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Wild Laughter in the Throat of DeathAuthor(s): Jean-Luc NancySource: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 4, French Issue, (Sep., 1987), pp. 719-736Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905787Accessed: 15/07/2008 10:27

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Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death

Jean-Luc Nancy

To move wild laughter in the throat of death,

It cannot be, it is impossible.

(Shakespeare, Laue's Lahour Lost, V, 2)

I. The Poem as Program

We shall read a poem m prose by Baudelaire, "The Desire to Paint."1

Malheureux peut-etre l'homme, mais heureux l'artiste que le desir de­chire!

Je brule de peindre celle qui m'est apparue si rarement et qui a fui si vite, comme une belle chose regrettable derriere le voyageur emporte clans la nuit. Comme ii ya longtemps deja qu'elle a disparu!

Elle est belle, et plus que belle; elle est surprenante. En elle le noir abonde: et tout ce qu'elle inspire est nocturne et profond. Ses yeux sont deux antres ou scintille vaguement le mystere, et son regard illumine comme l'eclair: c'est une explosion clans les tenebres.

Je la comparerais a un soleil noir, si l'on pouvait concevoir un astre noir versant la lumiere et le bonheur. Mais elle fait plus volontiers penser a la lune, qui sans doute l'a marquee de sa redoutable influence; non pas la lune blanche des idylles, qui ressemble a une froide mariee, mais la lune sinistre et enivrante, suspendue au fond d'une nuit ora­geuse et bousculee par les nuees qui courent; non pas la lune paisible et discrete visitant le sommeil des hommes purs, mais la lune arrachee du ciel, vaincue et revoltee, que les Sorcieres thessaliennes contraignent durement a danser sur l'herbe terrifiee!

1 I wish to thank Elizabeth Bloomfield, Peggy Kamuff, and Suzanne Guerlac for their corrections of my text.

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Dans son petit front habitenda volonte tenace et !'amour de la proie. Cependant, au bas de ce visage inquietant, ou des narines mobiles aspirent l'inconnu et !'impossible, eclate, avec une grace inexprimable, le rire d'une grande ·bouche, rouge et blanche, et delicieuse, qui fait rever au miracle d'une superbe fleur eclose clans un terrain volcanique.

II y a des femmes qui inspirent l'envie de Jes vaincre et de jouir d'elles; mais celle-ci donne le desir de mourir lentement sous son re­gard.2 [UNHAPPY perhaps is man, but happy the artist torn by desire!

I am consumed by a desire to paint the woman who appeared to me so rarely and who so quickly fled, like a beautiful regretted thing the voyager leaves behind as he is carried away into the night. How long it is now, since she disappeared!

She is beautiful and more than beautiful; she is surprising. Darkness in her abounds, and all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound. Her eyes are two caverns where mystery dimly glistens, and like a light­ning flash, her glance illuminates: it is an explosion in the dark.

I have compared her to a black sun, if one can imagine a black star pouring out light and happiness. But she makes one think rather of the moon, which has surely marked her with its portentous influence; not the white moon of idylls which resembles a frigid bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon that hangs deep in a stormy night, hurtled by the driven clouds; not the discreet and peaceful moon that visits pure men while they sleep, but the moon torn from the sky, the conquered and indignant moon that the Thessalian Witches cruelly compel to dance on the frightened grass!

That little forehead is inhabited by a tenacious will and a desire for prey. Yet, in the lower part of this disturbing countenance, with sensi­tive nostrils quivering for the unknown and the impossible, bursts, with inexpressible loveliness, a wide mouth, red and white and alluring, that makes one dream of the miracle of a superb flower blooming on a vol­canic soil.

There are women who inspire you with the desire to conquer them and to take your pleasure of them; but this one fills you only with the desire to die slowly beneath her gaze.]3

We shall read this poem as a presentation of laughter, as itself a laugh, or laughter, where laughter is also the presentation of the poem itself-if laughter is readable at all, which is more than doubtful. Perhaps, with respect to the "desire to paint," our desire to read has already burst out laughing, even before we begin.

2 Charles Baudelaire, Oeuvres completes (Paris: Pleiade, Ed. Gallimard, 1975), t. I, p. 340.

s Tr. Louise Varese (New Directions Publishing Co., 1947).

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When we read the text, we have already received its laughter as the pleasure of our reading, which is supposed to be a poetic, esthetic pleasure. What does laughter have to do with esthetic pleasure? Is there anesthetic oflaughter? Or is laughter beyond or behind any esthetics? And where exactly is the laughter in the text that we are reading? Where does it come in? As a fulfillment of the desire to read, or of the desire to paint? Or-somewhere in between one and the other? Where would that be? This is perhaps just what we desire to read, and what does not belong to the art of reading, or to any art at all ...

Nevertheless, we try to read. What the poem tells us is simple. It is the joy of the artist who desires to present or represent beauty­Beauty itself, something or someone that is "more than beautiful" -and whose desire as such, as pure "consumption" (for it is the desire of the unimaginable, of the "unknown" and the "impos­sible") gives him the strange and profound happiness of his own disappearance in the face of Beauty. At the same time that the unpresentable Beauty is presented, it (or she) is presented as un­presentable. Its (or her) impossibility is presented, painted through the impossible painting which the painting of desire is forced to be. Its absent presence becomes the "cavern" and the "darkness" into which the artist-the one who would present it­disappears. This poem is, therefore, an excellent summary of the main program of Western philosophical esthetics from Plato to (at least) Baudelaire himself: the program of esthetics as presentation of the aspiration toward impossible beauty-the philosophical erotics of esthetics, and the esthetics of erotics.

So far, however, we have not said anything about laughter. This is not surprising, if we remember how difficult and uncertain it has always been to integrate laughter within the philosophical erotico-esthetic program-laughter itself, that is, and not the comic or humor or irony. For the comic, humor, and irony have at least a minor part, however uncertain or ambiguous, within this program, whereas laughter itself may have always been on the edge of it.4 Yet the poem obviously has its climax in the "wide mouth" which "bursts into laughter."

What is happening with laughter here? What happens through laughter to the philosophical program of esthetics? Perhaps this is

4 As is well known, Baudelaire had his own theory on laughter; but I will not attempt to discuss it here, for the poem itself cannot be framed even by this theory.

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of no great importance (I say· that without understatement, and without any intention to stage a forthcoming surprise or revela­tion). Yet, however insignificant it may be, we are trying to read the poem at the very edge of its own program, which is to say at ·the edge of presentation itself-the very limit of any art of presen­tation, and this very limit as "presenting" itself. This is the same as the desire to present beauty (which is nothing other than to present, in an absolute sense). But it is also at this edge that desire itself bursts into laughter. How can desire laugh? How can pres­ence come into laughter? And what does it mean for presence to come, that is, to come into appearance ot to be presented? This is the very edge of erotico-esthetics, where to come is to laugh. On this edge, the program can be accomplished through laughter­but it can also burst into laughter. This may make a very slight difference-and at the same time an endless difference within presentation and within beauty itself.

II. Laughter as a Glance

At first glance-that is, a first glance at the glance which gazes throughout the poem (to use both of the words which serve to translate the French regard)-it is obvious that the poem is framed by two desires: "the desire to paint," as the title puts it, and the "desire to die" announced in the last sentence. The poem goes from one desire to the other. It is the transformation or metamor­phosis of one into the other, offering each desire as the truth of the other. Or, perhaps, there is only one desire5 with two objects. To paint and to die are perhaps the transformation or metamor­phosis of the same "transcendental object = X" of desire.

This unique desire, or desire in an absolute sense, is presented in the first sentence: "heureux l'artiste que le desir dechire." "Le desir dechire" gives the internal rhyme and rhythm to this "poetic prose, musical, without rhythm and without rhyme" as Baudelaire writes in his famous Preface. The poem ends in the rhyme and rhythm of "le desir de mourir," also echoed in ')ouir." "Le desir dechire"-echoed in "inspire," "aspire" as well as laughter itself, "le rire," which is the only represented sound in the poem-is the musical tone of the poem, its fundamental tune, the tone or tune of poetry leading into painting. Music, poetry, painting: the Holy

5 In French, the "desire to conquer" in the final sentence is not desir but the quite different envie.

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Trinity of the arts. Yet each of them is presented only in its differ­ence and distance from the others, and in the difference of these arts from artistic presentation itself (which is a presentation of the work and of the artist-perhaps of the artist as the work?). What is art, if there are many arts? Perhaps it is this question which makes us laugh. Laughter might be the transformation of desire.

But we should not read too fast. "Le desir dechire": it leads to death, for its object remains impossible, or is the impossible. Desire leads to death as the "object" of desire. But if death can become such an object, it is because it presents itself here as a presence, or better yet, as a present action of the subject: "to die." But the pres­ence of "to die"-the representation of death as the accomplish­ment of desire-is only possible through a mediation, which makes possible the objectivity of "to die" (and therefore the subjec­tivity of the artist who dies). The mediation, the immediate media­tion, is the gaze or the glance of the woman "beneath" which the artist would die. This glance, this regard, is the main object of the painting of the woman (of the presentation of beauty). She is not presented as a body; rather, she is painted through her eyes, their glance and its "illumination," before being presented at the end through three other parts of her face (the forehead, the nostrils, and the wide mouth-all holes and caverns). As the "lightning flash," the "black sun," or the "sinister moon," her glance gives light. It illuminates first, and looks only by illuminating. It is this illumination that is painted here. The illumination does not illumi­nate the woman. She is illumination itself, without body. The face, which is part of the body and its substitute, consists only of caverns and holes, like the eyes themselves, through which the illumination comes; only a topology of this coming is painted. It illuminates the artist, who dies. To die beneath the illuminating glance of his own painting (not his own portrait, but at least the portrait of his own incapacity to paint ... ) is to have his death-or more precisely, this "slowly dying"-illuminated. It is simply to see his own death. It is the impossible par excellence, or the possibility to come into this impossibility itself, to have it presented and to be presented to it.

Immortality is the result of this way of dying, and of the poem. (Does any art have a purpose other than immortality?) This dying, which is the opposite of "taking your pleasure" of the woman, should be taken as the pleasure of her eyes; to have one's own death taken as the pleasure of some immortal glance, in which the artist takes his immortal pleasure. He comes in his death.

But what about laughter? The woman's laughter is clearly at the

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center of her glance. Or it becomes this glance, it gives the glance its specific and final character: a tone, a light, and a color, simulta­neously. The laughing _mouth is the very illumination of the face. It is its flower, it makes it a flower, the "blooming" or coming of a flower. What is the woman laughing (or coming) at? She is laughing at the dying artist as he comes in his own death, because she knows about death. All that she is and all that she knows is "nocturnal." She knows about immortality, which she herself is presenting. She knows how immortality comes-that is, by never being given as present. Or she knows that she is herself that im­mortality which is death's own immortality. She knows how the blooming flower withdraws at the same time into the "volcanic soil." She knows the burning and the petrification of the same im­mortal presence. Her laughter is simply this knowledge. This knowledge is simply her laughter. Hers is "the wild laughter in the throat of death," laughing at the unavoidable tragedy of death. As Nietzsche would say, "To see tragic figures founder and to be able to laugh at the spectacle ... that is divine."

This laughing is not the opposite of tragedy, nor does it mock it. It is the glance at tragedy as tragedy, in its tragic truth: namely, that immortality comes only with death, as death itself. Laughter is the knowledge of this truth, and therefore the highest, the consum­mate knowledge. That is why it is "divine," like the woman in whom "mystery dimly glistens." It is the divine and feminine knowledge of the mystery of art as the mystery of life-of the mystery of life as the mystery of art. And this is why laughter itself remains mysterious. It knows with a knowledge that not only re­mains hidden but is this very knowledge precisely in its own hiding. It shows itself as its hidden-ness. Laughter reveals that it comes from the hidden place, which it keeps hidden. The glance illuminates its own darkness as darkness, and this is laughter.

But Baudelaire did paint the light of the woman, her glance and her knowledge. The most painted place in this painting is precisely the mouth which bursts into laughter, which offers its white and red colors, and which "makes one dream of the miracle of a superb flower blooming on volcanic soil." In this unnatural and supernat­ural image, he captured the mystery as miracle, he represented the truth about immortality. He painted-he represented-the truth which is present only in death. He painted the darkness of death (the "black sun") as a flower's bursting into an illumination. He painted the bursting of truth, which is even more than truth, the

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truth of truth itself. And this is laughter. It is the bursting of the poem into the poetry of truth, and into the truth of poetry. The artist painted art itself, in its consummation.

The painting is the poem into which the artist sinks, which is his own accomplishment. The poem, therefore, is no longer a painting as an image or representation. It is representation (art) going beyond itself, coming in(to) its most intimate truth. It is-as the work of art that it is and into which the artist sinks-the presen­t,ation of the artist himself in his essential truth, in his happiness at being "torn by desire." It is, therefore, the presentation of the very subject, and the very power of art: which is to achieve the presen­tation of the object of art as its own subject, in its immortality. The truth of art is art as truth: immortality contemplating itself in its own painting of that beauty which is "more than beautiful." In other words: presenting the impossible presentation of the illumi­nating darkness which bursts behind or beyond any representa­tion. The beauty that our whole tradition names sublime beauty­or the sublime beyond beauty-is given here. Not only something like a "sublime painting," but the painting of the sublime itself. The painting of poetry as the very sublimation of beauty.

Laughter is sublime-or, in this case, the sublime itself. It is into this laughter that the subject of art himself bursts into death, that is, into immortality. It is in laughter that this subject comes to his proper joy, the infinite joy of desire going toward the absolute excess of sublime beauty.

Thus, as in Nietzsche and Bataille (at least from a certain per­spective on these thinkers-or artists-which is the point of view of view itself, of the glance at darkness and of the darkness as the true achievement of what cannot be achieved) laughter displays here the accomplishment of philosophical erotics and esthetics. With its joy and its pain, with the pain of its joy, laughter reveals itself as the sublime flower of the impossible, as the painting of what cannot be painted. Such a painting is no longer a representa­tion. It is a pure presentation. Laughter is pure presentation, or the art of pure presentation: nothing less than the essence of art, than the desire of art, to come into presence in the presentation. If the desire to "conquer" disappears here, that is because its object can only be a representation. Whereas the desire to "die slowly beneath her gaze" is the desire to enter the presentation itself. This is no longer the desire to "take your pleasure of" the woman, but the desire to become the woman herself, the coming woman,

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or the woman in pleasure, who takes pleasure in nothing but death. (At this point, one notices that the poem does not make it absolutely obvious that_ the poet should be a man ... ) To become the bursting joy of the deep throat, devouring in its silence the realm of representation (laughter does not speak, and even its sound disappears into the pure dream of the flower).

In its desire of presentation, art-poetry as painting, painting as poetry-goes beyond itself. It succeeds not as art, but as the art of coming beyond art itself, taking the "infinite form"6 that no art can take. This is not a "philosophy of art," but rather philosophy itself in its sublation of art. Laughter gives the glance at-and from­this infinite form whose poem and painting are given only through the infinite opening of the throat of death. The philosophical sub­lation is the sublation of death into infinite life, the sublation of laughter itself into the pure glance, the pure visibility and pure theory of the "superb flower" that this sublating dialectics makes "bloom on volcanic soil."

III. Laughter as "Giving"

This is a painting. This is a painting of a woman who is not painted in the painting. She "disappeared" a long time ago. This is the painting of her disappearance, or of her as she has disappeared, and to the extent that she is always disappearing: she "appeared to me so rarely, and so quickly fled." This is a painting of the night of her disappearance, which is her beauty, and which is Beauty itself (as "more than beautiful"). But the painting of her disappearance is nothing other than the painting of the disappearance of the artist (and therefore, once again, of the desire to paint). He-and not she-is always "carried away into the night." For she is the night itself, and beauty itself. Not the beauty of the night, but the night of beauty. She does more than disappear: she is the disap­pearance into which the artist disappears. Yet this "being carried away," or the voyage itself, is the motion of the author's desire. What happens in the voyage, as the voyage itself, and in the night is nothing other than desire. The night is full of the desire for night-or it is the night of desire. The painting of the night paints

6 Hegel, Encyclopedia, paragraph 560.

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simply the way "I am consumed by a desire to paint." Painting Beauty means, therefore, painting my own consumption.7

The artist paints his desire-which means both desire itself, and himself. He paints the desire to paint as if this were something to be painted, some imitable thing. Or as if the painting itself were something of the same order as desire. It is a question here of representation as desire-not a desire to represent, but represen­tation itself, the painting, or the image as desire. Once again, this is the philosophical erotics of esthetics.8 Yet it also proposes or sug­gests something else, something like an excess within this erotics itself.

It is as if the image were no longer the result of the desire to present something-the more or less achieved result, taken as a representation - but rather that the image itself were only a de­sire, and no longer a representation (thereby implying that the de­sire itself were no longer constituted by the representation of its object ... ). Only a desire, only desire itself-which would never be the desire to make and to take something as present (i.e. to repre­sent it), but would rather be something like the desire to desire: the pleasure of going toward pleasure, of coming, and not of having come, the "forepleasure" of desire which Freud mentioned for the first time in his study of jokes. This is the pleasure which is identical to esthetic pleasure for Freud, and which he found so mys­terious.

The desire to paint is the desire to paint endlessly. Not to "con­quer" an image and to "take your pleasure of it," but to be end-

7 What if art were to be understood as the capitalization of consumption, if that be a definition of art, or of the philosophical erotics of esthetics? An art of con­sumption, and for consumers "the sinister and intoxicating moon," "the Thessalian wiches," etc.-Baudelairian modernism as repetition of the repetition of classical antiquity, as an exhausted, consumed imitation of what was supposed to be the imitation of consumption: of the burning of Troy, of the blinding of Oedipus ... Art as imitation and capitalization of darkness. Art consuming itself in the imitation of night, which gives nothing to imitate. Then, laughter. A prerecorded laughter, infinitely resounding in the darkness ... The joy and the bursting of consumption, and the mocking of it at the same time.

8 Cf. Hegel, Esthetics, the chapter on painting. It is true that, at first glance, Christian love, which is for Hegel the very object of painting, is free of"desire." But painting, as well as art in general, still retains the desire of representation. How­ever, Hegel's analysis can, from another point of view, be seen as displacing the philosophical program. I cannot discuss that here. One should at least keep in mind that love in painting is presented as joy, and even as laughter and gaiety. This is "the Sunday of life" ...

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lessly in the endless process of forming an image-of imagining. This is not the desire to have or produce an image, but to be the image oneself, or-better yet-the imagining process, the process of becoming-an-image (not imagination in the classic sense, as the faculty of constructing representations). It is the desire to corne­as an image, to be the coming (to appearance) of an image. This does not mean representing oneself or escaping into a fantasy land. Instead, it means becoming the specific movement of the image becoming image, the becoming visible of the visible, the coming (to appearance) of visibility. It means becoming not the appearance, but the apparition, or the revelation, or some appear­ance. Not the phenomenon but its phenomenalization or its phainestai. It means becoming the "surprise" which the poem gives as the essence of sublime beauty-the surprise the woman is, and which surprises the artist, disconcerting his art, confusing him as an artist.

Painting-or the idea of painting, which serves here as the Idea of art-seems to offer in a most sensitive, impressive way, the de­sire to become a presence which desires itself in it.5 surprising apparition. As Diderot writes, "What a torture the human face is for the painter, this excited canvas, which moves, stretches itself, relaxes, becomes flushed or somber, in keeping with the infinite changing of that light and mobile spirit we call the soul! ... Does a woman have the same complexion when she is anticipating pleasure, when she is in its grips, when she leaves it: Oh! my friend, what an art is painting!"

The desire to paint is, therefore, to be understood absolutely-as it is in the title of the poem (and because it is the title). It is not the desire to represent one thing or another. It is the desire to be painting-that is, to be presenting everything not as a copy or portrait, but as the disappearance of everything in its own pres­ence. For this unique presence does not belong to the logic of imi­tation (nor to its economy, its technique, its art), but to the quite different logic of presentation itself. Presentation desires to be presented in its very disappearance. Painting presents the desire of presentation to disappear in presence, and the reciprocal desire of presence to disappear in its presentation. This is no longer pres­ence beyond representation, as its model or its truth. Rather it is presence as it is present, or, in other words, as it desires to be present. Or the desire of this presence which does not go toward it

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(as a representation) but which comes from within itself, from be­hind itself.

That is why what we see here is not a painted woman, but the painting of a woman; this has three possible meanings: the process of painting the image of a woman, the action of a woman painting, and the painting or paint she is wearing as make-up (the red on the lips of the wide, laughing mouth). And we can say of her what Gertrude Stein said about a painter: "He likes to paint and more than that the painting he paints needs and likes to be painted."9

The woman likes to be painted. Only one thing is presented or presents itself here-and in a

surprising way: laughter. Aside from the light, whose illumination or explosion comes into darkness, aside from the woman's mind­the will to capture everybody into her darkness-and aside from the openings which present only her mystery, aside, therefore, from what is present only by absence, laughter is the only positive presentation of the painting. The poem turns upon the "but" which introduces it. Laughter, and the laughing mouth-the mouth whose opening, whose deep throat is filled with laughter­offer the only properly painted place in the painting. Here are colors, red and white-color itself, that is, or the coloring essence of color. Here is the flower, the painting as such. Here is the pres­ence of the portrait as well as the art of painting, as they disappear in themselves. For laughter itself is no longer a painted thing. Painting bursts into laughter. Laughter is the very explosion of painting, the essence of painting as a presentation of its own pres­ence in its own disappearance. (It is also the presence of poetry in its own disappearance, for the sound of laughter does not re­sound in speech nor as speech, although, as we know, it rhymes with the very rhyme of the poetic feature of "le desir dechire.")

Laughter, therefore, is neither a presence nor an absence, it is the giving of a presence in its own disappearance. Not given, but giving, and thus suspended on the edge of its own presentation. Neither face nor meaning, laughter is the giving of an infinite va­riety of possible faces and meanings. It is, in a word, the repetition of this offer. (The mouth does not burst permanently into laughter, but rather opens itself, and laughter occurs repeatedly,

9 Gertrude Stein, Sir Francis Rose, advertising for an exhibition at Marie Har­riman Gallery, New York, 1934. I thank Myriam Inch for this document.

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every time the woman is presented, every time the poem is read­better yet, it opens a repetition of reading within a single reading; laughter in general is_ perhaps repetition pure and simple.) Laughter offers presence, from behind and beyond any presence. The philosophical erotics of esthetics suspends itself. Presentation is no longer the goal of desire, for the offer of presence has been made before and behind any desire, before any intention of any kind of representation.

Nobody knows the reason why the woman bursts into laughter, nor the object at which she laughs. It might be out of joy, mockery, "intoxication," it might be out of exhaustion after the "cruel dance," it might be out of pleasure. It may be for all of these reasons at the same time-or none of them. Laughter bursts out without presenting or representing its reasons or its meanings. It bursts into its own repetition, into many laughs (there is perhaps always more than one laugh in laughter). It is a giving of presence, and such an offer cannot be a presence in itself. Presence is of­fered from behind any presence and its goes beyond any presence, or the presence as such can only come as a surprise, as the surprise that it is.

Laughter comes, and it is laughing (joy, pleasure, and mockery, all at the same time) about this very coming, which comes out of nowhere and does not go anywhere. Laughter is presence enjoying "being" (or coming as) presence-painting enjoying being painted, surprise enjoying surprising-endlessly, repeatedly, like a flower enjoying being the flower, blooming only to its own appa­rition.

But only something which can disappear at any moment, can also appear. Only the disappearance of presence makes up the offer and gives the surprise of presence. Only death gives to exis­tence the "inexpressible gracefulness" (better than the "loveliness" of the translation) of simply coming in(to) presence. Behind the red and white mouth, or as the very wideness of the mouth, as its indefinite and repetitive aperture, the throat of death bursts into laughter: coming forth from behind any presence, and going beyond any presence. The laughter of presence-which is never to be, itself, but only to be infinitely offered in its own finitude.

IV. Laughter as Between the Arts

Painting is a representation of poetry in this poem. "To paint" is a common metaphor for "to represent" in language or even in

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music. "Painting" is a metaphor for all the arts, to the extent that they are supposed to represent. "Painting" represents representa­tion in general. Poetry desires to represent sublime beauty, wants to be the production of its true image, the poiesis of its mimesis­which is to respond to poetry's essential destination. For poetry has always been designated not only as the first and highest of arts, but also as the fulfillment of art's essence. "Poetry" or "poesy" repre­sents the arts and/or art in general-as the "artist" does here, as substitute for the poet and/or any specific kind of artist. Even painting has to be poetic, in order to be an art. Yet poetry must be pictorial, in order to be true representation. Each is a model for the other.

As we know, the mark of poetry in this poem, the trace and the reminder of its traditional mode is the rhythm and rhyme of "le desir dechire .. le desir de mourir," with the accompaniment of "inspirent ... de jouir," which lends the rhythm and rhyme to "le rire" as the turning point and resounding climax of the poem. Po­etry, then, presents itself as desire. That is, it occurs as desire, indef­initely taken up in a movement from the desire of presence to the presence of desire, which both is and is not a dialectics (at least, to the extent that it is possible to say what a or the dialectics is). Laughter, bursting into laughter and/or into many laughters, offers the decision of this indecision. But this also means that po­etry fails to fulfill its desire by becoming painting. "Je brule de peindre," "I am consumed by a desire to paint": the failure to paint is precisely what kills the poet. He does not come in the pres­ence or to the presence of painting. He does not enjoy it. Poesy fails to imitate the painted imitation (as well as the imitation of painting). Thus painting is represented as the perfect imitation. Why? Because painting is not the reproduction of a model here. Why? Because the woman has fled and fled repeatedly.

But this is not an obstacle to the representation the poet gives us of her. He is able to represent her, and he does so throughout the poem. He represents here in her disappearance, in her mystery and impossibility. He represents her sublime unpresentability. He represents the model as inimitable. He represents the model beyond its function of model.

That is why "painting" does not mean -the representation of a model. It means its presentation: painting presents the model-the model of the portrait (which disappears as such), the model of beauty (which is "more than beautiful"), and the model of art (art

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as model of art), all at the same time. For painting-as it is silently understood here, and, perhaps, throughout the whole tradition as well-is not the imitat~on but the modeling of the model. Painting is, or should be, the "modeling" of the woman's absent body. The "modeling" of the model is not the reproduction of any shape (be it material form or spiritual Idea). Rather, it is the becoming­model of the model itself, it is what makes the model a model, or what presents it as model. Thus the "modeling" (painting) does not happen with a model in its background. Nor, however, does it happen without any model, as pure self-formation. "Modeling" is neither heterogeneous nor autogeneous. On the one hand, it is given a model, but on the other hand, this model is not given as something to be seen and copied. It is neither a schema, nor an Idea, nor a figure. It is nothing visible, nor does it have any invis­ible form. It does not belong at all to the logic of visibility or invisi­bility. "Modeling" is the setting up of the model as model, which has neither another model nor itself as a model. "Modeling"­painting-happens between heterogeneity and homogeneity, just as the desire to paint happens between the desire of a woman and the desire of the self. It is the presentation of a presence without either a former presence or a former absence. It is an offer. Just as pleasure comes without having been previously present (it was only desire) and without having been absent (desire itself is pleasure), so "modeling" is a "forepleasure," a pleasure coming be­fore pleasure itself.

This is also the way the achievement of art comes-before the work of art itself. Neither hetero- nor homogeneous, painting (the model of art) does not belong to generativity or to generation at all. It does not belong to any kind (to any art) of process and project of production. Yet it happens, it happens as "modeling," as the "modeling" which comes behind and beyond any model or any figure. We know where the painting occurs: in the red and white mouth (the color white, according to Kant, prepares the mind for the idea of innocence, and the color red, for the idea of sublim­ity ... ). 10 But the colors and shape of the mouth do not appear here as painting, at least not as the painting of a figure. They dis­appear into laughter. The mouth bursts: that is what it does. The

10 Third Critique, paragraph 42.

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painted mouth happens as the very explosion of painting, here, the vivid touch of the blossoming color. Painting arises here, it comes (into being), but precisely not as "painting," and even less as a painting, or as a portrait. Painting comes as the "modeling" of laughter. Laughter, therefore, is what models itself without having either model or self. An art behind or beyond the arts, an art without art. (Laughter is not an art, there is no art of laughter. Comedy or wit are determinations, specified models and meanings in which laughter probably obeys something other than itself. Laughter as such takes place behind or beyond them. This poem does not belong to any genre of humor.)

Laughter, in this poem, is the coming (into being) of painting specifically as the model of all artistic production -and primarily of poetry as the model of art. Laughter is the setting up of the model of the mode, or of a circularity of models-a circular mi­mesis. (Such a circularity is the reverse side of"modeling": the same thing as "modeling" the model, but considered from the point of view of representation.) And that is why laughter is laughing: it is laughing because painting bursts into pure sound, and because po­etry bursts into this non-painting painting-and also because it does not make music. It makes a sound, the sound of a resounding voice. But this voice is not a voice: it is an absence of voice, and a voice behind any voice. 11 It is the breath, the timbre and the mate­rial of voice, but it is not a speaking voice. It lies between the color of voice, the modulation of voice, and the articulation of voice. Laughter is a voice without the qualities of voice. It is like the sub­stance of voice, and even the subject of voice, which would disap­pear in their own coming into being.

Laughter is the substance of art, the subject of art, which would disappear in its own arising. It comes in this poem, it is enjoying every art, and the essence of art. But this essence is nothing but itself. Which is to say, the essence of art is nothing other than this "art" of making each art disappear into the other and of disappearing, at the same time, into itself Laughter is therefore mockery or derision, but it is also "inexpressible gracefulness" and dizziness, which happen together in the movement from each art to the other, to the extent that they cannot be translated into the other, and that

11 On the "absence in the voice," the silent woman and another Baudelairian "Bouche au rire enfantin," see Peggy Kamuf, "Baudelaire au feminin," Paragraph 8 (October, 1986).

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their common and separate purpose is precisely to produce such a translation-such a modelization. And that is why this poem both is and is not an attempt to represent each art by the other. (It could be demonstrated that every philosophy of art is an attempt to erase or sublate the differences between the arts-and, perhaps, that all such theories fail in this attempt.)

Arts are mutually unrepresentable, for none of them represents anything that would be their common object of representation (or of desire); that arts have no common subject of representation. Each art simply presents some coming into presence.12 Which means that there is no presence in general, as an essence, a present essence of presence itself, but only some presences. There is (or are) only a multiplicity of singular presences. Presence in itself (where is its "self"?) is not, not as presence. It is divided by an abyss of presence, by a lack or a gap within presence. Presence gives itself as divided. Not only as divided-in a kind of dialectical relationship to itself-but as the difference between many dif­ferent presences, each offered on the edge of the disappearance of presence itself.

Those different presences-or "presence" different from itself -are the different arts of presence or of presentation, presenta­tion of the senses. They are the different arts of modeling pres­ence-of presenting the model. Each is offered only at the limit of this difference (and that is what "giving" or "offer" means: not to be given, not to be presented as a present, but to be coming, in the presentation, to some limit which is not to be crossed). The limit lies between each art and the other, between language and art, between language and the art of language, as well as between lan­guage and language. This limit, and the differences it traces, is a transcendental factuality: we do not have one sense, or any "nat­ural" homology between the senses and language (which is the exact opposite of Baudelaire's theory or vision of correspon­dances ... ). This limit is the place of laughter-and the place of death: the place where there is no longer any sensibility or lan­guage. The place of coming or appearance of presence, where presence simply comes, not from anywhere or going to anywhere.

12 Would that not be analogous to the problematic of translation between lan­guages? (Cf. Derrida's reading of Benjamin in "Des Tours de Babel," Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985]). Would that therefore imply some consideration of language as art-besides poetry as such-or of each language as a different art?

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This laughter is not the laughter of death in an ironic sense, or the cruel mockery of death about the dying artist. It is instead laughter "in the throat of death," as something which does not belong to death (at least, if death is represented as the pure nega­tion of presence-not if death is the ultimate possibility of pres­ence coming in its own disappearance, which should be the other, nonspeculative reading of the "slowly dying" of the artist). This laughter is nothing but the vibration, the resounding and the tightening, or the tremor of the limit itself The limit between arts­the limit which the desire to paint must confront-opens itself or comes forth in laughter. It does not open a way through the limit. Rather it opens itself, as if a limit could split itself open (which is impossible). Thus this is more than ever a limit; it reveals the gap within itself-the wide open mouth. But it enjoys this (impossible) opening. Laughter is the joy of art and language at this most ex­treme-of art as the limit of language, of language as the limit of art, of arts as the limits of other arts and of languages as the limits of languages. It is not another art, a kind of "total" art which would achieve all of the others together. It is not an art, and it is not a language. Rather, it is the place where arts and languages as arts end and begin. It is extreme sensitivity and extreme sensuality, the pleasure or delight of touching the limit of any touching­which means the limit between all kinds of sensitivity, the limit due to which all arts are unable to touch each other, and due to which language is unable to cross the limits between the senses and the arts, or to touch the arts and the senses. The poetic desire to paint is the desire to make language sensitive, and therefore to make all of the arts communicate through the sensitivity of language. It is, therefore, a terminal desire, for such a communication would be the end of sensitivity as such, and hence of the arts, including the arts of language. There is no union, no marriage between the arts, and beauty is not a "frigid bride." But there is the touch of the limit: the joy of coming, and the coming of joy.

The artist dies because he desires the extreme end of art. But he dies under the glance of beauty, which is a glance full of laughter. Laughter comes into his own throat. It comes as the coming-the pleasure, the joy, the delight-of presence itself, for presence is offered only in its sensitive, sensual difference.

As a presentation between arts, that is, a presentation between different arts of presentation itself, or as the coming without pres­ence between all the modes of pre.sence-in other words, the pre-

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sentation of both the "together" and the "between" of all arts (fi­nally, the "together" as the "between," hence the espacement of pres­ence itself into its arts)....,..-as such a presentation, laughter is not a special kind of laughter. It is laughter not as an essence, but as the bursting existence of the mouth (not an "orality," but something which comes before orality, before any distinction of steps like orality, anality, genitality-beyond or behind any represented body). It is the surprise of being at the most remote frontier of any kind of presence. It is the wilderness which happens on this fron­tier-destroying any art, and enjoying the destruction. But it is also the alluring gracefulness of the limit itself, which gives art it­self in its very disappearance. It is the strange joy in the throat of death, which is neither the presentation of the impossible, nor the impossibility of presentation, but rather the impossible itself as it comes, the "inexpressible gracefulness" of the woman's laughter.

University of California at San Diego