1106 REVIEWS

Eleanor Kaufman, TheDeliriumof Praise:Bataille, Blanchot,

Deleuze,Foucault, Klossowski.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, xii + 224 pp.

The art formerly known as "theory" has, in the face of adversity, undergone
remarkable changes. Its discourse no longer runs towards the commonplace
(difference, the postmodern, alterity, etc.), but trickles through the cracks
and crevices of hidden influences, rumored allusions, secret loyalties, and
curious coincidences. The resistance to theory or theory's own paranoid
entrenchment-depending on one's point of view-has not only anecdotalized
its pursuits, but, more substantially, afforded theory and its defenders a cultist
sensibility. Eleanor Kaufman's study of a nexus of French intellectual
friendships betrays a familiarity with theory's peculiar fan culture. Who hasn't
wondered what exactly caused the falling-out between Foucault and Deleuze
in 1977? (The factual answer can be found in a footnote on page 178; the
theoretically informed take on it weaves through chapter 4.) It is Kaufman's
achievement, however, to have put the cultist point of departure to good
theoretical use, shunning the usual blueprints and predictable recipes. The
last years have seen their share of studies devoted to the anxious "influence"
of hegemonic intellectuals, French hospitality to unsavory German thinkers,
the long march and Damascus of Telquel,and altogether too many attempts
to squeeze as much French thought as possible into a single month of the
year 1968-and keep it there.
Kaufman avoids the pitfalls both of biographical speculation and historicist
contextualization. She makes clear from the very beginning that the constel-
lation of proper names given in the subtitle of her book doesn't refer to a
homogenous network of personal interactions and allegiances, that it indeed
"transcendsgenerational and institutional boundaries." Bataille and Klossowski,
the oldest members of the group here assembled, met through the College
de Sociologie, a gathering of thinkers who, as Denis Hollier has shown, not
only made the desubjectivizing intensity of emphatic communities an object
of study but exemplified it in their own practices and group dynamic.
Hollier's seminal study of the College comes closest to serving as a model for
Kaufinan's project, as her introduction acknowledges. Yet while she shares his
interest in tracing, as he puts it, "the transition between system and
anecdote," her carefully plotted nexus is constiuted not by social, or even
institutional, contacts. Rather, it is marked by a radical divergence of social
practices-from Foucault's interventionism to Klossowski's semi-private
"theatre de societe" in the Cour de Rohan to Blanchot's equally legendary
reclusiveness. What gives her study its remarkable coherence is the emphati-
cally textual instantiation of the friendships between Bataille, Blanchot,
Deleuze, Foucault, and Klossowski. In this respect, The Delirium of Praise is
devised as a genre study, the genre in question being that of the often
excessively laudatory essay, or encomium, defined by what appears to be an
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uncritical and hyperbolic stance, epitomized in Foucault famously and very

generously signing over the 20th century to his friend Deleuze (1).
The book is structured as a roundelay, that is, as a series of five studies of
separate friendships. These form a chain in which each interlocutor intro-
duced in one chapter is in turn paired off with another in the next, thus
presenting five succinct case studies of twosomes and their exchanges of
encomia. The roundelay begins with and circles back to Bataille, about whose
work Kaufman is by far the least enthusiastic. (In general, the reader needs to
be encouraged not to pass over the endnotes, as they contain some of
Kaufman's strongest assertions, such as her frank dismissal of Bataille [189]).
But it is Blanchot's friendship with Bataille through which Kaufman estab-
lishes her focus on genre. As Blanchot's own reflections on friendship reveal,
the laudatory essay cannot be taken as a simple manifestation of supposed
"personal" closeness. The praise these friends have for one another is not the
expression of an intensity but its primary site, an excess of thought that not
only passes through a host of intersecting silences, but is commanded by
them. If the friendships in question are thus marked by an originary
passivity-a claim that Kaufman in the following chapter seeks to support in
contradistinction to Montaigne's essay on friendship-they also resist exclu-
sion, offering neither monolithic fusion nor polemic division, but a bound-
less multiplicity of the impersonal. Kaufman accounts for this structural
openness by mapping each encounter in relation to a third constituent.
Sometimes this medium is openly thematized, as Nietzsche's migraine is
between Deleuze and Klossowski, or as the Godhead is between Klossowski
and Bataille. But in other cases the constitutive silences arrange themselves
around a tacit or even suppressed third, which becomes a figure of descevrement
or unworking, such as Louis-Rene des Forets's Bavardin chapter 2, or, in the
case of Foucault and Deleuze, Jacques Martin, the philosopher without a
work (chapter 4).
Chapter 3, on Blanchot and Foucault, deviates from this judiciously
constructed blueprint by inserting as such a third element Derrida, who, of
course, stands in an entirely different relation to this friendship, which
Blanchot declares only after Foucault's death, while at the same time
acknowledging that he never met Foucault. Derrida, of course, well deserves
mention in this connection because he in turn has discussed this peculiar
friendship and its missed encounter in his 1994 Politicsof Friendship.Derrida's
study has more generally set the stage for Kaufman's inquiry, however
differently motivated and oriented that inquiry is. (In her conclusion,
Kaufman extends her debt to Derrida's studies of the gift and of hospitality
[136].) But Derrida's inclusion in this chapter also signals his exclusion from
Kaufman's gang of five. She justifies this decision by stating that Derrida's
essays, including his recently collected and translated eulogies, rarely reach
the intensity of an encomium, and, more importantly, by pointing out that he
would more rightly belong in "an alternate configuration," "a virtual second
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volume to this study" (3), in obvious company with Levinas, Jabes, and
Blanchot. On the one hand, Kaufman here seems to repeat a familiar
gesture, that of trying to engineer a clear separation between two circuits: a
Derridean one of transcendent alterity, a Deleuzian one of vitalist imma-
nence. But on the other hand, she refuses to operate the magic switchboard
that would shift us into the allegedly novel mold of immanence. (A
stunningly naive sketch of this switchboard design can be found in Giorgio
Agamben's "Absolute Immanence," in his Potentialities.)
With similar restraint Kaufman also resists the temptation to follow her
own predictions. Even though the last chapter returns to Bataille, this time
paired off with Pierre Klossowski, the book does not thereby describe a
perfect circle. It is true that Bataille's and Klossowski's shared interest in a
general economy can easily be applied to the depersonalizing intensities of
adulation captured in Kaufman's study. Moreover, their denunciation of a
restricted economy of exchange (say, an exchange of validation and tactical
support, the soft money of intellectual campaign finance) vindicates her
contention that the workings and unworkings of praise escape any sociologi-
cal account. (In another candid footnote, Kaufman identifies Pierre Bourdieu
as "the preeminent restrictive economist" [199].) And yet, Kaufman argues,
the relation between Bataille and Klossowski itself presents an exception to
the rule they are striving to articulate, inasmuch as it is characterized not by
exalted praise, but, quite on the contrary, by the "tit-for-tatdynamic" (126) of
mutual criticism.
TheDelirium of Praise is to be commended for its remarkable conciseness,
which is the reward of a lucid structure and accounts for its compact size. In
addition to these achievements, it needs be noted that it can also be read as
an introduction to the work of Pierre Klossowski, long overdue in English, as
Kaufman rightly points out. When the surprising turn of the last chapter
decenters the nexus of unusual, uneven, and in a sense unrequited friend-
ships, Klossowski becomes a focal point of Kaufman's essay. While chapter 5
focuses on his The Laws of Hospitality(to date not translated in its entirety),
chapter 6 sets forth a characteristically clear interpretation of the intractable
economic treatise, La Monnaie vivante. The most plausible other pairing
would have been that of Klossowski and Foucault, who not only wrote a quite
laudatory essay about The Laws of Hospitality,but whose letter to Klossowski
upon the publication of La Monnaie vivante is reprinted in its new edition.
Kaufman mentions that Klossowski decades later declared Foucault his best
commentator, and it is not entirely clear why she chose not to include their
exchanges in her study, if not in order to keep Klossowski from taking center
stage. Kaufman all too obviously has more to say about Klossowski and is
singularly well-positioned to take account of both the philosophical and the
literary aspects of his intricate ceuvre.
Finally, by exploring the "intellectual hospitality" afforded by exaltation
beyond critique, and the possibility of a delirious "convergence" (15) beyond
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consensus and commonality, Kaufman presents a strong alternative to the

inherently masculinist, even unabashedly patriarchal, logic of filiation and
filial anxieties of "influence," with its schematic simplification of Oedipal
complexities. This welcome purchase has to be juxtaposed, however, to the
male exclusivity of the group, as Kaufman herself, somewhat apologetically,
admits (10). She points out a number of possible ways to address both this
apparent gender bias and a queer dimension of delirious praise "between
men." ('Queer' and 'delirious' are, one might add, etymologically and
geometrically congruous terms, since the Latin deliraredenotes the plow
veering from the furrow.) Kaufman suggests a number of lines of further
inquiry by relating Bataille's and Klossowski's debt to Catholicism to the
epistolary eroticism of medieval women mystics (144) and, secondly, by
claiming a "nongendered" energy released into the impersonal realm of the
delirium (11). (Derrida's parallel observation that, in its most political
moments, the discourse of friendship has, at least historically, invoked an
idiom if not a logic of fraternity, remains equally inconclusive.) Kaufman
addresses the problem more concretely when she discusses the seemingly
submissive stance of Roberte, the heroine of Klossowski's novel, who is
required by her husband's "law of hospitality" to surrender completely to
their guests. While Kaufman successfully demonstrates that power is distrib-
uted-and relinquished-in Klossowski's system in much more intricate and
perverted ways, her insightful but elliptical remarks make the reader hope
that she will find an opportunity to revisit both the works of Klossowski and
the many refreshingly original questions raised in this inquiry of truly
impressive scope.
TheJohns Hopkins University ARND WEDEMEYER

Richard Rand, ed., Futures:ofJacquesDerrida.

Stanford: Stanford UP, 2001. 254 pages.

When the circumstances surrounding the reception of a given author start

conforming to the paradigms of reading elaborated in his writings, one gets
an uncanny feeling of a diabolical ploy at work. When the author acknowl-
edges that he is bemused by this development as much as his followers seem
to be unaware of it, this impression is doubly reinforced. Consider the fate of
Derrida's works in this light. He is commonly grouped in the U.S. as a
poststructuralist even though structuralism in the U.S. is "a past that has
never been present." And since structuralism entered the mainstream
through his "poststructuralist"critique, it would make as much sense to call
Derrida a pre-structuralist. His most anthologized essay on "structure and