by

of the individual and a second phase, coincident with aesthetic modernism,

These transformations of society, knowledge, and subjectivity are also widely

produced by late modernity is, as expressed in that well-loved passage from

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instru-

This experience of ceaseless transformation is accompanied by a sense of

The “experience” of modernity has been darkly depicted by numerous other

Modernity as a Value Judgment

Futurism” exults in the “aggressive action” and “feverish insomnia” of

Modernity as Euro-American Hegemony

The conspicuously European character of the subjectivities, institutions, and

groups . . . unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources,

Modernism as Aesthetic Practice

The body of aesthetic practices gathered under the name modernism—which

the art consequent on Heisenberg’s ‘Uncertainty principle,’ of the destruction

communal reality and conventional notions of causality, on the destruction of

But if modernism is in some respects an expression of late modernity, it can

Conversely, absence at a “foundational” level cannot simply be derived from

shock.”39 The ancient image of wounding nonetheless left a profound

Recognition of this category by the psychiatric establishment, however,

Masks, where he diagnoses a “situational neurosis,”49 and where, in a series

Fanon’s correctives to the history of trauma institutionalized in psychiatry

The Notion of Recovery

• Trauma is conceived, along the lines of infectious disease, as a kind of

• Insofar as the “losses” of catharsis rebalance or re-equilibrate an economic

If cathartic methods rely on emotional discharge, practices of integration, by

subjects bear a clear resemblance to the depiction(s) of modernity we have

The Scandal of Interpretation

Embedded in this question of recovery, in the question of the efficacy of

This crisis of understanding and of representation is one that is often the-

only psychoanalysis but the entire modern discourse of trauma.”78 This

It is enough to formulate the question in simplistic terms—Why have the Jews