University of Oregon

L'Oreille de l'Autre: Otobiographies, Transferts, Traductions. Textes et Debats Avec JacquesDerrida by Claude Lévesque; Christie V. McDonaldReview by: Jane Marie ToddComparative Literature, Vol. 37, No. 4 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 361-363Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of the University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1770283 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

in a long and difficult critique of Habermas, in discussions of the attempts of

Marxists, particularly Jameson, to develop ways of reading texts politically, and in the examination of Bakhtin's treatment of the "carnivalesque." Indeed, the "carnivalesque," which expresses the spontaneous, recreative, festive, and para- doxical aspects of life, represents for LaCapra a valuable resource in the intel- lectual's self-contestation. In its traditional form as popular culture and, in mod- ern times as a kind of counter culture, it provides correctives to the "one-sided- ness" and the "official falsifications" of the dominant authorities. Here, as in LaCapra's discussion of the Marxists, he goes beyond the "great texts" which are his primary concern and touches on broader social and cultural issues.

LaCapra views his own work as an attempt to mediate between the two main trends in humanistic inquiry. The more traditional approach seeks to find an order, both in the chaos of the past and in that of the present, through deep com- mon structures of meaning. This approach has been challenged by those who en-

gage in a "deconstructive" critique of traditional assumptions and the desire for closure in favor of what is "marginal . . . uncanny or disorienting" in texts. But

despite his effort to do justice to the two orientations LaCapra clearly favors the latter as the most rewarding exercise. His preferences are seen most clearly in his criticism of two current kinds of ordering-Hayden White's tendency to fall back on a form of "genetic structuralism" and Paul Ricoeur's attempt to keep metaphor "in its place" and reaffirm philosophy as a "privileged realm of dis- course."

LaCapra's volume holds much of value for intellectual historians. Some, how-

ever, will be intimidated by his essays, for they display philosophical sophistica- tion and analytical skills rare among historians. And he assumes, as in the essays on Habermas and Ricoeur, a familiarity with complex theoretical issues which few historians possess. Moreover, historians are likely to question the priority which LaCapra, following Heidegger and Derrida, gives to "subversive" strate-

gies in dealing with texts. While such an approach may bring greater sensitivity to hidden meanings and implications, it threatens to plunge intellectual historians into a sea of shifting perspectives which deny any stable basis for their work.

Traditionally, that basis has been found in the assumption that the historian's subjects meant at least most of what they said or wrote. And the techniques on which intellectual historians have usually relied-synoptic content analysis and

paraphrases-are likely to remain the primary ways of presenting the thought of the past. But LaCapra demonstrates the limitations of these techniques, and points, in fact, to a significant deepening and expansion of the field of intellectual history.

STANLEY PIERSON

University of Oregon

L'OREILLE DE L'AUTRE: OTOBIOGRAPHIES, TRANSFERTS, TRADUCTIONS. TEXTES ET

DEBATS AVEC JACQUES DERRIDA. Edited by Claude Levesque and Christie V. McDonald. Montreal: VLB Editeur, 1982. 214 p.

The Ear of the Other (trans. Peggy Kamuf, New York, 1985) is the record of a conference held in Autumn of 1979 at the University of Montreal on the occasion of a visit by Jacques Derrida. "Nietzsche's Otobiography" (trans. Avital Ronell) comprises the first quarter of the text; this essay is followed by two round table discussions that address the topics of autobiography and translation. A number of

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COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

critics from various disciplines (literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis) offer short remarks and questions to which Derrida is asked to respond. The conference takes place around Derrida, who remains very much at the center of the debate; and in fact, his lecture on Nietzsche is as much about the phenomenon of academic "celebrity" as it is about the question of "academic freedom" that it claims to address. More than an interesting discussion and amplification of his "works in progress," the round tables at which Derrida presides also take as their object the institutional system of which they are part.

To illustrate the political and historical determinants of textual reception, Der- rida chooses one of the most notorious examples of interpretation, the use of Friedrich Nietzsche's writings in the Nazi propaganda campaign. Quoting an

early text entitled "On the Future of Our Academic Institutions," he lets the words resonate in their post-Nazi context, even maintaining the heavily loaded German term for "leader": "He was able to learn on the field of battle ... what he could , learn least of all in the sphere of 'academic freedom', that one needs

grosse Fiihrer and that all formation (Bildung) begins with obedience" (p. 43). In the pages that follow, he proceeds to answer a series of objections or defenses that one might raise in the face of the Nazi interpretation that imposes itself. He

explains that it is not enough to say that Nietzsche never meant that, that in fact he would have found it repulsive. Such a reaction, he adds, is "politically unaware" since the "effects" of a text cannot be reduced to the author's presumed intentions, and besides, one would still have to explain how "reactive degenerescence could

exploit the same language, the same words, the same utterances, the same rallying cries as the active forces to which it stands opposed." In conclusion, he asks: "Must not there be some powerful utterance-producing machine which programs the movements of the two opposing forces at once, and which couples, conjugates or marries them as life (does) death ?" (pp. 44, 45). That machine then becomes the object of inquiry and Nietzsche's article supplies the critique. After all, Nietzsche's call for a "grossen Fiihrer" is an effort to counteract the influence of the State and its pervasive discourse; in fact, when Nietzsche advocates "linguistic discipline," he is attempting to combat "a constraint which is all the more ferocious and implacable in that it conceals and disguises itself in the form of laisser-faire." In the name of "academic freedom," the State "controls everything" (p. 49). Against the "reverse cripple" that Zarathustra meets, a man who is only a tiny stalk supporting a gigantic ear that takes in everything without distinction and without differentiation, Nietzsche and Derrida caution us to "have a keen ear," to

distinguish "the active from the reactive, the affirmative from the negative, even

though apparently they are the same thing" (p. 70). For Derrida, the question of autobiography is inseparable from the institution

and from reception. His reading of Nietzsche's essay on the future of academic institutions begins with Ecce Homo. The question that Nietzsche poses in his sub-

title, "How One Becomes What One Is," is answered by Derrida: only through the ear of the other. He reads Nietzsche's account of his genealogy as an irre- ducible duality between the already-dead and the forever-living, that is, between the loss of the self through writing and the infinite capacity for return that that

writing allows. When Nietzsche takes on the task of telling his life to himself, he seems to be contracting only with himself, yet he implicates "on the force of a

signature" (p. 20) future readers and future generations who alone can guarantee that his text returns to his name.

Thus, both autobiography and the problem of reception intersect the question of the institution and its discourse. The question of translation, pursued through

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BOOK REVIEWS

the more circuitous route of discussion, follows a similar trajectory. Derrida's reading of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" argues that "pure language" (die reine Sprache) is not the telos of all individual acts of translation, a language that, combining all languages, would approximate the pre-Babelian linguistic paradise, but rather language as such, I'Ptre-langue de la langue (p. 164). (Derrida's "Des Tours de Babel," which contains a more extensive discus- sion of "The Task of the Translator," appears in Difference in Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham, Ithaca, N.Y., 1985.) It is through the activity of translation that one confronts the materiality of language. Similarly, he reads Benjamin's concern for the sacred text as an inquiry into the process of "sacralization" and therefore of canonization in the secular as well as the religious sense. Translation then emerges as an activity that poses important theoretical questions pertaining to the study of language and literature.

Derrida recognizes that the questions of reception and translation have much to do with his own situation. He invites us, from the first pages, to seek out the "autobiographical" aspect of his lecture; as he reads Nietzsche's description of the master lecturing to his students, it seems oddly germane to the scene being played out in Montreal. But Derrida plays the scene ironically, taking on the role of Zarathustra and exhorting his audience not to take his words as "truth" and to pay heed to the ear with which those words are received. His later discussion of how the term "deconstruction" at a certain historical moment "jumped out of the text and was seized by others who have since determined its fate" (p. 117) illustrates one way that the paradigm of selfhood sketched out in relation to Nietzsche could be turned back in an account of Derrida's position within the institution.

Curiously missing from the Montreal conference, however, is a critical response to Derrida, either from the more traditional sectors of academia or from critical Marxism or feminism. His audience is uniformly sympathetic even when the limits to his approach are starkly apparent. When, for example, he warns against engaging in what he calls "gynemagogy," Christie V. McDonald takes up the

pejorative term without question. Yet it is clear from the discussion that Derrida's framework does not allow him to proceed any further than Nietzsche, for whom woman is "the faceless figure of a figurant, an extra. She gives rise to all the

figures by losing herself in the background of the scene like an anonymous per- sona" (p. 56). She has no place either as student or instructor in the academic

system Nietzsche critiques, yet the figure he uses to describe that system is that of the fetus attached to its mother by an umbilical cord. Derrida, who analyzes this absence of women in Nietzsche, finds himself unable to assess such questions as the historical status of women as translators and as writers, except to appeal to a vague "polysexuality" and to claim that one's gender, like one's signature, is

only constituted retroactively by the ear of the other. Admitting that his "train- ing" and "incompetence" limit his attempts to approach questions in terms of his- torical periods, he can only affirm the usefulness of "this type of research" (p. 115). This should alert his audience to the limitations of Derrida's discourse in dealing with the particular question of the changing historical status of women; unfortunately, it seems that, at this conference at least, only Derrida is willing to critique Derrida.

JANE MARIE TODD

Miami University, Oxford, Ohio

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