"We are all Indians" : violence, intolerance, literature

“WE ARE ALL INDIANS”

V IO L E N C E IN T O L E R A N C E

LITERATURE

“We are all Indians”

Violence/ Intolerance /Literature

Prace Naukowe

Uniwersytetu Śląskiego w Katowicach

nr 1123

“We are all Indians”

Violence Intolerance

Literature

Edited by

Wojciech Kalaga & Tadeusz Sławek

Uniwersytet Śląski Katowice 1990

Editor of the Series:

History of Foreign Literatures ALEKSANDER ABLAMOWICZ

Reviewer

WANDA RULEWICZ

Contents

P r c f a c e ... ... 7 Tadeusz Rachwal: History. Of In d ia n s... 9 Tadeusz Sławek: A Hammer oT Philosophy. The Scene of Violence in Nietzsche and

Jeffers ...20 Emanuel Prower: Discourses That Kill...34 Andrzej Wicher: Freedom vs. Intolerance -— Variations on the Theme of Supernatural

Wives and H u sb a n d s... 47 Ewa Borkowska: “A Counterpoint of Dissonance.” Nietzsche and Hopkins . . . 68 Krzysztof Kowalczyk: Devil and Responsibility: Some Romantic Cruelties . . . . 77 Zbigniew Bialas: Introducing Basic Components of Sacer (-—). The Evidence of

Song o f Lawino by Okot p’B ite k ... ... 87 Marek Kulisz: Geoffrey Firmin’s Life without Principle... 99 Jerzy Sobieraj: Communal Intolerance in Eudora Welly’s “June Recital” and

Della W e d d i n g ... 106 Mirosława Ziaja: Intolerance or Generation Gap: Classroom Readings and Misreadings

of ‘T he Minister’s Black Veil” ...112

Preface

It was a confrontation with Jerzy Kosmski’s writings intensified by, then not too distant, prospects o f the Polish translation o f his Painted Bird that attracted our attention not only to the questions o f violence and cruelty but, first o f all, to a hesitant and often temperamental reaction to his books and the sccne o f brutality. If K osinski’s prose works enjoy such a range o f success and popularity it is not only due to their status o f aesthetic object but also to the ambiguity and lack o f interpretative measures and strategies which would allow us to master the representation o f cruelty. What marks the territory o f violcncc is its permanent refusal to be mapped out and domesticated.

Thus, Kosinski’s Painted Bird had to inevitably give way to a far wider rcflcction upon the discourse o f violence and domination which resides in various forms o f utterances thus making it virtually impossible to draw a clear dividing line between the exploited and abused “us” and the exploitative and dominating

“them.” Hence, as Tadeusz Rachwał claims, the expansion o f European culture and civilisation is always “annihilistic,” as the only space which it can find for itself is the territory “from before civilisation and history,” “an uncivilized territory to be domesticated.” A t the heart o f culture there lies unavoidable and irreducable violence o f self identification vis-a-vis the savage wilderness.

Thus, the title o f the volume We are all Indians borrowed from Baudrillard aims at disarming the powerful naturalizing effect o f history according to which facts and events are approached as “innocent” and considered to be mere descriptions.

Some contributors deal with specific literary illustrations o f the scene o f violence (Eudora W elty’s prose, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, African long poem Song o f Lawino), one argues that also reader response criticism is not exempt from the pressure o f intolerance. Hence, although the essays bring together a whole range o f literary and historical sources (such like fairy tailes, Mercator’s Atlas, G.M . Hopkins poetry and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights), it does not overlook certain philosophical traditions (Heidegger’s interpretation o f violence in An Introduction to Metaphysics, Nietzsche’s philosophizing with a hammer and Bataille’s concept o f transgression), which seem to frame in a fundamental manner a necessary rethinking o f the humanist anthropocentric tradition the scene o f which violence radically exposes.

Wojciech Kalaga, Tadeusz Stawek

Tadeusz Rachwał

History. Of Indians

“We” ... is an “I” expanded beyond the strict limits of the person, enlarged and at the same time amorphous.

---- EMILE BENVENISTE, Problems in Generał Linguistics

The historical documents are not less opaque than the texts studied by the literary critic.

— HAYDEN WHITE, Tropics o f Discourse

Let us begin com m onsensically. I f our history is about us (the polysem y o f

“about” m ust be ignored for a while), and if “ we” is what it is in the epigram above, then, w ithout doubt, we m ust try to draw at least some conclusions. A s an anom alous kind o f being “w e” is not quite what it is; it is an expanded “I ,” m ore than “ I .” And what that “m ore” is, is im possible to give a “m orphous” shape to, it is im possible to write about as about one more thing am ong others. A suggestion that this “m ore” is in som e sense

“Indians” com es from Jean B au drillard---we shall return to i t ---and what this suggestion also tells us is that our history to o m ust be, in a sense, about Indians. W hat I am going to do in this text is to read one opaque statement o f Baudrillard’s, and to read it neither from the position o f the historian nor from that o f the literary critic, but rather from a number o f positions whose identification m ust be left to the reader. “I will add,” says Derrida in Positions, “ concerning positions: scenes, acts, figures o f dis­

sem ination.” 1

In L ’echange symbolique e t la mort Baudrillard says that “there will always be animal and Indian reservations to conceal that they are dead, and that we are all Indians.”2 What this statement seems to be saying is that animals

1 J. Derrida, Positions, Irans. A. Bass (Chicago: The University оГ Chicago Press, 1981), p. 96.

2 J. Baudrillard, L'echange symbolique et la mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), p. 36.

and Indians are dead, and that we are dead along with something which cannot be simply referred to by the pronoun “them” because this “them” is also u s ---Indians. Confined to their reservations beasts and Indians (thus made confluent) are not us, but neither are they them. “W e” cannot be said without simultaneously evoking the “m ore” which in Benveniste undermines its identity, without wildness and savagery o f animals and Indians which, in Baudrillard, we are. This ascription to the “we” o f its other(s) makes the essence o f “we” actually unthinkable, and it is the death o f animals and Indians that might guarantee some identifiable kind o f presence to “we.” This death, however, must remain concealed because its unconcealment will also unconceal our death, the death o f “we.” Baudrillard’s “we” is thus simultane­

ously inclusive and exclusive, it conflates “you” and “them.”

The problem o f pronouns meets the theme o f history in the work of Emile Benveniste. He defines historical narration as

the mode of utterance that excludes every autobiographical linguistic form. The historian will never say je or tu or maintenant, because he will never make use of the formal apparatus of discourse (discours), which resides primarily in the relationship of the persons je:tu.

Hence we shall find only the forms of the third person in a historical narrative (histoire) strictly followed.3

Histoire and discours are two distinct kinds o f enunciation (enoncialion) because in the former there is no inherent person. It is inherent “only in the positions T and ‘you’,” and thus histoire, unlike discours, is a “non-personal”

kind of enunciation for which the third person is reserved. Histoire lacks “the sign o f person,” it is as it were a kind o f language from which the speaker and the hearer withdraw, a language which supresses “the human reality o f dialogue.”4 This lack o f person, however, is itself a mark, it is an absence which is a trace o f both “you” and “I.” In “ the human reality o f dialogue,”

that is to say in discou rs,“you” and “I ” are present, but unlike third person pronouns and “all other designations a language articulates ... they do not refer to a concept or to an individual.” 5 For Benveniste it is the reality of dialogue that constitutes a person:

Consciousness of self is only possible if it is experienced by contrast. I use / only when I am speaking to someone who will be you in my address. [This] implies that reciprocally- / becomes you in the address of one who in his turn designates himself as / . ... This polarity of persons is the fundamental condition in language, of which the process of com­

munication, in which we share, is only a mere pragmatic consequence.6

3 E. Benveniste, Problems .in General Linguistics, trans. M.E. Meek (University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 206—207.

4 Ibid., p. 201.

5 Ibid., p. 226.

6 Ibid., pp. 224—225.

To conceive of language instrumentally as o f a means of communication is simplistic, and the search for a time immemorial in which there was man and no language is both naive and vain for Benveniste because it is only in language, in discours, that “I” and “you,” and hence the idea o f subjecti­

vity, become thinkable.7 Since “I” and “you” have no stable reference it is also human subjectivity that lacks stability. Language is social and so is man, his “ I ” being always inextricably linked with “you,” with its other whose other it is. “We shall never get back to man reduced to himself and exercising his wits to conceive o f the existence o f another,” says Benveniste. I f man is a sign for Peirce, for Benveniste “it is a speaking man whom we find in the world, a man speaking to another man, and language provides the very definition o f m an.” 8

Historical narrative by hiding its discursiveness in the third person produces the effect o f a transparent notation o f facts whose factuality also confirms the stability and factuality o f the absent addresser and addressee. In other words, historical narrative implicitly translates “I” and “you” into “he”

which is not a personal pronoun in Benveniste but “non-person,” and which, unlike the two personal pronouns, has objective reference. Historical narrative, precisely, reduces man to himself.

The objective reference o f “he,” its reference to an object “outside direct address” 9 exists, according to Benveniste, by opposition to the “I ” o f the speaker. “H e” has value because “it is necessarily part o f a discourse uttered by ‘I’.” 10 “I” and “he” are thus never identifiable with each other, they actually belong to distinct modes o f language although, paradoxically, one cannot exist without the other. The temporal domain o f histoire is thus domain of which “I” does not partake---although this domain defines itself against the “I,” against the “present” which has “only a linguistic fact as its reference.” 11 Objectively, Benveniste’s “present” is always already in the past.

The present cannot, like “I,” enter the text o f history, although the objective (historical) existence o f the present, presence o f the present, is, in fact, historie’s root and foundation. The time at which one is, at which one is present, is the time at which one speaks in Benveniste, the time o f “I” at which there is no objective reference. The paradox seems to be that one cannot really speak about oneself otherwise than historically, otherwise than objective­

ly ---as an object always already in the past.

7 Cf. ibid., p. 224.

8 Ibid., p. 224.

9 Ibid., p. 229.

10 Ibid., p. 229.

15 Ibid., p. 227.

This is exactly the case o f the historical genre called autobiography, the genre in which the history o f one’s “I ” is actually the history o f someone else, o f an object that I know to be me. Yet, this “m e” is in fact a “he.” The autobiographical “I” functions in much the same way as the proper name or as as Benveniste’s “non-personal” pronoun s---he, she, it. It is actually a “he”

disguised as “I,” a delayed “I,” an “I” positioned in the past and thus a “non-person,” a rememberance o f “I” copied from the book o f memory.

Unlike autobiography history openly erases the markers o f discourse, the personal p ron ou n s---“you” and “I ” ---and in effect obscures the moment which institutionalizes it, the “reality o f discourse” in which the

“non-objective” now o f “I ” initiates the “non-personal,” and thus objective, past o f “he.” By this gesture the narrativity o f history, the fact that it is also a story o f a discoursing subject, is obscured as well.

Benveniste’s histoire is obviously a broader term than history, and it applies equally well to fictional narratives. Simultaneously, however, histoire cannot fully break with discours, with the realm o f the “non-objectivity,” with the realm o f the undecidable “I” and “you.” H istoire’s attachement to discours must thus also problematize the fact/fiction distinction pure and simple just as it problematizes present/past, objective/“non-objective,” event/“non-event”

distinctions. The impossibility o f fully separating discours and histoire inevitab­

ly contaminates one with the other. The difference between historical narrative and literary narrative, if there is any, might lie in the former’s pretending not to be a story and the latter’s pretending to be one.

Both “fictional” and “real” histoires assume the existence of events prior to what Robert Scholes calls “entextualization,” 12 and from this point o f view the two kinds o f writing (or speaking) are in fact indistinguishable. It is thus not quite right to state that in fiction events are presented as i f they did have such prior temporal existence and to cut the “as i f ’ in the case o f history.

There is nothing in historiographic presentation that excludes the realm o f the

“as i f ’. All events presented as if they had no prior existence are to be presented as they are (or were), and thus not presented at all. Historical facts seem to speak (by) themselves and a historian is not so much an author as he is a compiler. He is not the one who speaks or writes, and he remains outside his text as something which in fact cannot have its histoire.

It is for this reason that a history o f a discoursing subject, o f “I,” is unthinkable otherwise than as a history o f “he.” Autobiography is histoire.

“I” always preexists its history. It does not quite belong to it, but it puts history adrift itself remaining an unrecoverable origin, a beginning which is its limit. “I,” the subject, is always some distance away from the world, from history (and the two are not really different), from the book or atlas o f the

12 R. Scholes, “Language, Narrative and Anti-Narralive,” in On Narrative, W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 207.

world, and it does not partake o f it. In an important sense, Wittgenstein would say, the “I,” the subject does not exist:

If I wrote a book called The World as I found it, I should have to include a report on my body, and should have to say which parts were subordinate to my will, and which were not, etc., this being a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject; for it alone could not be mentioned in that book. ---- The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world.13 In an important sense, let us continue this story, “I” is a fiction, the subject whose history can only be a story. It is by the erasure o f “I ” that histoire also erases and masks its fictive and fictional status, represses what cannot be, or have, history. “I” is hiitoire’s/and historie’s/constitutive outside, its uniden- tifable producer which does not have its own history. The frustrating story of this “producer” is to be found in psychoanalysis.

For Jacques Lacan ego “is frustration in its essence.” 14 The source o f this frustration is the irreducible alienation between the “I” whose history we glimpse at in the mirror-stage and the desired Other in which man’s desire finds its meaning. “It is from the Other that the subject receives even the message that he emits.”15 Ego’s history is the story o f id, and it never fully replaces the

“discourse o f the Other,” which is the unconscious, but always partakes o f it, returns to it and “adopts its plural structure.” 16 The “I” o f the conscious, the

“civilized” and historical “I” is thus always as it were incomplete, split, undecidable---it is never graspable as an object or an event for, or in history.

The paradox o f “I” is that it is neither historical nor ahistorical, that it is neither an objective third person to be included in a narrative nor the brutish, anarchic,

“alinguistic” non-structure. “I ” is the discourse o f the Other; discours and not histoire. A history o f that discourse renders the “I” as an objective entity which it is not, and thus produces an “I” which can only be a kind of fiction, and which Wittgenstein reduces, as we have seen, to nonexistence.

The way o f history is thus the way o f repression and “propriation” o f discours to histoire. This repression gives rise to seemingly factual categories which are, by this gesture, simultaneously pointed to and silenced. Such categories as the unconscious, the Other,.madness or “I” have no objective means o f presenting themselves and they are objects posited by histoire, by the language through which other signs, the signs o f the Other, cannot speak. “The very status o f language,” says Shoshana Felman, “is that o f a break with madness, o f a protective strategy, o f a difference by which madness is deferred,

13 L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinnes (London and Hendey: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), S.631, S.632.

14 J. Lacan, Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis, trans. A. Wilden (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1981), p. 11.

15 Quoted in M. Bowie, “Jacques Lacan,” in Structuralism and Since, J. Sturrock, ed.

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 135.

,a Ibid., p. 135.

put off. With respect to ‘madness itself,’ language is always somewhere else.”

And just as “I” or the subconscious cannot be communicated through histoire so too the phenomenon o f madness, “being in its essence silence, cannot be rendered, said through logos.” 17

As regards “I” histoire is always somewhere else. And since the nature of this “I” is thus bound to remain outside the scope o f objectifying language, since this “I ” is a fiction upon which histoire’s third “non-person” is grounded, it is obviously the groundedness o f this ground that is at stake. Histoire silences the “I ” just as psychoanalysis silences the Id while simultaneously positing it, just as psychiatry silences madness. What such “grounding”

categories seem to have in common is their otherness to historically accepted norms and values: incoherence, wildness, unrestrained desire, primitivism, brutishness, etc. — the inability to speak o f or by themselves by means o f a clear, coherent, unambiguous language. Without the ego the unconscious is mute, and so is “I” without histoire, so is madness without reason. The unconscious is in some sense a “pre-history” o f the ego, of what is thinkable and reasonable. The unconscious cannot be thought o f from within and it becomes thinkable as a category only from the civilized and culturalized point of view. It is for this reason that the unconscious, says Malcom Bowie, “is so easily thought o f as brutish and anarchic.” 18

Benveniste’s discours is thus not translatable into histoire in the way pre-history is not translatable into history without becoming history itself.

“Pre-history,” for a historian, is like the psychoanalyst’s dream. Its only way o f being present is by way o f rewriting, representing it as a coherent text of the ego. Yet, it is the “non-language” o f dreams, the “pre-historical” world, the world which as yet has no history, that provides history with the territory to explore. And to explore something also means to conquer and to subject, to enclose or carve out certain areas o f the territory so as to have a subject for investigation, a subject which is an object. Paraphrasing Jakobson’s well known definition o f literariness we might say that history is organised violence committed on (what I call) “pre-history,” and in Lacanian jargon the organ organizing this violence is the phallus, the Law o f the Father.

The phallus, which is the figure o f the social power to sever the intimations of the unconscious, in its linguistic dimension represses the “turbulent activity”

of the language o f the unconscious (the unconscious is structured like language in Lacan). In other words the phallus imposes histoire upon discours, and thus provisionally nails down words onto meanings.19 The surplus of language which remains outside histoire is thus only thinkable as chaotic, anarchic and

11 Sh. Felm an, Writing and M adness (Literature/Philosophy!Psychoanalysis) (Ithaca and New Y ork: Cornell U niversity Press, 1985), p. 46.

18 M . Bowie, “ Ja cq u es...,” p. 138.

19 Cf. T . E aglelon, Literary Theory. An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), p. 169.

brutish, let us repeat, and thus constitutes the territory which is either a terra incognita populated with Indians and monsters or a land conquered and included into the sphere o f the Law, into the sphere o f “legal” language and

“legal” history. Nietzsche compares this constitutive outside o f history to atmosphere. He finds in history a denial Of what he calls “life” for which a certain misty and undecidable aura or atmosphere is indispensable. “Every living thing,” he writes in On the Advantage and Disadvantage o f H istory fo r Life, “needs to be surrounded by an atmosphere, a mysterious circle o f mist: if one robs it off this veil, if one condemns a religion, an art, a genius to orbit as a star without an atmosphere: then one should not wander about its rapidly becoming withered, hard and barren.” 20

History is thus a barren kind o f writing because it denies the ahistorical and thus the living. “Historical justice,” which in Lacan is the justice o f the Law of the Father, “is a terrible virtue” for Nietzsche “because it always undermines the living and brings it to ruin: its judging is always annihilating.”?1 This act of annihilation is achieved in history by the rethoric o f objectivity, by the act of erasing the discursing subject from the text. This erasure is dictated by the impossibility o f objectifying the subject, by the impossibility o f making him at the same time speak and be present in the historical account o f events.

T he subject is not an event in the historical sense. Historical “he” orbits w ithout an atmosphere, without what makes it a living thing. The problem and the paradox is th at this atmosphere cannot be completely annihilated just as it is impossible to annihilate the language o f the unconscious. This language will be always lurking in the rhetorical spheres o f the already mentioned wildness, primitivism, and anarchy.

It is thus no mere coincidence that the same kind o f rhetoric justifies the expansion of European culture and civilization. This expansion is necessarily an “annihilistic” one since the only territory where it can carve out a space for itself is the territory from before civilization and history, an uncivilized territory to be domesticated. Wildness and savagery must give way to the plough o f culture and to the walls of civilized cities which organize the topography o f the world in the way the stable and fixed meanings o f words organize language. What justifies, for instance, Brutus’ conquest o f the land

“which warlike Britons now possesse” and the extermination of its former inhabitants in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (II.x.5) is the fact that the “hideous Giants” possess the island unjustly. Brutus, says Spenser, “them o f their unjust possession depriv’d ” (II.x.9). The giants are presented in the poem as both morally and sexually filthy, as totally uncivilized (they have no cities) and

20 F. N ietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage o f H istory fo r Life, trans. P. Preuss (Cambridge, 1980), p. 40.

21 Ibid., p. 38.

uncultural (they hunt and don’t cultivate land). As Richard Waswo notices in his reading o f the poem

Logically, there can be nothing unjust about the possession of a land by its aboriginal inhabitants. The giants’ possession is unjust because they are so; and the whole point of Spenser’s version of the scene is to make them so. To transfer the “injustice” from their behaviour to their land-tenure renders the taking over of that land, as well as their extermination, just.22

Spenser is obviously but an example o f how thinking in terms o f history is productive o f repression and violence, o f endowing violence with authority and legitimacy. History either exterminates and then renders the exterminated as inferior or grasps the already familiar, those areas which welcome it and yield to it. “We see what we look for;” says Waswo, “our stories tell us what to look for; we find it (whether it’s there or not) and then we can act our stories. Such is the process by which our founding legend o f the descent from Troy makes things Happen in the world.”23 The story o f M ore’s Utopia can be quite exemplary here. A ll that we know about the former inhabitants o f the former peninsula is that they were “a pack o f ignorant savages” who probably had no idea that it was good and desireable to wear breeches.24 We also know that they became “perhaps, the m ost civilized nation in the world.”25 It is the coming o f U topos that transforms the Abraxians into an organized society.

The whole history o f Utopia is included in one short paragraph the rest o f the text being m ostly a description o f this peculiar social organization. Yet, it is this short passage which renders the Utopian society as educated and then transformed from without and not self-made from within. An autochtonous society is not a society for the historical gaze, and its marginalization in Utopia is quite symptomatic. The indigenous inhabitants o f the peninsula are present in the story’s history o f the island only as something already over and done with, as an always already absent presence.

That history and culture cannot have grown from a “here,” that they cannot have been autochtonous, that expansion and exploration are inscribed within them, that they cannot simply be stable and identifiable objects is the institutionalizing paradox o f both history and culture. This is also the paradox o f G onzalo’s dream o f the Golden Age in The Tempest o f which he can think only in terms o f the rhetoric o f sovereignty, commonwealth and plantation, the paradoxical plantation which would naturally feed his innocent people (c f.n .l). Wildness is quite evidently not natural enough to produce any

22 Cf. R. Waswo, ‘T he History that literature Makes,” in New Literary History, Vol. 19 (Spring 1988), p. 546.

23 Ibid., p. 556.

24 T. More, Utopia (Penguin Books, 1965), p. 70. Paul Turner translates Abraxa as Sansculoltia: o-not and brakae — breeches; cf. ibid., p. 154.

25 Ibid., p. 70.

kind o f age, and before the island generously offers man its fruit it must be

“propriated,” governed so perfectly as to “excel the golden age.” As there is in fact no history without kings or governments, the Ovidian Golden Age subverts both the institution o f history and the state. Kings, laws, ships and foreign lands were ideas as yet nonexistent in that age. Gonzalo’s naturaliza­

tion o f nature in The Tempest is in fact a historical gesture, the gesture which domesticates by producing domains or dominions to which names can be easily attached and which otherwise are nameless areas o f absence; barren deserts, wild forests, savage cannibals. This is, among others, the case o f Caliban whose existence or presence in the play depends on the fact that he speaks Prospero’s language otherwise being a creature without any kind o f dccidable form. Jose Rabasa finds this tendency o f history to make visible, and thus actually existent, by naming a characteristic feature o f European expansion and colonialism. In his reading o f Mercator’s Atlas or a Geogra- phicke Description o f the World he describes this tendency as

... a tendency to make space historical by means of the legends incorporated into the empty areas in the maps. Ther is a centrifugal movement from the name-laden Europe to the periphery where legends and drawings characterize vast territories without history. In the periphery itself, the concentration of names serves as a thermometer of colonialization.2®

What is not “propriated” by a name is thus without history and outside history. Mercator himself says that his Atlas

is composed of Geographie (which is a description of the known Earth and parts thereof) and Historie, which is (Oculus Mundi) the eye of the World.27

The geographer must thus be already equipped with some historical binoculars in order to describe the already known areas of the world simultaneously

“forgetting” about all others and in fact filling them (or as in the case o f maps drawing) with monsters and cannibals whose identity will resamble Caliban’s body. The nature the geographer describes must be made natural by history, it must be a natural object or fact easily discernible upon the map o f the world.

History, “the map o f the world,” says Rabasa, “naturalizes particular national formations and institutionalizes forgetfulness in the perception o f the world.”28 This seems to be the kind o f forgetfulness Antonio has in mind when he ridicules G onzalo’s vision: “The latter end o f his commonwealth forgets the beginning” (II. 1). For the age without travel, history and sovereignty, the Golden Age, is something which can be a historical event only as long as we forget that we have forgotten it. Wording this paradox differently, we are blind to the naturalizing effect o f history and treat historical facts as

26 J. Rabasa, “Allegories of the Atlas,” F. Barker et al, ed., in Europe and Its Others, Essex Sociology of Literature Conference, Vol. 2 (Essex, 1985), p. 9.

27 H.J. Mercator, Atlas or a Geographicke Description o f the World, (1636), Facsimilar edition (Amsterdam, 1968); quoted in ibid., p. 5.

Jł Ibid., p. 6.

innocent and pure events which history only takes up and describes rather than carves out from the otherwise quite differently ordered “atmosphere” as Nietzsche had it, o f “life.”

The movement o f history is thus bound to leave something “outside its scope,” a certain surplus or terrain without history; the “I,” the unconscious, the wild. This reserve seems to be the “animal and Indian reservations” (and only too many examples o f seeing Indians as animals can be found in colonial discourse, and not only there) Baudrillard talks about in the beginning o f this paper. The “life” o f this reserve is the “life” outside history, but it is history that produces it as outside, and it is called into its marginal being, paradoxical­

ly, by history itself. History “conceals” this dependance, and thus simul­

taneously conceals the actual nonexistence o f these areas o f “life” , their

“death.” “We are all Indians,” says Baudrillard, and his we, as I have said, is both inclusive and exclusive; it also says that we are always already them.

Tadeusz-Rachwal

HISTORIA. O INDIANACH S lre sz c z e n ie

Artykuł jest próbą krytycznego spojrzenia na historię z punktu widzenia poststrukturalizmu.

Pewna niedookreśloność kategorii podmiotu mówiącego, wynikająca z zaproponowanego przez Benveniste’a podziału języka na discours i histoire, stanowi punkt wyjścia spojrzenia na historię jako na dyscyplinę, która apriorycznie traktując takie kategorie jak wydarzenie czy przedmiot, dokonuje niejako represji tego, co wymyka się kategoryzacji. Dobitnym przykładem takiego oddziaływania historii są teksty dotyczące innych kultur, teksty czasów kolonizacji, w których

“wyniszczenie Indian” dokonuje się także na gruncie retoryki.

Тадеуш Рахвал

ИСТОРИЯ. ОБ ИНДЕЙЦАХ Р езю м е

В статье сделана попытка критически посмотреть на историю с точки зрения пост- сгруктурализма. Некоторая недоопределенность категории говорящего субъекта, вытекающая из предложенного Бенвенистом разделения языка на discours и histoire является исходной точкой подхода к истории как к дисциплине, которая, априори рассматривая такие

категории, как событие или предмет, производит как бы репрессию того, что ускользает от категоризации. Убедительным примером такого воздействия истории являются тексты о других культурах, тексты времен колонизации, в которых “истребление индейцев”

происходит также на почве риторики.

Tadeusz Sławek

A Hammer of Philosophy. The Scene of Violence in Nietzsche and Jeffers

0 Human Imagination, 0 Divine Body I have Crucified, 1 have turned my back upon thee into the Wastes of Moral Law.

There Babylon is builded in the Waste, founded in Human desolation...

— WILLIAM BLAKE, Jerusalem

Before I sink into deep sleep I want to hear. I want to hear The scream of the butterfly.

— JIM M ORRISON, When the M usic’s Over

The most general rendition of the Nietzschean project seems to concentrate round the question which, although variably described by the philosopher himself, can be presented as the sanification o f Western philosophy. Whether Nietzsche chooses to talk about it as the Eternal Return, Transvaluation o f All Values, or going beyond Good and Evil, what is at stake is a new health (Genusung) linked with the ability to listen to what was forced to sound and with manifold indications o f sense as joissance which in Nietzsche’s rhetoric is rendered by the notions o f gaiety, joy (Fröhliche Wissenschaft), dancing and buoyancy (H eiterkeit).

The opening passage from the Preface to The Twilight o f Idols provides us with a particularly good exemplification o f this paradigm:

Inmitten einer düstem und über die Massen verantwortlichen Sache seine Heiterkeit aufrecht erhalten ist nichts Kleines von Kunststück: und doch, was ware nötiger als Heiterkeit? Kein Ding gerät, an dem nicht der Übermut seinen Teil hat. Das Zuviel von Krall erst ist der Beweis von Kraft.1

Nietzsche constructs a philosophy o f sanification centered round the notion o f excess, Zuviel and Übermut. This philosophy is to turn out indispensible (nötig) in the situation which carries the consequences that themselves go beyond any measure ( über die M aßen). Necessarily, it is a theory o f the new man which is embedded in the Nietzschean excess, the man who is able to face the statement o f his own incompatibility with any measure, o f the de-centered man deposed from the privileged position where the Renaissance tradition

1 F. Nietzsche, Götzendämmerung (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1921), p. 85.

of humanism placed him, the man who is “the strangest (because unrelated to measures which apply to other entities) o f the creatures.”2 This man, able to cope with the unmeasurable and living outside the measure, deals with the

Ü ber---(o f M ut and M aß) and Zu- (of Viel), thus he himself is über-mensch, a human being that is in a sense “all-too-human” (allzumenschlich). It is this excess that constitutes the new man, in the way as it is the surplas o f power that accounts for the new energy (Das Zuviel von Kraft is der Beweis von Kraft). In other words, Übermensch, i.e. the man o f Über-, like Blake’s man, is an active agent whose self knowledge is determined by the infernal wisdom of

“Exuberance is beauty,” “Y ou never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough,” and o f “The road o f excess [which] leads to the palace o f wisdom.”3

This regaining o f new manhood which is inherently involved in exuberance and spilling over, o f going over the limit, must inevitably imply a loss: to spill over is also to lose if not even to waste, to go over the top means also to fall down, to plunge down an abyss. In the logic o f excess I am myself to the extent to which I abandon myself, o r ---better---1 live in excess when I go beyond what is called “I.” “I ” is what leaves the domain o f “I,” spills over “I;” I am the wound through which I slowly leave myself. This is how Georges Bataille envisages life in excess:

Vivre I’exces, c’est vivre celte surabondance jamais sai&isable, jamais maitrisable. Le trop-plein deborde toujours, et n’est jamais recuperable... Vivre en exces, c’est paradoxale- ment disparaitre aussi. Si je franchis le seuil — et l’exces est toujours au-delä du seuii... -— plus loin qu’au lieu ou mes forces m’ont porte, plus loin que mon desir, je m’aneantis... C’est vouloir et accepter ma perte.4

Similarly, Heidegger in his meditation upon Nietzsche warns us not to approach the superman “as a product o f an unbridled and degenerate imagination rushing headlong into the void.” Consequently,

...we must never look for the superman’s figure and nature in those characters who by a shallow and misconceived will to power are pushed to the top as the chief functionaries of the various organizations in which that will to power incorporates itself.5

The excess, the man as a man o f Über-, is the territory where the rethinking o f relationships like domination, property, and desire takes place or, rather, where it does not take place, as this would suggest a solidification and certain stasis but the domain where this rethinking activates an endless series of gestures without itself properly taking place. In Rilke’s words the excess is

2 M. Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. R. Manheim (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 126.

3 W. Blake, Complete Writings, ed. G. Keynes (Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 150, 152.

4 A. Amu ad, G. ExcofTon-Lafarge, Bataille (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), p. 72.

5 M. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking, trans. J.G. Gray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 59.

Lautloses Leben, Aufgehn ohne Ende,

Raum-brauchen ohne Raum von jenem Raum zu nehmen...6

Similarly, Bataille confesses in the Preface to Madame Edwarda his ultimate helplessness when it comes to define excess;

...l’exces est cela par meme par quoi Petre est d’abord, avant toutes choses, hors de toutes limites.7

Also Nietzsche warns us that a necessary condition for being activated by buoyancy (H eiterkeit) is not to stay in a confined space o f a problem, but to leave it (in die Sonne zu laufen), as the philosophy o f excess overturns traditional readings o f homely spaces and either deprives them o f the status o f the life-cherishing hearth (Bataille’s life outside one’s threshold, seuil) or openly marks them as hostile to life and stygmatized by deadly seriousness (Nietzsche in a continuing passage from the quoted “Preface” instructs us to run outside in the sunshine in order to shake off too heavy serious­

ness ---einen schweren, allzuschweren geworden Ernst von sich zu schütteln).

The task o f philosophy is now to interrupt the humanist tradition which inscribed reality in the centralized system regulated by mental and emotional needs and measures o f man. A s Robinson Jeffers says in the poem which we shall refer to later what philosophy sets before itself is the problem o f finding

“an opening.” To put it more adequately, this task is less a matter o f neutral

“finding” and more a case o f aggressive and violent gesture able to perforate the shell o f inauthentic discourse and inauthentic existence. Nietzsche does not try to hide the violence which must be the main sanifying factor: the man of excess, the man who has “spilled over” the opening, or the threshold, the un-domesticated man, the man o f Ober-, must be the man o f Übermut and Zuviel, the man o f war (we ought to keep an eye on the ambiguity o f this phrase partly describing a quality o f man, partly referring to a ship, especially so that in Nietzsche a ship is a constant metaphorical figure o f freedom, see chapters “Von den drei Bösen,” and “Von alten und neuen Tafeln” o f Zarathustra).

The most spectacular figure o f the crucial role played by violence in Nietzsche’s thought is a subtitle to Götzendämmerung containing the concept o f “philosophising with a hammer.” The hammer appears as an instrument of pressure and listening. As the former it overcomes the unwillingness to speak and forces what would wish to remain silent (was still bleiben möchte) to resound; as the latter it is responsible for the very fact of the transmission o f voice like the anatomical hammer which, located in the middle ear, transmits

• R.M. Rilke, “Die Rosenschale,” in R.M. Rilke, Poezje (bilingual edition) (Kraków:

Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1974), p. 130.

7 G. Bataille, Madame Edwarda (Paris: Editions 10/18, 1966), p. 12.

vibrations from the eardrum to the cochlea (incidentally, we should not let go unnoticed that the whole nomenclature o f the auditory ossicles is related to the crafts o f war, as besides the “hammer” we also have there an “anvil” and

“stirrup;” thus, it should not come as a surprise that Nietzsche’s book is a “great declaration o f war” (grosse Kriegserklärung)). The hammer is also a theological device as the realm which wishes to remain silent, the realm o f the divine. In other words, the violence o f the Nietzschean hammer is not o f a simple destructive nature; it is a mode o f liberating man from a God considered as a limit, a restriction imposed upon human creativity by the system, a closed totality, such a God must imply. The logic o f Nietzsche’s theology o f the hammer is that through the use o f this instrument one does not so much get rid o f Gods but encroaches upon their enviously guarded right to keep silent, to remain isolated in the plenum o f the original unity which defies and conditions the future dispersion o f signs. The silence o f Gods regulates and organizes the functioning o f human signs securing a proper distribution o f signifiers and their belonging to appropriate signifieds. The attack o f the hammer is aimed at a certain fixed way o f representing objects and their organization in closed systems. Übermensch, the man o f Über-, promotes then liberation o f objects. As Martin Heidegger notes:

The last man — the ilnal and definitive type of man so far fixes himself, and generally all that is, by a specific way of representing ideas.8

The violence o f the hammer directs itself against the fixity and results in turning the world from the ready-made one to a world which is fundamentally unready and future-oriented, the world which is “the wanderings o f a way o f thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world o f the future which proclaims itself at present, beyond the closure o f knowledge.”9 In the

“A u f den Glückseligen Inseln” chapter o f Zarathustra we read that

was wir Welt nannen, das soll erst von euch geschalten werden: eure Vernunft, euer Bild, euer Wille, eure Liebe soll es selber werden!10

And later on in the same chapter the way retreating from Gods is a way towards the openness o f creativity:

Hinweg von Gott und Göttern lockte mich dieser Wille, was wäre denn zu schaffen, wenn Götter — da wären!

The hammer performs two functions. When applied to theology and corres­

ponding metaphysics o f system and presence, the silent presence o f God, the invigilator and guarantor o f order, it leads to a major shift or G od’s position.

Nietzsche’s hammer attacks the very foundations o f totalitarianism as

• M. Heidegger, What..., p. 62.

9 J. Derrida,, O f Grammatology, trans. C.G. Spivak (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1976), p. 4.

10 F. Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Leipzig: Kroner, 1930), p. 91.

a terror o f truth, o f God as a superpoliceman. About 40 years after the

“Preface” to Götzendämmerung was written, Walter Benjamin, in an excellent passage from his M oscow diary, grasped this conjunction o f theological and political totalitarianism:

...there is still perhaps not a single spot in Moscow from which at least one church is not visible. More exactly: at which one is not watched by at least one church. The subject of the tsars was surrounded in this city by more than four hundred chapels, which is to say by two thousand domes, which hide in the corners everywhere... spy over walls. An architectural okhrana was around him.11

The purpose o f using the hammer agains Gods is to break their silence and involve them in a discussion with man. Thus Nietzsche speaks about “asking questions with the hammer” (m it dem Hammer Fragen stellen), and the very act o f throwing Gods into the human discourse already deprives them o f their privileged status. The hammer is a device which returns Gods to semiotics and interpretation. In Zarathustra Nietzsche opens God to human thinking and creativity (Könntet ihr einen Gott schaffen? Könntet ihr einen Gott denken?), and in The Twilight o f Idols he listens very attentively to Gods response (Antwort) with a marked stress on the delicacy and subtlety o f critical vigilance indispensible in this communication: G od’s answer must be listened to by those who have ears behind ears ( Einen der Ohren noch hinter den Ohren hat) which endless succession o f ears suggests that G od’s message is subject to intricate analysis in the meandering passages o f the labyrinths o f ears where it is continued and proliferated by numerous other hammers (those anatomical devices responsible for the violent action o f transmitting vibrations, i.e.

straining to the point o f piercing the tympanic membrane).

However, as we have said before, this use o f hammer does not destroy Gods but wrenches from them a response, involves them in the semiotic element and deprives them o f the benefit o f silence which is always imposed by closed systems Gods are guardians of. Thus, to attack Gods with the hammer is like approaching a piece o f metal with a tuning fork to make it vibrate, to make the metal available to human ears by the constant and dangerous work o f the hammer and membrane. Nietzsche himself speaks of hitting Gods with a hammer which is like a tuning fork (m it dem Hammer wie mit einer Stimmgabel) to listen to their sound (Aushörchen von Götzen). This allows the philosopher to center the question o f violence round the pro­

blematic o f discourse which is Nietzsche’s manner o f humanizing Gods.

Violence is the art o f posing questions, i.e. o f interpretative vigilance applied to areas which so far have been exempt from interpretation. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche presents a good reader as “a monster o f curiosity and courage” and

11 W. Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. E. Jephcott, K. Shorter (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), p. 204.

someone who is “drunk with riddles” (ein Untier von M ut und Neugierde, Rätsel-Trunkenen).

Courage (M u t) is necessary to create, posit dillemas (Mutmassung) concerning areas sealed off by powerful restrictions (G ott ist eine M ut­

massung,12) which, in turn, must lead to too a courageous (Übermut) act of going beyond limits. This excess, the ability to think the extremes o f human sense (Eure eigne Sinne sollt ihr zu Ende denken13 ) is not only a question o f Über-mut, but it also constitutes the true mode/m ood (M u t) o f man’s existence; Übermut is not audacity (the excess o f courage), but it is the super-mood (Ü ber-m ut), the excessive modality o f man which locates man’s potential to create outside the narrow confines o f Cartesian subject. This super-mood, super-courage (Über-mut) o f excess is achieved through dis­

course, listening to the voice wrenched by force (a hammer) from the protected and privileged areas o f silence. It is this attentive listening “with small ears”

(Ich die kleinste Ohre habe,1* says Nietzsche about himself in Ecce H omo) to the voice ( Stimme) is a fundamental m ood (Stimmung) o f man’s being.

Through violence man makes the divinities speak, listens to their voice (Stim me) and uncovers his m ood (Stimmung) which consists in the super­

courage (Übermut) o f thinking and creating (Mutmassung).

But the very term Aushorchen which Nietzsche uses in The Twilight o f Idols is ambiguous, as it not o n ly speaks about listening to Gods but also about examining them in the same way in which a doctor examines, auscultates his patient. Thus, the violence o f the hammer is also a means o f restoring Gods to good health (H eilkraft).

This is the first function o f violence in Nietzsche’s philospohy: to turn man into excessive being ( Übermensch) through a polemic with Gods which is an act o f a radical sanification o f G od’s status. God becomes a true divinity when it recognizes its limits and go beyond them seems to be the basic principle o f the theology o f excess. I f this aspect o f philosophising with a hammer concentrates on theological dillema, the other protocol o f reading this phrase emphasizes its human reference. As we have said before, the philosophy o f excess must find ways to represent the act o f Überfühlung, o f spilling over and transgression. The stylistic trope that renders it possible is a metaphor of opening or aperture through which man could break away from what Adorno and Horkheimer describe as “the solid walls o f prisons and labor camps, its [pitiless civilization’s] own stone ideal.” 15

12 F. Nietzsche, Also..., p. 90.

13 Ibid., p. 90.

14 F. Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (Stuttgart: Kroner, 1921), p. 359.

ls M. Horkheimer, T. Adorno, Dialectic o f Enlightenment, trans. J. Cumming (New York:

The Seabury Press, 1972), p. 228.