1977 diacritics, v7n2) - interview- louis marin

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Interview: Louis MarinAuthor(s): Louis MarinSource: Diacritics, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Summer, 1977), pp. 44-53Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/465020

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INTERVIEW

LOUISMARIN

Questions from Diacritics

1. In ETUDESSEMIOLOGIQUES (1971) you outline the program of a

"pictoral semiology," that you proceed to illustrate through diverse

studies centered on the rhetorical mechanisms at work in the process of

figural construction. In LA CRITIQUE DU DISCOURS (1975) you take

representation itself as your object, in its dual dimension as both

figuration and signification. In relation to the entirety of your work

(including UTOPIQUES: JEUXD'ESPACE nd a vast arrayof articles), how

would you characterize the value of this emphasis on the classical notion

of representation? And within the ensemble of discourses with which a

society pictures and signifies itself, what place, what status do youascribe to the discourse of painting?

2. Your work has now illustrated extensively the possibility and fecun-dity of using models drawn from semiotics, linguistics, and textual

theory for the interpretation of painting. Could you indicate now, in

retrospect (nearly ten years after the "Elements pour une semiologie

picturale" [1968]), how you envisage the grounds for reading interchange-

ably text and image? Does that practice not entail some danger of

ignoring the specificity-what Lyotard might call the intensity-of the

image as distinct from the linguistic text? Or, if they can be read

together, what is it that produces the effect of their difference?

3. Placing special emphasis on the textual displacements or emendations

that occurred in the various editions of the Logique de Port-Royal, youshow that the center or crux of the theory of the sign is to be found in the

doctrine of the Eucharist. Your reading here borrows at once from the

method of philology and from that of semiotic analyses, the latter

attempting to grasp the coherence of the text not in its properly

conceptual content, but in the study of the mechanisms that allowed for

the production of that content. If we view this double movement

(philological and semiotic) as analysis of philosophical discourse, we are

tempted to locate your work somewhere between phenomenologicaldisclosure, as it might be pursued in a hermeneutic process, and an

ideological critique, as it might be developed in a Marxist or post-Marxist

44



framework. You appear to be seeking after both the truth of the text and the play of

ideological envelopment (Port-Royal being the second-degree ideology of the

Cartesian first-degree, and Pascal formulating a critique of the second-degree

ideology). From your vantage point, is it then impossible to believe in a neutral

semiotic practice? Doesn't the analysis of Port-Royal's discourse entail a subversive

thrust in regard to the pseudo-neutrality of semiotics? Would this critical analysis nolonger be simply historical in scope, but also have epistemological implications for

the field of semiotics?

4. The "theory of philosophical discourse" enters into La Critique du Discours

through your insight into the work of the fragmentary in logic: you show that there

are discursive positions or stances in logical discourse. You do not, however, set out

to constitute an exhaustive inventory of the mathematical models of the discourse

under investigation (Pascal in this case) with a view to constructing the type of

reading we encounter in the "history of science." Rather, your notion of the model

is displaced, has to be differentiated from such an approach: the model becomes a

critical notion serving as the fulcrum for deconstructing the text. To what extent is

the more or less methodic or "scientific" deconstruction that you practice,

incorporating the instruments of semiology as well as the framework of the

discursive model, at odds with the project of deconstructing the text(s) of

metaphysics, or again, with the epistemological project of elaborating an archeology

of knowledge? That is to say, how do you situate-what is the scope or import

of-your (choice of an) explicitly oriented deconstructive reading, as it departs from

traditional "historicizing" or "logicizing" reading? Given that the locus at which the

"theory of philosophical discourse" can be generated is inscribed by this shift away

from historicism or logicism, how is this shift regulated so that the reading can retain

an operational validity?

5. The eucharistic model, as you show, constructs/deconstructs the logical text; thetheological builds and destroys the logical text. As proposition and as figure

[Critique, p. 362] the eucharistic utterance achieves the "uniting of the contradictory

exigencies." This speech act (Hoc est corpus meum)-which occasions an illuminat-

ing reconsideration of the place of such key elements in the Logique de Port-Royal as

the neutral deictic, the copulative verb, the place of the body, and the possessive-islocated "at the center of the problem of language and the sign" [p. 33]; it is the

"space in which the model is produced." [p. 100] It allows for placing in a series the

"gestural function of the originating designation" [p. 181], the logical and figuralstatus of the copula "est" [p. 181], the relations between deixis and logical content

[pp. 183-85]. The center of this model is the HOC,"the

blind productive spacein

which the contradictions of the model are reconciled." The model would then

reconcile the "contradictory exigencies of the text," and its center would in turn

reconcile the internal contradictions. This conciliatory function, resolving internal

and external contradictions, raises the question of the structure of the text. Can we

not construe the model as another name for the ground or force that structures the

text? For what the model "accounts for" is in fact secondary in relation to its

"structuring function": is the "accounting" not an effect of the structuring force?

6. You indicate that the space of discourse is bounded by three poles: "(1) the

originating metaphor of the word (2) the figure of desire (3) the ideological trope of

the proper name of the subject" [Critique, p. 338]. This tri-polar grouping bounds a

space the systematic topology of which remains to be constructed. Is conceiving ofdiscourse in terms of space not already setting out in that direction? In programmatic

terms, what are the priorities that govern this type of work? How does one pursue

simultaneously a theory of discourse and a description of the ideological enclosure

within which that discourse is practiced? Is the model of the text topological?7. On the Anglo-American scene where, thanks to career-related circumstances,

you sometimes have occasion to play a pedagogical role, you have doubtless noted

that we are commonly inclined to throw caution to the winds in considering the

significance of delineating ideological structures or investments, i.e., we are proneto risk moving beyond the methodological issues raised in the previous questions to

diacritics/June 1977 45



remember quite well certain events, encounters, and readings which triggered a

given question, a line of inquiry,or some desire to write.

So to the first question which concerns the insistent, recurringplace of thenotion of representationfrom the beginning of myworkandwith it the notion of the

discourse of painting, Iwould be inclined to reply: London,1966; reading; and the

long afternoons at the National Galleryor at the CourtauldGallery; then meetingJeanSeznec and EdgarWind; Poussin's man killed by a serpent in a grandlyclassical

landscape, but also Poussin through the work of Anthony Blunt who was just

finishing his three great books, and Panofsky,etc. . .; and at the same time, myownwritten commentaries on the Pensees that Iwas working at constantly, projectingabook that was going to be called La Logique de Pascal. So that, succumbing to

remembrances, I am tempted to answer theoretically that between, on the onehand, iconography, history,the tradition of beautifulforms, and on the other that ofa prodigious knowledge of texts, stories and legends, and the reading of a singulartext made "foreign" by being shattered, interrupted, fragmented, a text whosedemonstrative and persuasive structures I was trying reconstitute, there came into

place a strange painting which at the same time intersected both these directionsand yet held them apart,or ratherwhich reinscribedin itself, in itsvery singularityasa painting,both the one and the other direction as well as myown dispersalbetweenthem-I mean the Ex-Votoof 1662by Philippede Champaigne. In the last analysis, itis by recalling today, in 1977, the two sisters of Port-Royaln their cell, doubly and

mysteriously illuminated by the daylightwhose source is invisible to the observerand by another light falling from above in which both Grace and Miracle are beingfigured; it is by rereadingthe text written-inscribedto the left of the canvas (a text

composed by the great Arnauld himself) with the aid of models supplied byBenveniste, Austin, Searle and those proposed by Greimas and Propp; it is by

focusing my look [regard]as reader and as viewer on the borderline that separatesand articulatesthe text and image, moving back and forth to the rhythmof a double

project of contemplation and reading, constantly falling short yet ceaselesslystimulated, that I am tempted to answer the first two questions: figure and/or

signification, image and/orlanguage, icon and/ortext. From mageto language, from

languageto image, the representationof a real event never stops being constructedand being undone, in the gap between the one and the other, in that zone of thecanvas where words are written and icons are delineated, in the locus where the two

scenes of readingand contemplation are put in touch and set apart,at the edges of

contact between the two great systems of significance, figure and discourse, a zone

of limits,of disjoined adjoiningswhere both one and the other, inthe same place, atthe same instant, are brought to fulfillment and falter, each one conquering its

identityover the other and estranging itself from the other irretrievably.A place and a moment that are empty and active, that I attempted to approach

with the notion of the neutral,of fiction or fictive practice,or more recentlywith thatof rhyme (or syncope) in autobiographicalwriting. Thatis why-but only after thefact-I observe that except for the enthusiastic naivetes of the "Elements de

semiologie picturale"(which markedthe epistemological optimism of a generationtaken with the modeling power of structural linguistics), I have never studied

anything other than these ambiguous objects-medals, engravings, still lifes,geographic maps, portraits,illustratedtales-which put to readingand viewing the

unavoidable question of the "limits" [bords] and "edges" [rebords]of signifyingsystems at the point where their significance exhausts and produces itself,performingitself in this text and this icon. Aren'tthese surfaceswhere heterogene-ous elements come into contact the loci of intensities? And have we gotten far

enough beyond representation today to be able to speak of it as a "classical"

notion? Or more precisely, has one ever really finished constructing that notion and

abandoning it?

Thus the Ex-Voto of 1662 can appear as this image-text which is emblematic of all

my research, present and future, just as it was symbolically the trigger of work in the

past, in the narrative of that work as Iam now constructing it thanks to the questions




from Diacritics. Because of them, I notice that I have always placed this emblem, this

symbolic operator, at the limits of my own discourse, in the role of a "to be

continued," an incompletion function in this discourse; as an operator of non-

closure, it appears at the end of the article in the Annales E.S.C., which is itself the

reproduction of a lecture given at Oxford in 1966. The same incompletion is present

in my contribution to the Melanges Mikel Dufrenne, since the study lacks therigorous analysis of the text in which "narrative representation" is "seized" by the

repetitive "speech acts" of the promise and of oblation and in which past time is

neutralized by the present instant of iconic representation, itself constructed by the

conjunction of two narrative sequences around an instant-that of the miracle which

is not shown but told by the text producing the representation. In other words, the

empty place of fiction between figures and discourse is the space in which I am

trying to write.

And this remark leads me directly to the four questions from Diacritics

concerning LaCritique du discours, an austere mass into which Iam now compelled

to venture. The fact is that in this sort ofautobiography being

asked of me or that I

am irresistibly drawn to write, this book-a thesis-has a strange and significant

history, one that is in any case pertinent in the context of the questions raised here.

Initially my project was to write a book on Pascal, whose Pensees I have been

reading since adolescence, and more particularly a book on Pascalian logic. Coming

after many readers since 1680, but stimulated by the discoveries of Louis Lafuma in

the Fifties, my objective was to reconstitute or reconstruct the edifice of the

"Apologie de la Religion chretienne" on the site of the great ruins of the Pensees.

Ten or fifteen years spent at this undertaking led me progressively to this very simple

discovery: not only was the reconstruction- or representation-of Les Pensees into

a finished work whose structure I would reveal an impossible task, but it was a false

one, or rather the re-presentative operation itself resulted from an effect of thisstrange text. For the sake, here again, of a systematic account, let us say that the

need to represent the Pensees as a book seemed to be forcefully determined by the

fact that the texts, the pensees, were-as fragments and as a collection of

fragments-indeterminate, aleatory, in a state of constant interruption.

This discovery, basically a very simple one, occurred in two stages. The first was

discovering the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of saying that the Pensees were

the ruins of an edifice that must have existed prior to their material, signifying reality

as a text. Where then did the book of the Apology, fragments of which would be the

Pensees, exist? In what ideal prior-world? But it was no less impossible to say-in the

second stage-that the fragments were the materials for a future book that wouldhave come into existence afterward (if Pascal had not been ill, had not died at the age

of thirty-nine, etc.). Neither a site of ruins or excavations on which I would have

served as the archeologist, nor a construction site on which I would have been the

mason and architect. Yet the very fact that I was drawn irresistibly to act as

archeologist or architect, that temptation called for reflection. And this reflection

was soon reinforced and recast into a problem of writing or rather of discourse: how

to practice, in dealing with a fragmentary text whose "fragmentarity" I was trying to

characterize, a discourse that is not fragmentary, without immediately dissolving,

spiriting away what this discourse wishes to bespeak, or without allowing that

discourse itself to be put into question by its object and relegated to critical

invalidity, or without allowing that discourse to be produced as just one of theeffects of the text it analyzes. Ultimately, what Iencountered in Pascal's Pensees was

a text which necessarily posed the problem of the status of critical metalanguage and

its values of truth and certainty; and when I speak of critical metalanguage, you will

recognize what is called, in the questions formulated by Diacritics, philosophicaldiscourse.

The difficulty Iam evoking here in the mode of an autobiographical narrative is a

fundamental, a radical problem. Yet at the same time, again as a result of

circumstances, a way out of the impasse began to come into view, a tactical solution,

a diversionary maneuver: could I not find a book, a work specifically dealing with

48



the properly philosophical position of truth, a philosophical discourse presentingitself at once as true and as teaching the true means of arriving at the truth, but in

which the fragmentary text of Pascal would exert its effects-its violence disrupting

the internal coherence of the discourse and the mastery or control of that discourse

over reality and man. Circumstances provided me with this book. M. Foucault, N.

Chomsky, and various historians of philosophy had recently placed at the forefrontof philosophical modernity La Logique de Port-Royal, in which I observed that the

Pascalian text was cited at the fundamental points of articulation of the philosophical

discourse: the primary terms of this discourse, essential words or categories of

language/thought; the limits of this discourse, its closure and simultaneously the

closure of its object in the intelligible representation of that object; and finally the

subject of this discourse, the "ego" that sets it in motion and finds in the discourse

its own ontological and semantic identity.In other words, the Logique de Port-Royal, in conjunction with the Grammaire

generale et raisonn6e, offered me this "middle" philosophy of classical representa-

tion, the discourse of clarity and distinction in which, for two centuries, rationalist

ideology found the charter of its values, an "applied" cartesianism whereby the

transcendental deductions of the subject, the idea and its validity (= the truth) are

short-circuited to the advantage of a surreptitiously normative description of the way

representation and its signs function, of the functioning of discourse and its subject.

But at the same time, the Pascalian quotation was affecting the paradigms of the

Logique, exerting its effect in two directions: introduced in order to corroborate the

logician's assertions [propos] with an authority at once scientific, philosophical, and

religious, the quotation introduced gaps into this discourse, signified the back-side

[l'envers] of the logician's analytic mastery over discourse, not as its hidden face, but

as the work this mastery had to carry out in order to achieve its position of authority.

But this "work" was not to stop there. Gradually, around those points where thePascalian quotation intervenes in the Cartesian book of Port-Royal, displacements,

distortions, warpings began to menace even the discourse that seemed most

securely demonstrable. The representative model seemed to deconstruct itself even

as its construction was developing. The questions from Diacritics point, in a critical

fashion, to some of these deconstructive movements, internal to the text of the

Logique but which have methodological implications for the reading (my reading) of

the text: thus, for example, what Diacritics presents as an alternative-semiotics or

philology, Marxist criticism or hermeneutics, etc. First I would say, at the risk of

shocking some readers, that in reading a text I hardly worry at all about

methodologicala

prioris;by that I mean that I set aside

spontaneously,by virtue of a

"natural trait of mind" as the seventeenth-century moralists would say, the idea of a

method that would pre-exist the object under study or the idea of applying a "ready-made" instrument to a material, the text, that would, through this application, both

be broken down analytically into its its ultimate elements and constructed in its true

form. Take the example of the theoretical, methodological alternative, philology or

semiotics, which is nothing other than a representation of the opposition history/structure. Ishall limit myself here to telling the story of my reading of the Logique de

Port-Royal.For the reasons I have already noted, I began this reading with the analysis of

the effects of the Pascalian quotation in this book, effects of the work of the

fragmentary in the systematic, coherent exposition of an Art de penser. Now Iquickly observed that it was quite difficult to determine accurately the limits of the

book, its closure, its beginning and its ending, that it was equally difficult to

determine its author. You will recognize at this point not just the effect, in my own

"critical" discourse, of the questions that the Pascalian quotations introduced into

the Logique, but also the application of the presuppositions, the a prioris of

Foucault's L'Archeologie du savoir (which had not yet appeared when I was writing

my book). It matters little to me that my questions touching upon the limits of the

book and its productive center be perceived in either of these ways. I am limiting

myself to telling a story. Why these questions about this book? Quite simply because




they are asked by the book itself? What is the true Logique de Port-Royal? The first

edition of 1662, that of 1664, that of 1683? What are the true intentions of the

authors? Will we find them in the preface addressed to the reader, in the first or

second introductory discourse, etc.? What is the true role of Arnauld and that of

Nicole in the work? What did they really write together, separately? How did they

write? All these questions are philological questions insofar as answers would begiven that lay claim to the status of truth, i.e., reconstructing or representing the true

Logique, the real authors, their authentic intentions, etc. Now that was not at all

what I set out to do: for me it was a matter of analyzing an operation of the text [un

travail du texte] within what is called a book (whence the study of successive

editions, additions); of locating in this book, in which the text is at work in this way,

places of enunciation, different discursive positions; of asking whether the text in

the "Book," the places and positions of discourse in the "Authors" would

corroborate the coherence (so obvious to the reader) of the "object produced" bythe discourse, or whether, on the contrary, they would undermine it, or more pre-

cisely whether there did not appear, in the Logique, some axes or foci [foyers] of

coherence, some plural systematics organized around masses of quotations (from

the Grammaire generale, the Perpetuite de la Foi, the Essais de morale, etc.). From

then on, what I called, perhaps awkwardly, the representative model that the

Logique elaborated-with such force, such power!-was, as its construction and its

grounding emerged, shaken, displaced, questioned, fractured in and by these very

operations of construction and grounding.Now if the expression "representative model" is in fact pleonastic, if every

representation is a model in the double sense of normative paradigm and theoretical

construct, if, finally, all representation is ideology and all ideology is representation,what the "text" was questioning in the "book," what the "positions of enunciation"

were questioning in the "author" was indeed the ideology of representation, therepresentation of ideology, representation as ideology. It is this deconstructive

movement that I formulated with the notions of first or second degree ideology,which are perhaps unfortunate terms since they tend to muddle that movement and

hide it within a metaphoric scheme of levels and hierarchies. Still, this is not the

case: there is no secret or hidden truth of the book, but an operation in the book

[travaildu livre] that I call text; there are no conscious or unconscious intentions of

the authors, but an author's work (or play) that Icall positions in discourse, etc.-myown discourse being but one of the effects traced, registered by this work. (My

objective, which went beyond the dimensions of La Critique du discours, was, from

that moment on [February, 1972] to pursue these studies in other domains: thus in

studying the Fables of LaFontaine, the Contes of Perrault, the Reflexions et Maximes

of La Rochefoucauld, the Memoires of Retz, etc.)But perhaps this extension that I envisaged will take on one of its possible

meanings if I carry on with my story and go a bit more into detail. The work of text in

the Logique led me to discover rather quickly a web of problematics (problematiqueen r6seau), what I called axes or foci of coherence: the question of the sign in

general, that of discourse and its minimal unit, the sentence (posited as the semiotic

and the semantic by Benveniste), and finally, the theological question of the

Eucharist, or more precisely, of the operative ritual sentence, in the Catholic sense,of transsubstantiation: "This is my body." Now these questions are not brought out

in the Logique, I would emphasize, in anything more than a marginal fashion,through borrowings, quotations, and, especially in the case of the Eucharist,

examples. In short, it was as if the gentlemen of Port-Royal, equipped with the

"Cartesian" representative model, could only develop it in the domain of languageor else apply it in that of theology. Rather than repeat here the analyses I offered, in

LaCritique du discours, I will note what they revealed to me: that in support of these

developments or applications, a supplement was inserted into the "model," a

supplement that did not derive from the model, that the model did not account for,but that, on the other hand, did account for the operation of the model. In other

words, the textual marginality of the succeeding additions to the book, their

50



chronological or historical supplementarity, also turned out to be central, funda-

mental, structural. The same "fragment" of the text thus occupied several signifying

positions in the space or volume of the book, it crossed through the book,circulated in it. And it is this displacement, this dynamic polyvalence that I sought to

inscribe in my own discourse, to trace in my book in the form of recurrent

considerations of the same questions.What then was this supplement that was both superfluous (marginal) and

necessary (structural)? Itwas the appearance in the model of representation, whose

privileged metaphorical scheme is the mirror and the paradigm, the optical re-

flection (cf. the essential texts of the Discours de la methode), of an articulatory

power of language and of a capacity of appropriation and identification which

assured, prior to any metaphysical or transcendental deduction of the objectivity and

truth of the signs and representations of the theoretical subject, the perfect

congruency (adequation) of the sign and the thing, of the model and reality, of the

representation and being. The analysis, marginal in the Logique, of the ritual formula

"Hoc est Corpus meum" provided the structural schema of this power and this

capacity, but within the religious mystery, the obscure clarity of the Catholic faith:

the schema of the imposition of the sign on the thing ("Hoc"); the schema of the

erasure of the speaking subject in what is spoken, a schema in which the institution

of the theoretical or symbolic ("est") will be recognized; and finally, the schema of

the return of the subject of enunciation in the utterance but as an appropriated,identified "sign-thing" ("corpus meum")-the thing (being) is consummated as a

sign, i.e., as my representation, the representation of myself, my substance which is

mine, "my body." The "theoretical," the optico-metaphysical re-flection that is

representation itself would thus be supported by this ground the structure of which

is given by the gentlemen of Port-Royal, in the margins of the Logique, as a

supplement-but given in the sphere of the religious (this is an essential point, forthis advance, this break-through toward this ground may well have been possible

only in the religious sphere in the seventeenth century). And yet the grounding of

representation here in its value as truth, objectivity, and universality (theoretical

discourse, the mathesis universalis, the universal domination of man over being)

requires the effacement, the forgetting of the originary consumption, the primitive

self-devouring, this narcissistic cannibalism in the blind silence of the animal body.This power and this capacity of language and discourse, and with them, the

theoretical itself, science and philosophy, thus turn out to be symbolic of a desire, a

desire for knowledge, a desire for truth: all that, which can sound exceedingly

modern to us, is stated by Descartes, and is repeated by the Port-Royal logicians intheir famous definition of judgment and of, precisely, the Verb-of which "the

principal use is to signify affirmation, i.e., to indicate that the discourse in which this

word is employed is the discourse of a man who does not only conceive of things

(that is the role of representation), but who judges and affirms them," i.e.,

according to strict Cartesian orthodoxy, who wishes or desires them to be as he

conceives them (this gives a strange accent to what is currently called the aletheicfunction and the existential function of the copula). Against this background, the

task that remained to be carried out was to read the third part of the Logique de Port-

Royal in order to uncover one of the sharpest, most rigorous analyses ever

conducted of the powers and capacities of discourse in the enunciative relation.

Those powers are explicitly treated and investigated as the subversion of the

representative model by the violent manifestations, indiscernible in their effects, of

the desire that is named, in the book, grace and/or lust.

Upon careful reflection, it seems to me that I have been answering with these

remarks the fourth question, which is unquestionably the most complex anddifficult since it addresses the epistemological status of my own discourse. I would

nonetheless like to bring in a few supplementary considerations concerning the

relation between historical reading, logical reading, and the project of deconstruct-

ing the metaphysical text. First, a remark touching on the ambiguity of the term logicin what was entitled, in 1662, the Logique. For it is indeed a question of logic, but




this logic is an art of thinking and, very precisely, an art of judgment; it is

indiscernibly descriptivepresentationof the realconditions that make discoursepos-sible and a normativepresentation of the ideal conditions that make it legitimate.In this optic, from this point of view, my "critical"discourse attempted, attempts

today, to proceed along this limit, on this double edge: diacriticaldiscourse, as I

said previously, insofar as it simultaneously opens a gap and occupies it, the gapbeing that space where the truth, the effect of truth, is produced. Second, a remark

touching on the historicalor historicizingdimension of my readingof the Logique:this dimension or this orientation is in fact tactical, I mean that the Port-RoyalofArnauldand Nicole, and in particular hat of the Logique, taken as one of its majorproducts, is the place of philosophical discourse in which, simultaneously, the

Cartesian metaphysics of representation and of the subject of representation is

exposed-in all the senses of this term-and, in fear and trembling, there

occurs an opening onto the spaces of a lack,absence, and void where desire-graceand/or lust-is at work. Inother words, the projectof deconstructingthe metaphysi-cal text comes, in this place, to be neutralizedas a project, my project, shallwe sayas a meta-discourse (I would then have to inquire into the status of that meta-discourse, and inquire into this inquiry).Forthe deconstruction of representationis

already underway and my discourse is only the product of that process, and themodels and categories (semiotic, linguistic, etc.) that I employ are dismantled as

they are put to use, undergo a metamorphosis into figures of the desire for

knowledge, just as my theoretical discourse on philosophical discourse is trans-

formed into a criticalfiction. So that today, after a few years have elapsed, Iwonder

whether, within this tactic that is at once historicizingand logicizingin (andnot on)the text of the Logique as it is plied by the Pascalianworkof the fragmentaryand, inits margins,by thatof the borrowingsand quotations that I have indicated, the very

notion of deconstruction is not in turn displaced as an epistemological andtheoreticalprojectto the advantageof limited, punctual operations of disintegration,or ratherof a "catastrophic"reversalof the powers of discourse (critical, heoretical)

by the humoristic or parodic inclusion of my own discursive position in the objectabout which myown discourse speaks, where the markof a double effect of distanc-

ing and parrying s inscribed.That brings me to a brief consideration of the last two questions that were

addressed to me. First,concerning my "critical politics," the preceding remarksshould make it clear enough that, in my reading of the Ex-Voto of 1662 by

Champaigneor in my reading of the Logique, what I am questioning is the powerthat is structured and

exhibited,that is institutionalized

bythe book or the

painting:the power of an order of truth, representation in general. And it should be equallyclear that Iam strivingfor a discourse, a mode of writing,a pedagogical practicethatdoes not seek to bringthat power to light, i.e., to bring it under control to its own

advantage, in a discourse thatwould in its turn institute an order of truth, its school,its space of authority.Whence, perhaps, my nomadic course between the Eastand

the West, between Europeand America.Whence, in the second place, my interestin short narratives such as La Fontaine's Fables or Perrault's Contes, amusingparodiesof the greatand serious questions of the metaphysicsof representationandthe subject of knowledge. What I said earlier about the ritual formula "Hoc est

corpus meum"and about the consumption of things as signs should have sufficed to

point up the pertinence of what Diacriticsaptlyterms the figures of orality,eating,and incarnation,on the condition that we understand clearly (as in the fable, for

example, where the "moral" sanction of the animal'sdiscourse is the alternative of

eating or being eaten) that "the talkinganimal," one of the definitional images of

man, is the figure of an origin of language based on the mutualdevouring of animalbodies and that this origin of language, indiscernible as such (as a real event) islikewise indistinguishable from the origin of power whose figure in turn is themutual devouring of bodies: the circularityof these figures (eating the other as a

figure of the power-to-speak; speaking-(to)-theother as a figure of the power-to-eat[the other] shows clearly enough that it is only a matter of a fiction of origin,

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"origin" meaning nothing but the power to "institute" the fiction.

It is also a matterof understandingclearlythat these figuresof an origin, stagedin a narrativerepresentation,a "fable,"are in turnat work on this representationsoas to institute it as such: as narrationor power of enunciation, as the fable, or a

figure of the origin of narrative. But this power, as it happens, is a listening trap, a

reading trap, and once it is in place, this narrative nstitution, this representationfunctions in a strange fashion, and that is its power as play, its playfulness-itsoperation is only its undoing, its movement is only its turning-back,in the doublesense of return: to come backto itself, to include itself in its product so as not to be

exempt from the trap it sets; and to exhibit the other side of the coin, to turn itselfover as one "reverses" a glove or a skin.

Iam positively delighted with this last question because it points very incisivelytoward a place of communication or transfusion among some of the diverse motifsof my work, motifs which, seen from a distance or a global perspective, can seem

foreign to one another: utopia as both representationand fiction; representationasan institution, power of truth and as a space for the fulfillment of desire; esthetic

pleasure as an effect of this power and as the acme of jouissance, happiness as adefection from institutional power and an exercise in playfulness. But here isanother way of answering the question that is always forgotten: "how does it

happen that we write, that we have an urge or desire to write?" The answer is

provided at the end of "Puss in Boots" in this marvelousobservation that the Kingdoes not give his daughter to the miller's son until afterhaving had one drinktoo

many.


1977 diacritics, v7n2) - interview- louis marin

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