For Denis Hollier

On November 30, 2022, graduate students from NYU’s French department organized an event at the Maison Française in honor of Denis Hollier, soon to be Professor Emeritus at the department. Jeffrey Mehlman and Ann Smock, alongside a number of NYU faculty members and students, were invited to speak about his work as a writer, editor, advisor, colleague and professor. The texts below are compiled from their interventions at the event.

“Self-effacement,” or “l’effacement de soi,” was proposed as a theme around which the speakers could prepare their remarks. Admittedly vague and somewhat on the nose, given the occasion, students found that it nonetheless provided a useful entry point into the work of Denis Hollier and his auteurs fêtiches—by which I mean those he wrote about, edited, and taught. I could mention here what he describes as the “poésie portée disparue par la prose autobiographique” of Michel Leiris^{^[1]}; or a Roger Caillois for whom the novelist “travaille à la réalisation de ses propres conditions d’impossibilités”^{^[2]}; or a Jean-Paul Sartre who stands against “le poète qui s’absente,” and himself promotes, in a first instance, a littérature engagée which comes to resemble a sort of “littérature d’évasion,” in Denis’s reading, before, in a second instance, that too is made to absent itself for the benefit of more useful prose: “L’écrivain, en tant qu’écrivain, doit renoncer à la littérature.”^{^[3]}

But I think self-effacement also speaks to the unmistakable playfulness, verging on irony, which characterizes Denis on the page. Sartre’s definition of irony makes mention of meaning self-effacing, or “annihilating” itself, as it is put forward. Precisely the kind of rhetorical motor on evidence in Denis’s book on Sartre, sent down this path from the epigraph onwards, which tells us that “le critique vit mal,” that he is a “gardien de cimetière.” We find it too in the introduction to the Collège de Sociologie, twice-begun—“style Nietzsche” and “style Balzac”—and by which end Denis apologizes to his reader for the occasional footnote, or what he calls the “bain de pieds plus ou moins pédant que j’ai fait prendre à certaines de ces pages… Je me serais laissé tenté par le masque provisoire, intraduisible et vide de l’apprenti sourcier.”^{^[4]}

Here he is again, insinuating against those who accused him of insinuation, in the Politique de la prose: “L’insinuation, elle ne me déplaît pas. D’ailleurs, ça ne m’engage pas. Je n’ai pas à me mouiller. Je cite et ce n’est pas de moi. Je m’arrange pour que ce soit toujours lui qui l’ait dit. Dis-je. Ce qui ne me déplaît pas.” Even Denis Hollier the maître sourcier could not help but pull back the curtain, with a wink, on his ambivalent position—writing eloquently for himself, by himself, in the words of others. I can only wish the texts compiled here follow suit.

Simon Leser

Ph.D. Student

French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

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^{^[1]} Denis Hollier, ‘La poésie jusqu’à Z’, Les Dépossédés (Paris: Minuit, 1993).

^{^[2]} Denis Hollier, ‘La littérature doit-elle être possible?’, Les Dépossédés (Paris: Minuit, 1993).

^{^[3]} Denis Hollier, Politique de la prose (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

^{^[4]} Denis Hollier, ‘À l’en-tête d'Acéphale,’ Le Collège de Sociologie (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).

I wish it were Leo Bersani raising the first cheer to Denis on this festive afternoon.

Despite missing Leo, I’m happy that you thought to ask me to be part of the gala. I feel nonetheless that I’m in kind of a quandary, because I’d like to send a message which, since it’s meant just for Denis, ought, I expect, not to be for anyone. Possibly my message would do best to resemble—in its very pale, miniature way, of course—the pages of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, which Denis, at the end of his essay on Hegel, “in the Light of Mauss,” imagines deposited in some dim old library basement along with Queneau’s Encyclopedie des fous littéraires, “whence to radiate nevermore.” A monumental message, as it were, received by no one.

Pour qui écrit-on? Denis often returns to this question of Sartre’s, and suggests, here and there, different answers: if you are Kafka, for example, you write for the one person, your father, “who is certain never to acknowledge you,” or—another example—if you’re an écrivain engagé, then for all the people who are just as certain never to get your message, having neither the time nor the inclination to read. Here is one more formulation of the question, adapted this time for Roquentin, the loner: “pour qui écrit-on “‘je ne parle à personne’”?

It is just conceivable that total oblivion would have been a more “authentic” fate for Hegel’s Phenomenology than the one the great work actually had (on account, as Denis puts it, of Kojève’s coming along). I mean, given its content—its unacknowledgeable content—zero reception might possibly be imagined to be the right reception for it. For even though recognition is a major concept in the Phenomenology, and not too hard to grasp, what is actually recognized therein, in Bataille’s estimation anyway, as I learn from Denis—what Hegel recognized—negativity—is just about impossible to recognize. Hegel himself could barely bring himself to acknowledge it. Negativity at the very basis of human life—“the identity of self-conciousness and destructive action” is practically unavowable. Bataille says that Hegel thought it would drive him mad. His entire philosophical system might be thought to have been erected in order not to have to recognize “sacrificial experience.” At some level, though, this unacknowledgeable message may have been the one that Hegel wanted to convey. A person can at least imagine Hegel wishing to send a message no one could receive. Such a dispatch would not necessarily be the same as a letter, say, without an address. It might be comparable, rather, to a letter addressed to no one.

Unrecognizable negativity is akin, as I take it, to Bataille’s “expenditure” which, Denis says, “does not need to be recognized.” It is abandonment of everything including the prestige and power that can come of such abandon, at a potlatch ceremony for example. It wants nothing at all in return for the staggering loss it is; it forgoes recognition, it doesn’t need to be acknowledged, and thus it requires no ceremony, no public, no witness at all. It is not directed toward anyone, it has no target. No one need know anything about it. It isn’t for anyone.

Except that, after all, it can’t do without others and their recognition. Denis quotes Bataille: “authentic consumption ought to be solitary but then it would not have the completion that the action it has on others confers on it…” And Denis adds on his own account” “Loss and expenditure, against the grain of their own tendency, must finally, like the gift, be recognized.” Why? he asks: “Why is expenditure fatally condemned to inauthenticity? Why does it need an other in order to occur? Why must it occur in front of some other? Why must it occur in public? Why, in a word, must it occur?”

Similarly, he asks of literature, elsewhere and more than once, Must it be possible? Really? Does it have to be inauthentic?

At the end of the essay I began by quoting, Denis refers to Queneau’s novel Les Enfants du limon, where one of the characters, an obscure lycée principal called M. Chambernac, has, possibly at the instigation of a young demon, veered off his usual dull track to undertake (as Queneau did) a long project of archival research bearing on fous littéraires. The fous are writers no one ever read or learned anything from at all. To deserve inclusion in Chambernac’s Encyclopédie des fous, you have to be unrecognized. Your extravagant books must enjoy zero reception. It bothers Chambernac from time to time that his exhausting research project consists, for all intents and purposes, in bringing recognition to loons who matter to him precisely inasmuch as they remain unrecognized. It’s as if, proceeding at cross purposes (against the grain of his own tendency), he’d undertaken to make obscurity glorious after all, or show that absence is a stunning attribute. His ultimate decision to abandon his project is linked to his realization that he has himself become obsessed with his own gloire, like the fous themselves, none of whom, in the depths of their obscurity, ever had the slightest doubt about their own brilliance. Indeed, Chambernac’s harmless conceit as unknown author of a great work that brings to light the genius of unknown nobodies does bear some resemblance to the magnificent and at the same time ludicrous ego evoked by Denis in a different text where he writes: “Thinking expenditure for a subject means thinking of a scene from which he has been evacuated: the ego, having become expendable is endowed with the glory of not being there.”

We are not too far here from the world some writers that Denis has studied dreamed of—a world with no room for them. Where literature, stripped of its conditions of possibility, would be free, I should think, to not occur, en flagrant délit. To take place for no one, spectacularly.

Denis brings up the Gnostics’ idea of God, in connection with Bataille’s dualist materialism. The Gnostic God is the “Unknown” the “Abyss,” “Silence…”: in short, “the God who is not.” In Les Enfants du limon there is a character called Daniel who is at least as similar to Queneau himself as Chambernac is, or as is the character actually called Queneau who appears briefly at the end of the novel, to start writing it. This other very Queneau-like character discovers God, in the throes of his terrible asthma attacks. For many nights, gasping for breath, he pursues an awful contemplation of Evil in the world: it’s not so much his own excruciating disease that overwhelms him, but war, famine and especially torture. He is tormented by the thought of a God who abandons humans to appalling injustice and suffering. Eventually, though, he comes to scorn the God imagined by humans according to their own meager lights, the God whom they praise and implore as if he cared about their love or the problem of evil or owed them any answers—as if the divine bore any relation at all to them and their need. From the depths of his agonizing asthma attacks, Daniel approaches the God who owes no explanation for the torrents of blood flowing all over the world, from whom it is foolish to ask a justification for anything. He is the abyss, the God who is not. “Daniel s’abîmait d’épouvante.” “Il trébuchait devant le gouffre de la divinité… et bégayait devant Dieu comme un simple et comme un enfant.” Never having been especially ambitious, he drops everything to wander aimlessly around Paris, penniless, laughing quietly to himself at the vanity of religion: he is observed with pity by passers-by—a nut. He has passed from the profane world, where God’s presence is absent, into the sacred one, where His absence is present. The sacred, Denis says, reading Bataille, is not the opposite of the profane, so much as the reverse. Sacrifice is the passage from “obverse to reverse.”

The sacred is not the opposite of the profane so much as its mirror image. The semblance of its own pale semblance. As Denis has it, the sacred is not the opposite so much as the alteration, or contamination of the profane. For it confounds what the profane world keeps separate: to wit, the sacred and the profane. Possible impossibility, impossible possibleness—authentic, inauthentic, expenditure and spectacle—the world in which we live and the one where we die—each the other’s mirror image.

“A little as though I were going to die or live,” wrote a poet—Claude Royet-Journoud—at the bottom of a page bearing a sparse arrangement of other lines. As I’ll mention a little further on, I can barely make out anything Royet-Journoud writes. But sometimes I sense that the threatening shadow of what never happens hangs over his books. Something awful and decisive. “Ce qui n’arrive jamais.”

“Un peu comme si j’allais mourir ou vivre,” he wrote. “On se donne une histoire à répéter.”

Some time ago, I started to admire very much the poems of Emmanuel Hocquard. He liked to describe himself as a letter writer. It was one way of explaining literality (for he is said to be a literal poet). He addressed poems to particular individuals he knew (sometimes beginning them “Cher Pierre,” or “Chère Norma,” and ending “Emmanuel”). And each time, everything about the poem was determined by the direction it was sent in. By its destination, that is: its destinataire. At least so Hocquard quite often said, and I took him at his word. It seemed to me that each of his poems, instead of meaning anything, was meant for someone. I pictured him collecting some words, copying them out and arranging them on a page or two because, unexpectedly, they struck him as being just suited for someone he knew. “I wrote this for you,” he states, in his book of sonnets. His friend and ally Royet-Journoud wrote, however—in the middle of a poetry book that happens to be dedicated to Anne-Marie Albiach—“this is not a book for you.”

“Ceci n’est pas un livre pour vous.” Elsewhere, in a similar vein, he wrote—and placed in quotation marks:

“aujourd’hui je ne parle à personne”

I don’t really mean to oppose Royet-Journoud and Hocquard to each other—Royet-Journoud addressing no one, and Hocquard sending each poem straight off to someone. After all, Hocquard wrote “I’m writing this book for you” in a sonnet book called Un test de solitude. And the other poems that he addresses to specific friends and acquaintances are, he explains elsewhere, records of his aloneness. I dare say they document his solitude. “Indices de ma solitude,” he writes. They aren’t about anything or anyone; rather they are from someplace. From Emmanuel. They are signs, I mean, or symptoms (indices), of one specific look-out on the world—the Emmanuel vantage point.

Sometimes the poems are lists of things scattered around in his particular field of vision at a particular time--at the time the list is getting drawn up (“Si je vous écrivais au passé j'aurais l'impression de mentir”). “La table d'écriture. La table de lecture sous la fenêtre. Deux table. Lampe sept....”

Octobre.

Le retour des rouges-gorges. Ce que j'ai

sous les yeux.

Writing table, lamps, returning robins are clues about one particular gaze upon a world, one outlook by definition singular, impossible to communicate or share. Insular. Poems by Hocquard document his island.

He addresses each one to some other island. Each is just meant for one other specific outlook, for the other isolated gaze singularly apt to read the symptom, as it were, to get the hint, and sense the character, or the color or tone or tone color peculiar to the Emmanuel solitude. The addressee is obvious: “seule et évidente.” It’s a someone who, from the Emmanuel outlook, is so blatantly themself they are no one. They’re so unmistakably present that all the features and attributes distinguishing them and making them recognizable and impossible to confuse with anyone else have disappeared in the radiance of their sheer évidence. It leaves them without distinction. Faceless. Like the girl Maylisse in a little poem by Hocquard—a girl who turns the line “Maylisse is lovely” into a tautology.

Nothing leads up to a tautology and from one, nothing follows. It doesn’t communicate. It just interrupts.

“Viviane est Viviane,” we read, many times in Un test de solitude. “Viviane est Viviane. Seule, évidente.” Lovely or not, who knows, whatever. If there’s a point, it’s that she goes without saying. Too clear for words. The impossible, Denis says somewhere in Les dépossédés, can be an everyday thing, too. Hocquard’s aim must have been to write lines that turn into tautologies right before your eyes—white themselves out, I suppose. Efface themselves by proving to be lines that nothing calls for. They’re just meant for no one.

One of Hocquard’s favorite tautologies is “a secret is a secret.” A secret, which he considers always to be someone in particular’s private secret—a secret, then, is what’s secret from the person whose it is. It’s them! A secret is always someone’s particular distinction, I would say, someone’s incommunicable being herself, seule, évidente—and it consists in getting away from her, from her alone; or better, it consists in being for each, their very own, inimitable dispossession. Each time the unique distinction of no one. I think that for Hocquard the point of writing is to be this secret’s secret communication.

“I’m not speaking to anyone today,” Royet-Journoud wrote, and sure enough for months and months now, even years, none of Royet-Journoud’s books has spoken to me at all—oh, maybe a line or two here and there, if some unexpected context for it happens to come up. But mainly, if any of his books says anything to me, it’s “This one is not for you.” All the laborious ways of reading that I’ve tried out in my life have proved quite useless. So I was happy and interested to encounter an essay written in honor of Royet-Journoud, in which the author says he doesn’t actually read Royet-Journoud’s books either. This non-reader has a name that’s really a mouthful—a misfortune for me since I admire him and often wish to quote him. It’s Siegfried Plümper-Hüttenbrink.

His own book, which I hastened to get, is dedicated “to the more than improbable reader.” He is modest! And kind of a wit: for example, I was cheered up when, feeling dejected over my unsuccessful attempts to read Royet-Journoud, I learned that he—Plümper-Hüttenbrink—has never known how to read Wittgenstein: “Assis?” he wonders. “Debout? Couché? Ou encore en prenant un bain?” One of the reasons I enjoyed this passage so much is it reminded me of Denis wondering, in La Politique de la prose, how to write: standing up, sitting down, with your right hand, your left hand, before or after washing your hands, with your mouth full… And also how to read: probably best not curled up in a cozy armchair—out in the street might be preferable, with a big crowd, a groupe en fusion. Would everybody have their own copy of the same text, would they all read silently, or aloud, led by a sort of choral conductor…

I wasn’t exactly right when I thought at first that Plümper-Hüttenbrink, dedicating his book “au plus qu’improbable lecteur,” meant to indicate, in a breezily modest manner, that he’d written a book unlikely to be much of a success. If you go ahead and read the book (called Jeux de lecture, published in 2020), you learn that he considers readers in general, or as you might say, he considers the reader, to be about as likely to exist as a flying saucer. It’s not that readers are rare these days, but that, however many or few in any era they may be or have been, the reader is not of this world.

It’s not that she resides, reading, in some other world. It’s rather that her location can’t be found on any map. For she reads somewhere in the world that’s nonetheless out of it. There can be no witness to her inside-out or outside-in existence, any more than the cat in Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment can be observed living and dead at the same time. It’s an unrecognizable situation—this superposition of one condition and its reverse. The reader, inhabiting a sort of uncontainable enclave, and indeed apparently being this insular exile (for to read she retreats way inside herself, thereby emptying completely out), is nowhere herself so much, Plümper-Hüttenbrink says, aping Lacan, as where she is not, but is rather the other, the actor playing the one she is.

Instead of belaboring these conundrums any further, let me ask, Why should they clump up around the reader? Perhaps because it’s pour lui qu’on écrit. Maybe being on the receiving end of a message sent straight out to no one in particular just disappears the addressee, by landing them in one of the reversible locations that are nowhere to be found. But the fact that the language the reader encounters is a written, not a spoken one, has a bearing too. It’s a question of printed matter for the reader; of letters, then—of characters which, when Hocquard and Royet-Journoud were running a press, called Orange Import Ltd, back in the 1970’s, used to get laid out backwards on the printing press in order to come out frontwards when printed. In short, reading, from the perspective I’m adopting now, is a literal affair. Books—or at least books like Royet-Journoud’s—appear to be in Sanskrit or ancient Greek, or morse code: a language the reader doesn’t speak, though she may be able to decipher it. Reading is closer to decoding than one might usually think. Or, it’s a kind of scrutiny similar to that employed when one tries to read the expression on a person’s face. Or when one examines a body for symptoms, or, I dare say, inspects a document.

Plümper-Hüttenbrink, who doesn’t actually read Royet-Journoud, says that he “consults” his books, the way you might consult a fortune teller or an oracle. Indeed, the way he did, apparently, as a child, slip into his grandmother’s bed very early in the mornings, so she could read to him. For him, it seems, these early morning forays were like visits to the booth of a tarot card reader. And he recalls Sartre’s description, in Les mots, of being read aloud to by his mother. She would go all still for the occasion, lower her eyes, and speak, in a strange voice hardly her own—“une voix de plâtre.” Why not say d’oracle? Plûmper-Hüttenbrink wonders, especially since Poulou concluded that the scarcely human voice reaching his ears during these reading sessions issued from the book itself.

In any case, reading, from this perspective, is something like reading the stars: it’s looking for signs, omens, inspecting marks and traces—finger prints, say. In some of his prose notes, Royet-Journoud mentions animal tracks and fossils. Indices, he calls them (opposing them rather vehemently to metaphors). Written language, I gather—the language encountered by readers, is a scattering of clues. It’s evidence. Examine the evidence.

Plümper-Hüttenbrink has little taste for poetry. It’s embarrassing, what with all its imagery, “incurable verbiage fantasmagorique.” It just can’t help calling up what isn’t there—l’absente de tous bouquets. Bataille’s “haine de la poésie” is preferable. Poetry emerges from L’Archangélique as rubble: “gravats et indices d’un naufrage. Débris de vocables jetés à l’abandon, et qui persistent à nous faire obscurément signe.” Written language signals; it’s a jumble of clues; documents, I think one might say. Anyway, it’s evidence, but of what?

A reader, faced with scrambled shards on the pages of a book—leftovers from a disaster (or disparate objects strewn around a crime scene)—must start in all over again with language, practically from zero, like some Robinson Crusoe, or like a child, infans, who laboriously deciphers the little phrases in his books word by word and murmurs each term almost inaudibly to himself—figuring out, Plümper-Hüttenbrink suggests, what there is to say (the names of things, I suppose, and of their colors and shapes, their movements and so on). The child consults his books to see what there is to say, so he can have himself say it—thus feeding himself his character’s lines. Like Poulou. I wouldn’t have remembered, if Denis had not quoted them, the lines from Les mots, where Sartre recalls “un bavardage anonyme dans ma tête:” someone murmuring to him in his head when he was small: I’m having a drink of water, I’m sitting down, I’m walking, I’m eating a cookie, and he himself, mouthing this perpetual account: “Je marche, maman, je bois un verre d’eau…” “I thought I had two voices,” Sartre writes, “of which one, which scarcely belonged to me, dictated to the other its remarks. “La voix propre,” Denis observes, “est celle qui répète.”

But with practice, with age or just with luck, a reader may, as it were, regress, to a still earlier stage of development and see all of a sudden not what there is to say, but what there isn’t. He may see, as Plümper-Hüttenbrink puts it, that he sees nothing to say.

He sees signals, but of what? Signs that indicate, but not anything. He sees the clues, the evidence, the sheer evidence. It’s by no means a vision of what isn’t there that he’s favored with; he sees what is there, too obvious for words. Thus a really small child, still barely at an age to talk, who hasn’t yet learned much of what there is to say, gets taken out in his stroller, and sees trees and cars, dogs and so on—being there minus all their distinctions: their names, their greenness or furriness. He sees them being there without being anything. Anything to recognize, anything to speak of. Sometimes he’ll shout, That! It’s that.

The reader—the more than improbable reader—is, I’m guessing, the receiver of such a message. The reader is the very person, I mean, for whom nothing is meant. Pour qui écrit-on? Maybe for someone, peculiarly apt to hear nothing; or maybe for no one, apt to hear anything. Just anything, without distinction. Probably you couldn’t locate this destinataire on any mailing list. But there’s this to take into account as well: It’s not in just anyone that evidence of no one in particular can be read—at least not by the nobody now speaking. I mean, it’s certainly not just anyone who could have inspired in some pensioner from California the wish to offer them so clumsy a greeting—so forgettable, but also so dubious—and on top of it all, so very warm a salute.

Ann Smock

Professor Emerita of French

University of California, Berkeley

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[1] Denis Hollier, ‘For Prestige: Hegel in the Light of Mauss’, trans. Nicholas Huckle October, 146 (2013), 19–30.

[2] Claude Royet-Journoud, Les objets contiennent l’infini (Paris: Gallimard, 1984).

[3] Ibid.

[4] Claude Royet-Journoud, Les natures indivisibles (Paris: Gallimard, 1997).

[5] Emmanuel Hocquard, Un test de solitude (Paris: P.O.L., 1998).

[6] Emmanuel Hocquard, L’invention du verre (Paris: P.O.L., 2003).

[7] Georges Bataille, L’Archangélique et autres poèmes (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), 60.

Denis Hollier, in 1978, sketched a beneficently corrupt series of readings of texts as they came to realize a variety of a-centric interactions. From which a series of literary samples were coming to resonate in the minds of us, his readers. A few samples of just such cases of corruption begin with that of what the author called filousophie: the crookedness at the idealized core of knowledge or philosophy. (It was not for nothing that noise, or thievery (à la “purloined letter”), dissemination (à la deconstruction) and parasitism itself would become benchmarks of a kind of liberating corruption that figured as crucially characteristic figures of the literary at its most unexpectedly seductive.

Take the case, in this regard, of a political tract that recently, in the course of a strikingly anachronistic invocation, surfaced somewhere between contemporary politics and the classical American songbook. On the one hand, and quite up-to-date, Poutine, Russia’s sometime historien en chef and corrupt guide to European political reality, Russia’s, yes, but, on the other, and almost unimaginably: Pudding, stretched or squeezed out of the proper name, Poutine, with its exercise of authority over American popular culture…. I’m thinking, or perhaps you are thinking already, in a moment of metonymy, of the classic Cole Porter song whose title and /or refrain is none other than Putting on the Ritz. Yes.. that might be it: authority might be incorporated in the power of Poutine pretentiously crushing (or falsificando) the script of authority, borne by an exaggeration or dubious glorification of history which shows up as “Putting on the Ritz.” Which figures as a characteristically dolled up treatment of ideology and would be one fate of the authority arrogated by the Cole Porter classic.

As for “Putting on the Ritz,” it might be time to invoke that phrase as the label par excellence of THEORY’s adventure. Everything in a certain Cole Porter perspective takes us to Farce et signification (as Derrida comes close to calling it), which afforded me my subtext for recasting “Bonapartism” in Revolution and Repetition as “Farce et signification”: namely that bonapartisme which drew so presciently on the third term of what the electoral (or putschist) politicians of the day called… a third term.

There are other keys to Theory which open their doors to their least true (but most promising) dimension. Consider the battle cry or tocsin of the erotic, for instance. A misspelling of that cry—as tocsin or even toxin—evokes the artificiality of what has never cast itself as instinct: instinct, the channel through which “nature” or instinct rewires itself…. Toc, that is, also known as the artificial (i.e., as a perversion that seems to proliferate as the anti-instinctual), but is also known as the anti-instinctual component of every instinct…

One could have isolated our outline of the anti-instinctual (or American) structure of every skeletal node, which brings us beyond the binary to French inflections of one of Philip Roth’s anti-heroes. And from there to the would-be heroics of what I (somewhere in Diacritics) called “Portnoy in Paris”... To Jersey and beyond… To invoke Philip Roth at his exquisite best was inevitably to redirect his attention toward the Bronx and beyond…. Mix things up a bit further and we find the damaged—but gorgeous—mess of the ruin of the Normandie in New York harbor (and which imposed its angles on the damage of the shipwreck of World War II involving its own series of Franco-Americanics)…

But it should not be forgotten that a rebellion against the delicacies of what have been called “visual hallucinations” and the mirror-like consumption of conjoined pairings are perpetually en force or en faiblesse. An essay on that loss of structure has recently insisted by way of “visual hallucinations” and what has been called “Lewy Body Dementia.” Narcissism (beyond the specular world and its mirror stage) is of the order of the day. (Jewish) Lewy brings us to paired “L”s—or paired ailes as in Lacan’s collaborative Laplanche and Leclaire texts on the unconscious, which together served to orient my French Freud anthology at the beginning of my life as a writer and whose culminating text may well be this homage to my friend Denis Hollier, whose genius I here take pleasure in saluting.

Jeffrey Mehlman

Professor Emeritus of French

Boston University

It is impossible to compress in this short space my thoughts, feelings, and memories of Denis Hollier. I’ve known him as an editor of the journal October; as a comrade with friends in common—Rosalind Krauss, Tony Vidler, Joan Copjec, Yves-Alain Bois, Hal Foster, Hubert and Teri Damisch, Howard Bloch, Leo Bersani, Peter Szendy—in multiple places-in-common (Berkeley, Paris, New York); as the curator of an exhibition on Michel Leiris at the Pompidou-Metz museum that was one of the most imaginatively conceived, visually astute shows I’ve ever seen, and above all as a colleague in the department of French Literature, Thought and Culture at NYU. Denis played a crucial role in my joining the faculty at NYU in 2002 and it has been difficult to adjust to department life without his everyday presence. He was an exemplary, if somewhat reluctant Chair, who built department strength with brilliant appointments and conference initiatives. We served on so many Ph.D. committees together that they sometimes blur into one long conversation. Kaliane Ung, Youna Kwak, Laura Hughes, Annie Brancky, Fredrik Rönnbäck, Alexandra Lukes, Beata Potocki, Matthew Amos, Joshua Jordan, Kevin McGann, Alexandra Borer, Julie Sage, and Niamh Duggan were among those wonderful students whose work provided the occasion for bracing exchange; discussions that often prompted me to rethink an entire project.

Denis’s erudition, worn lightly like his editorial expertise, never ceased to amaze me. His subjects span literary history and critical polemic, French postwar thought, surrealism and avant-garde aesthetics, French left-right politics, and the strange anthropology of the Collège de Sociologie, concurrent with what Pierre Guyotat called “the great era of thirdworldism and ethnology” bequeathed by the tragic legacy of French colonialism.^{^[1]} Following Bataille, Denis took the genre of the document—understood in the esoteric Chartist sense of a chivalric emblem or historic text that no longer has exchange-value—and detourned it, in the chiding words of Pierre d’Espezel, “into something more like “documents on your own state of mind.”^{^[2]} The motif of ethnographic autotheory runs through Denis’s work on Sartre, Bataille, Caillois, Blanchot, Malraux, Paulhan, and Leiris, alongside his hard look at the fascisizing heroics of living-as-dying that fascinated these writers and others who formed part of the cénacle at the Collège de Sociologie. Discernible too is a fil rouge harking back to the traumatic events of Denis’s youth: collaboration, deportations, work camps and death camps, the control mechanisms of a colonial state apparatus that flowed into street-level repressions of striking workers, student demonstrators, and transgressive writers (in a contemporary moment of book-banning in America, I think here of his signature on a petition, alongside Sartre, Pasolini, Joseph Beuys, Derrida and Foucault, protesting the Pompidou Culture Ministry’s censorship of Pierre Guyotat’s 1970 post-Algeria, dystopian erotology, Eden, Eden, Eden). Another through-line or rather, soundtrack, is Rabelaisian and Nietzschean—a peel of bilious laughter carried over from Rabelais: ou, c'etait pour rire, co-authored early on with Michel Butor in 1972.

Throughout Denis’s writings a tauromachic agon of drives and pulsions plays out – pulsions de vie, pulsions de mort. Their flux and release valves recall the thermodynamic hydraulics of Zola’s vitalism tracked by Michel Serres in Feux et signaux de brume. Zola appears in Denis’s introduction to the English edition of his magisterial Bataille monograph, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille. Here he presciently framed two issues that are particularly timely today: cultural appropriation and reparations. Denis writes of “redressing the repugnant,” a thematic badge of both Zola and Bataille insofar as both understood the violence of conversion effected by cultural institutions. Noting that “museums have a strange way of following in the footsteps of slaughterhouses,” (which made me think immediately of the downtown Whitney Museum’s choice of site in the meatpacking district), Denis riffs on Freud, replacing his famous dictum "Wo Es war, soll Ich werden" ["Where It was, there I shall be"] with “Wo es war…soll Museum werden.” [Where It was, there the Museum shall be]. He then exhumes a relatively obscure 1867 article by Zola titled “Les Squares” that satirized urban landscaping as a place “where lawns try to recall nature for consumptive city dwellers.” The square is a carceral site of penned nature, a “prison-house of culture,” a Sloderdijkian human park. Denis characterizes as “soft expenditure” the way in which such managed spaces of leisure and upcycled waste not only ironize the doubled extractivism of proletarian wage-labor (“Those who have nothing still have themselves to spend”), but also neutralize the ancient ritual of animal sacrifice. “For lack of an animal, Denis writes, they [the workers] kill time.”^{^[3]} Needless to say, after reading this book urban parks and squares never looked the same!

Culture appropriates by wasting life, leaving in its destructive wake “things one never gets over, sins that cannot be redeemed, garbage that cannot be recycled.” What’s truly irreparable—beyond repair in the sense of Baudelaire’s “irrémissible” (associated with a toxic fog that blurs vision and incapacitates the faculty of judgment)—is the lost distinction between “clean and dirty expenditure.” This loss is what permits us, Denis argues, to “lay money on the hypothesis that an integral appropriation of expenditure is possible—as if it were possible to spend and be spent without getting dirty.”^{^[4]} The appropriationist hypothesis exploits what Denis calls the “agio-logic” of an anthropophagic object. This is an object that “refuses to let itself be set up as an object,” positioning itself in the liminal zone of the sacred where a revolutionary alliance of “high” and low against “the very high” occurs. “The opposition,” writes Denis, “is no longer between high and low, but between a stable, Archimedean point of reference (here the high), and the comparative that makes it lose its footing.”^{^[5]} The “comparative” as a force that makes referential meaning lose its footing, effectuates an Aubhebung, a transvaluation of all values. Ranked terms, and with them inequality, are annulled, leaving hierarchical social orders unmoored. But lest we assume that capitalist expenditure is dismantled by this radical leveling, we soon learn that’s how, in fact, its feeding machine survives. For Bataille the solar anus engineers a free-fall into heaven, where eating stars and eating shit are one and the same. It is a regime of same, where the point is to self-consume and keep on with consumption no matter the object, host or aim. In Absent Without Leave Denis employs the general rubric of “teratology” (the science of nature’s deviations), to flesh out this state of affairs: exceptionalism is phased out, monstrosity and ugliness provide the basics of aesthetic praxis, and dirty hands become the new normal, the common weal of the body politic.^{^[6]}

“Dirty,” we recall, is the proper name of a central character in Bataille’s Le bleu du ciel [The Blue of Noon], the most abject, yet favored lover in Troppman’s trio of women. “Dirty” is also the title headlining the opening section of the text, commemorating what may be the only surviving portion of W.C., a scatological narrative written in the late 1920s reportedly destroyed by Bataille. In Against Architecture Denis fixes on the “dirty name,” qualifying it as an “untransposable unspeakable,” a word exposing its impropriety in the flash of the pineal eye, a traitorous word “full of hallucinatory virulence.”^{^[7]} In the repetition of the “un” prefix in untransposable and unspeakable, we feel the unrelenting drive of negation, hurtling us into the vortex of a horror beyond words. Yet we also experience what Benveniste called the nuntial, an enunciatory power that exceeds informational, instrumental language (parallel to Benjamin’s reine Sprache).^{^[8]} The pure expressive force of the nuntial recuses itself from the reparative function of aesthetic sublimation, sometimes registering as disgust towards redemption. Denis fixes on an instance of this disgust in Jean Giraudoux’s portrayal of Judith, as she is recoiling from the prospect that “the unspeakable pleasures she had known in Holofernes’ bed were about to be transformed into a pious tale, an edifying legend.”^{^[9]} Literature for Denis, just as it was for Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, Bersani and others in his repertoire, remains only hypothetically, provisionally possible (“Must Literature be Possible? is the opening chapter of Absent Without Leave), or altogether impossible because it could not be redeemed. It simply cannot be rescued from the precipice of a cultural project designed to clean and appropriate all those rivulets of blood overflowing the abbatoir floor.

Emily Apter

Julius Silver Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature

Chair, Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

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[1] https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-pierre-guyotat/

[2] Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 126.

[3] Denis Hollier, Against Architecture, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989), pp. xii-xv.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid, pp. 131-2.

[6] Absent without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War, op. cit. p. 139.

[7] Against Architecture, op. cit. pp. 105-6.

[8] « Le langage n’est pas seulement signalique… il est nuntial, » Emile Benveniste, Dernières Leçons (Paris: Gallimard, 2012), p. 51. Cited by Giorgio Agamben,“The Vocabulary and the Voice” (Trans. Thomas Zummer), foreword to Benveniste’s Dictionary of Indo-European Concepts and Society, trans. Elizabeth Palmer (Chicago: Hau Books, 2016), p. xiv.

[9]Absent Without Leave, op. cit. p. 144. See too, the extraordinary analysis of Leiris’s Judith of Holofernes (in the 1946 version of Manhood), which establishes “commitment” as a mode of working through castration anxiety: “Ever since the Gestapo showed that one could punish effectively with no love involved, Judith has been the emblem for any situation requiring commitment. Risking a little bit of one’s own body within a woman’s body (“I love not knowing what the future holds,” Bataille used to say) is no longer the only way to lose sight of oneself. Once the terrain of truth has been displaced from the sexual to the political, commitment replaces castration. In this sense, the politicization of the 1946 text is first of all a desexualization of risk.” (102-103)

Je tiens à préciser en préambule que ma présentation sera plutôt brève et n’entrera pas dans des détails théoriques ni dans les archives de Denis. Mais je parlerai modestement en tant qu’étudiant profondément marqué par l’enseignement et le style de Denis.

Je commencerai par une anecdote. Il y a environ trois ans, avant d’avoir commencé à NYU, je me suis rendu à Boston University où j’avais été convié pour une visite, et la figure la plus marquante du département de Français que j’ai rencontrée était Jeffrey Mehlman, qui durant l’entretien, entre quelques histoires sur Jacques Derrida, m’a parlé de ce Denis Hollier qu’à l’époque je ne connaissais que de nom, et Jeffrey m’a dit que je devais absolument rencontrer ce M. Hollier et prendre un cours avec lui, et c’est quasiment sous la contrainte que j’ai dû choisir le séminaire du Professeur Hollier.

C’est donc avec une grande curiosité que j’ai commencé à suivre son cours intitulé « La littérature et le mal » et de me plonger dans la lecture de plusieurs grands penseurs et écrivains, qui je dois bien l’avouer, m’étaient soit plus ou moins étrangers soit indésirables. Au premier titre se trouvait Georges Bataille dont la découverte a été pour moi une vraie révélation, et qui m’a suivi durant les deux séminaires de Denis que j’ai eu la chance de suivre.

Il me semble qu’il y a deux grands thèmes qui passionnent notre cher professeur « qui s’efface », à savoir la question du double et la question de la perte. Ce sont deux thèmes qui parcourent les cours de Denis que j’ai pu suivre, mais également dans son dernier séminaire dispensé à ses étudiants sous-gradués qui portait sur le décadentisme. Pour vous dire l’influence qu’a eue Denis sur ma recherche à mon petit niveau de doctorant, c’est que ces deux thèmes ainsi que celui de la décadence constituent mes trois listes pour les Qualifiying Exams.

Ce n’est qu’une preuve parmi d’autres qui témoignent de la patte Denis Hollier sur moi. Mais ce que je retiens en premier lieu des cours de Denis, c’est d’avoir transmis cette pensée dilapidatrice de Bataille, pensée extrêmement exigeante, difficile voire impossible et inacceptable par moments.

Il y a également un autre penseur qui a énormément compté pour Denis, c’est Derrida. Comme Denis l’a confié à Emelyn Lih dans l’entretien paru dans le dernier numéro de l’Arc, les deux ouvrages d’approche critique les plus importants et influents dans sa vision de la littérature et de la philosophie sont L’écriture et la différence ainsi que La dissémination. Effectivement, je pense que c’est clair pour tout le monde ayant suivi les cours de Denis—et il y en a ici présents —des notions comme le délai, le détour, la dette ou encore l’effacement composent la constellation conceptuelle de Denis, et se retrouvent encore aujourd’hui jusqu’à cette journée hommage.

Et au-delà des concepts, c’est un conseil que je retiens précieusement. Plutôt que de vouloir réconcilier d’apparentes contradictions et de procéder par ressemblances et par analogies, il s’agit de laisser vivre la discordance et même d’y voir, non une faiblesse ou une carence, mais d’y repérer au contraire peut-être même la marque d’un grand texte, dont le temps se chargera d’apprécier et négocier sa portée et sa force.

On peut voir là l’une des résistances salutaires, dans le sillage de Bataille, vis-à-vis de l’esprit de synthèse. A savoir la défiance eu égard à l’un, à la somme totalisatrice, et aussi au nombre deux, qui cultive la binarité, mais également au trois, emblématique du travail dialectique. Il s’agit bien plutôt de penser par la doublure, par le dédoublement, le supplémentaire et la prolifération qui rendent compte de la différence et qui repoussent les limites de la pensée rationnelle.

C’est incontestablement Bataille qui a su articuler ce projet de mesure dans la démesure, et de proposer une dépense sans réserve qui est tout sauf une négativité au service du discours et du sens ; mais une dépense absolue, radicale, qui ne bénéficie pas de la sécurité du sens ni du savoir, sans mesure et sans limite.

Bataille, Denis l’a montré dans ses travaux, provoque en nous un déchirement, un vertige de la pensée, un tremblement de la raison et un risque qui n’autorisent pas d’économie du sens. Bataille relatait justement la déception qu’il éprouvait à lire les textes qu’on lui consacrait tout en sachant fort bien que la nature même de sa pensée se dérobait au discours et se révélait incapable d’y être pleinement appréciée.

Toutefois, la réception posthume du philosophe a connu un autre sort, en partie grâce au concours de Denis et sa contribution colossale aux œuvres complètes de Bataille et de ses fouilles sur le Collège de sociologie.

Je citerai pour terminer l’aphorisme 287 de Nietzsche dans le Gai Savoir intitulé Joie de l’aveuglement, qui revient plusieurs fois dans les écrits batailliens : « Mes pensées, dit le voyageur à son ombre, doivent m’indiquer où je me trouve : mais elles ne doivent pas me révéler où je vais. J’aime l’ignorance de l’avenir et je ne veux pas périr à m’impatienter et à goûter par anticipation les choses promises. » Il me semble que le mot tabou, que l’on ne doit pas prononcer aujourd’hui, a à voir avec cette ignorance de l’avenir, à ne surtout pas contrarier mais à préserver et à chérir.

Je finirai, en référence encore à Bataille et à la notion de dépense, en simulant ici-même une cérémonie de potlatch; après les verres de whisky gracieusement offerts par Denis, je tiens à répliquer maintenant, à charge de revanche, en faisant un humble don d’une bouteille de scotch de la marque préférée de Denis (Oban Single Malt Scotch Whisky).

Samuel Holmertz

Ph.D. Student

Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

Early in Politique de la Prose, Denis Hollier notes how often a specific type of example recurs in Sartre’s work, both literary and philosophical: the example of writing, l’exemple de l’écriture. The first lines of L’Imagination are “Je regarde cette feuille blanche, posée sur ma table; je perçois sa forme, sa couleur, sa position.” We are to understand that this sheet of paper is the one on which the text we are reading is being written. Similar sentences occur in Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions, and in La Nausée, where Roquentin instructs himself, “Il faut dire comment je vois cette table, la rue, les gens, mon paquet de tabac...” As Denis concludes, Sartre likes to write on what he’s writing on. This has several consequences for the argument being made in Politique de la prose. But more broadly, alertness to the textual uses writers make of the most literal tools and accessories of their craft can be found in many places in the work of Denis Hollier. In the opening essay of Les Dépossédés, Marguerite Duras makes a brief appearance, puzzling over the ways her memory of a moment during the Liberation of Paris differs from the journal entry she made of it at the time. La Douleur recounts how she had set up a table in the Orsay train station to take notes and interview refugees; she had noted that a police officer came up to say “On vous permet de travailler debout, mais je ne veux plus voir cette table ici.” And yet later, she can recall the scene with everything but the table, everything except the act of writing that must however have been taking place, since it was found to be objectionable.

A similar setup appears early in La Règle du jeu. Biffures, the first volume of Michel Leiris’s autobiographical quartet, is most famous for the opening chapters, which analyze a series of verbal confusions from childhood and the plethora of memories and lasting enchantments they provoke. But with the fifth chapter, things change, and the reader is invited into Leiris’s new home. I will briefly quote from “Perséphone.” Leiris is speaking: “C’est au 53 bis, Quai des Grands-Augustins que

j’habite maintenant. [...] De mon quatrième étage on aperçoit des arbres, le fleuve [...] on entend des oiseaux et, tintant de différents côtés, des cloches, jusqu’à ce que la nuit [...] ait enveloppé d’un calfeutrage d’obscurité et de silence rarement ébranlé par les trains cette chambre où—avec force détours, retours, ratures, biffures, bifurcations diverses—présentement j’écris.” Here too we see the writer at his desk, writing in the present tense: “je me débats ce soir avec ma plume et mon papier (les plus matériels de mes organes d’écrivain.” Keeping in mind my contention that Denis has a special affinity for this type of scene, it is barely an exaggeration to say that this passage is part of what led Denis to Leiris, what operated the conjunction between the autobiographer and the critic. In an interview that Denis was kind enough to grant me last year foL’Arc, the department newsletter, I asked him about how he had come to work on the specific figures who people his books. In Leiris’s case, Denis alluded to his efforts in the wake of Bataille’s death to figure out what the Collège de sociologie was, since no one seemed to remember, even those who had participated in it. Quoting from the interview: “Je venais de lire Biffures et j’avais été frappé par le fait que, dans une page consacrée à son déménagement récent, Leiris donnait sa nouvelle adresse, un peu comme l’expéditeur d’une lettre mettrait la sienne au dos de l’enveloppe pour s’assurer que son destinataire sache où lui adresser son éventuelle réponse. Je lui ai donc écrit pour l’interroger sur le Collège de Sociologie.” This inscription of the writer in his writing, complete with a postal address, is thus in part responsible for the meeting which would eventually lead to the incredible and incredibly valuable Leiris Pléiade volumes from which I have just been quoting.

Of course, these moments of seemingly complete presence are often ruses, as Denis never fails to point out. Writers make little sketches of themselves in their books only to better erase themselves later on. This is most evident in Duras’s case: rereading her journal, she remarks “Je ne me revois pas écrivant.” In L’Imaginaire, Sartre brandishes the piece of paper he is writing on as an example only to immediately turn his head away and imagine it instead of perceiving it, with confusing consequences for the mechanics of the operation (writing while looking resolutely elsewhere). And as Blanchot remarks in La Part du feu, Leirisian autobiography is engaged in a paradoxical movement toward depersonalization even as it remains intensely personal. These too are situations for which Denis has an affinity, as Simon Leser’s description of today’s event makes clear.

How to characterize this interest in the most material organs of the writer, and their tantalizing dance between inscription and erasure? The appropriate term, I think, is that of support (I’ll explain in a moment why I prefer to keep it in French). Once you are looking for it, it crops up everywhere in Denis’ work. In Politique de la Prose: “c’est une loi du texte sartrien qu’il ne cesse de s’appuyer sur son support.” On Duras: “La guerre retire à l’écriture ses supports, son assise.” And in “À l’en-tête d’Holopherne,” the second Leiris essay in Les Dépossédés, discussing the additions Leiris made to the 1946 republication of L’Âge d’homme: “Coupé de soi par la guerre, l’écrivain ne se reconnaît plus dans la première personne de son autoportrait. Six ans de malheur ont introduit du jeu. Le sujet se démarque de son support.” The word support is both very concrete – the thing on which another thing rests, that which props up something else, in the most literal way – and bemusingly broad: the long dictionary entry in the Centre national de ressources textuelles et lexicales catalogues a remarkable diversity of technical applications in domains including construction, heraldry, cosmetology, electro-acoustics, and butchers’ tools, but ends with the acception “Chose abstraite ou personne sur laquelle repose, est établie une chose abstraite.” As you can see, the possibilities are vast.

The Dépossédés essay on Judith and Holofernes in Leiris is particularly haunted by supports and their displacement. The most concrete types of support are in evidence here as well, as part of the virtuosic explanation of the Judith tradition in art and drama. Denis explains, drawing on Panofsky, that Leiris’s lubricious imaginings about Judith are partly indebted to a long-standing iconographic confusion between Judith and Salome. Panofsky provides a helpful test: if the female figure in a painting is holding a severed head by the hair, that’s Judith; if the head is resting on a tray or other flat surface—“elle repose, cou coupé, sur un support”—then it’s Salome. Even as Leiris writes on Judith, he’s relying on Salome’s platter. And the essay ends with a final instance of support: the emptying-out of the subject, writes Denis, “l’évidement du sujet est le support du cénotaphe autobiographique.” The moments where the writer, speaking in their own name, appears most present to the reader, surrounded by the material aids and surfaces of their art, are also where they are most absent, most engaged in the hollowing-out of their identity. This notably allows autobiography to take place without the indulgence that Roquentin and his creator judge so harshly; further, it allows the critic to enter fruitfully into the text, in that place between writerly head and hand, between pen and page, and between decapitated head and supporting platter.

I’ve focused on the Dépossédés in these remarks partly because it was the first work by Denis I read. In a sense it is at the origin of my desire to come to NYU and work with Denis, a desire I have maintained with such constancy that I am indeed still working on my dissertation even as Denis himself is moving on to other horizons. But I also rely on it here because some of its more various references resonate with particularly formative aspects of my time under Denis’ tutelage. One of these is connected to Judith. In the spring of 2017, I acted as assistant to the undergraduate senior seminar Denis co-taught with Philippe Roger on the figure of the hero. Judith was one of these heroes. The class read Giraudoux’s play Judith, and I was completely baffled by it, to the point that I did not feel competent to discuss it with students. When I consulted Denis about this, I remember vividly how he simultaneously validated and dissipated my confusion by saying, “Les personnages de Giraudoux se ressemblent, même quand ils s’opposent.” This has stuck with me, not only as a tool for withstanding the barrage of witty back-and-forth of a Giraudoux play, but for reflecting on resemblance and opposition within and between works by the same author. My dissertation deals with experimental autobiographical projects that extend over decades, including Leiris’s, and I have found it crucial to keep in mind that autobiographers may both resemble and oppose themselves, in any number of sequences and permutations.

A second connection is linked to André Schaeffner, who comes up in Les Dépossédés as one of the contributors to Documents. For reasons unrelated to NYU, but contemporary to my time as student here, my sister Ariadne and I were hired in 2016 to translate Schaeffner’s pioneering work of ethnomusicology into English: The Origin of Musical Instruments: An Ethnological Introduction to the History of Instrumental Music. The book initially came out in 1936, and Schaeffner draws on his immense organological erudition but also on his field work as a member of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition (from 1931 to 1933), where he and Leiris became firm friends. I am perhaps sensitive to the term support in part because of the great difficulty I had finding an appropriate translation for it (it comes up 28 times in Origine, in a vast variety of senses). Of course, in order to honor an author’s choices and consistency, a translator does her best to render repeated words by the same English word, but in this case observing such a policy was too challenging: just as it proves for the autobiographer, support is too slippery, too multivalent, never there when you’d most like to lean on it.

Denis quotes Schaeffner in Documents saying “Nul objet à fins sonores ou musicales, si ‘primitif’, si informe apparaisse-t-il, nul instrument de musique ne sera exclu d’un classement méthodique.” Since no sooner was my work translating Origine des instruments de musique over than I began working on my dissertation, André Schaeffner and Denis Hollier are the two major figures of my time at NYU, and their influences meld together to a certain extent: I take with me the lesson that the effortlessly apt associations and connections that characterize so much of Denis’s writing and indeed conversation are supported, rest on, the Leirisian and Schaeffnerian impulse to consider and classify all objets à fins littéraires, without excluding any a priori, no matter how “informe”. In the interview I referred to earlier, Denis expresses skepticism at any motion to exclude or dismiss texts from the literary fold: decreeing “that’s not literature” or “that’s just literature” is always a dubious proposition: as he says, “Ça sent son contrôle d’identité.” This openness extends to include the quirks and corners of texts. An epigraph in Politique de la prose quotes a journalist saying, of Sartre, “Utilisant en bon romancier ce qu’il a sous les yeux”: this is Denis’ approach as well, drawing on the material and immaterial aspects of literature that inhabit his own table de travail. It is a comfort to know I can depend on the intangible support that these examples and lessons constitute, not only through the end of my graduate study but beyond.

Emelyn Lih

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

Célébrer l’œuvre de Denis Hollier, aujourd’hui, à La Maison Française, est un moment un peu ambivalent de présence/absence: il est là, bien là, à sa place, et pourtant il est parti. Certes il n’est pas loin et il a promis d’être toujours au département de Français et à la Maison, bien que: est-ce que la France est sa maison? Pas sûr. Il a toujours été présent par son absence de France, depuis si longtemps. D’autant plus au cœur de la pensée et de la littérature française qu’il est loin de leur territoire et de leurs enracinements de toutes sortes. C’est de cela que j’aimerais parler dans le temps court de cette réunion : la relation de Denis à la présence et au présent.

D’une manière triviale, nous pourrions dire que Denis Hollier maintient, par ses réflexions, ses éditions et son enseignement sur Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, Sartre, Malraux et bien d’autres, la présence de la littérature, au sens où la littérature ce ne sont pas seulement des livres et des auteurs/autrices, mais des réglages entre le langage et le réel, des articulations entre des pulsions et des imaginaires. Cependant Denis ne s’est jamais contenté d’une analyse du « fait littéraire » car ce fait n’existe pas, et il a toujours écouté la musique étrange qui se compose dans une écriture, avec l’oreille de celui qui « connaît la musique », c’est-à-dire qui est capable d’entendre la résonance des mots et des figures dans leur contexte historique. Denis est en effet un extraordinaire historien de la littérature, pas au sens positiviste de l’érudition, mais au sens d’un archéologue des discours, comme il l’a montré dans sa grande entreprise d’une New History of French Literature.

Pour être plus précis, je vais citer un de ses livres qui joua un rôle décisif dans mon expérience des textes et de leur critique : Politiques de la Prose, Sartre et l’an quarante. Pour l’étudiant que j’étais dans les années 90, ce texte a été une illumination, d’abord par sa liberté de ton à l’égard d’une œuvre que j’étudiais depuis plusieurs années : je faisais une thèse de philosophie sur les concepts sartriens, et je découvrais là un auteur qui avait une connaissance totale de tous les écrits de Sartre et qui les faisait virevolter pour en découvrir l’intelligence à travers les figures et les multiples contradictions du philosophe écrivain. Au lieu de chercher l’unité, la cohérence, la continuité générale d’une œuvre, comme le font souvent les chercheurs qui veulent trouver une clef explicative, Denis Hollier l’étirait dans tous les sens et révélait la fabrique délirante d’une notion qui allait devenir LA notion phare de l’après-guerre : la littérature engagée. Et cela, Denis le montrait avec un style d’une virtuosité éblouissante, que très peu d’universitaires osent employer et sont capables d’inventer. Déjà le titre est un coup de génie, car « Sartre et l’an quarante » joue à la fois sur le mépris du réel et de l’histoire (selon cette vieille expression française « s’en foutre comme de l’an quarante »), et le titre insiste sur une date cruciale pour Sartre : fait prisonnier en Allemagne, l’année 1940, Sartre affirme que sa vie a été divisée en deux à partir de ce moment-là. Avant, il était un philosophe anarchiste et individualiste qui s’intéressait à la phénoménologie, après, il s’immerge dans le collectif, il devient marxiste et il s’engage totalement dans la politique.

Précisément, je voudrais interroger cette réflexion de Denis, très tôt dans son œuvre critique, sur la relation au temps, à la présence, à l’histoire et à la politique. Car ce qu’il dit de Sartre a des liens avec son propre rapport à la temporalité, et à la façon de se situer à l’égard du contemporain. Cette notion de contemporanéité est complexe, comme lorsqu’on parle d’art « contemporain » : est-ce l’art du présent, l’art de l’avant-garde, ou un courant particulier ? Face à la tyrannie du présent, Barthes imaginait des contemporanéités anachroniques. Par exemple, il affirmait que Marx, Mallarmé, Nietzsche et Freud étaient contemporains car Ils avaient vécu objectivement 27 années ensemble et l'on pourrait imaginer leur discussions. « De qui suis-je le contemporain? se demande Barthes dans Comment vivre ensemble. Avec qui est-ce que je vis? Le calendrier ne répond pas bien. C'est ce qu'indique notre petit jeu chronologique — à moins qu'ils ne deviennent contemporains maintenant? ». La contemporanéité ne repose pas seulement sur la rencontre propre à une époque, elle a aussi sa temporalité, son devenir. On ne naît pas contemporain, on le devient. Et c’est, me semble-t-il, ce que pratique Denis Hollier. Il se garde du présentisme pour construire ses propres contemporanéités, anachroniques parfois.

Une telle démarche n’est pas sans conséquences. Dans le champ académique notamment. S’intéresser à des écrivains ou des penseurs qui ne sont plus à la mode, cela déclasse son homme, c’est une façon de rester dans l’ombre, quand tous les autres cherchent la lumière. Denis le raconte à propos de deux conférences à Cerisy : une fois, il intervient dans un colloque sur Artaud/Bataille et il parle de Nietzsche ; on lui reproche alors d’être en avance car le colloque Nietzsche se tenait la semaine suivante. Une autre fois, ce sont Nancy et Lacoue-Labarthe qui organisent un colloque sur les fins de l’homme et Denis, au lieu de parler de Derrida comme tout le monde, propose un commentaire de Sartre. « Je persévérais dans un certain anachronisme. Mais cette année, je ne serai pas en avance, plutôt en retard. (…) Le sourire ne se fait pas attendre lorsque quelqu’un s’intéresse encore à Sartre, écrit encore sur lui. On le soupçonnerait presque d’en être encore à Sartre, d’en être resté à lui. » On connaît ce genre de censure par l’indifférence dédaigneuse du Moderne : Comment, vous lisez encore Sartre alors qu’on en est à Derrida, Lyotard, Deleuze et Foucault ! Sartre, maintenant, on s’en fout comme l’an quarante !

On dirait d’ailleurs aujourd’hui la même chose : comment vous lisez encore Derrida alors qu’on en est à Bruno Latour ! Ou bien, vous lisez Proust alors que tout le monde lit Annie Ernaux ! Vous êtes démodé, has been, pas à la page, pas à la bonne page, en retard d’un chapitre ! Et Denis d’essayer de se justifier sur ce « semblant de retard, cette inactualité ». Voilà un mot « inactualité » qui le ramène à Nietzsche et à ses « Considérations inactuelles » (Unzeitgemässe, Untimely, inopportun, intempestif). Il faut être moderne, affirmait Nietzsche, mais quand la modernité devient la mode, ou pire, quand elle se transforme en religion, il faut la dénoncer et la fuir. Ce qui ne signifie pas être réactionnaire ni anti-moderne, mais plutôt indépendant et intempestif. L’inactuel, parce qu’il ne suit pas la mode, n’est jamais démodé.

« Être en retard », cette accusation même peut se renverser facilement. Qu’on pense à cette notion utilisée pour certains médicaments : l’effet retard. Cela signifie que la chimie n’est pas synchrone, et qu’elle va produire des effets plus tard, comme si le retard avait l’avenir devant lui. Le retard produit des répliques, des échos. Mais c’est sans doute la physique, plus que la pharmacie, qui donne la meilleure formule du retard, du moins celle qui correspond à une pratique du pas-de-côté. Voici la définition qu’en donne le Larousse : le retard est le « Déphasage négatif d’une grandeur sinusoïdale par rapport à une autre de même fréquence ». Être déphasé donc, suppose, comme Denis le pratique, choisir une phase plutôt qu’une autre, produire une nouvelle onde sinusoïdale dans le temps présent.

Ce décalage, même s’il ne s’affiche par comme une éthique ni une politique, implique une relation défiante à l’égard du pouvoir. Car être de son temps, s’affirmer dans son temps par le discours et le savoir, c’est exercer – on le sait trop bien dans le monde académique – un pouvoir de représentation et de nomination, de labelization. Par contraste, celui qui est en retard ne peut prétendre devenir un maître du temps présent. Sans doute ne le veut-il pas, et il faut du courage, ou de la distance, pour assumer l’inactuel.

Les auteurs que Denis a étudiés, à part Blanchot, n’ont pas résisté à la libido dominandi du maître penseur, même si, en aparté ou à voix basse, ils ne se reconnaissaient pas dans les idoles du temps présent. Barthes, avouant lire Chateaubriand, avait aussi confié, à la fin de sa vie : « Tout à coup, il m’est devenu indifférent de ne pas être moderne ». Sartre qui a suivi, comme tant d’autres, les deux grandes scies de la philosophie française au XXe siècle, Heidegger et Marx, confiait, de son côté, qu’il rêvait plutôt d’être Stendhal et Spinoza. Denis sait tout cela, il connaît les trucages, les secrets et les illusions de ces auteurs qui ont incarné, en leur temps, la modernité. Mais il les écoute sans les juger, car il ne cherche pas le pouvoir ni le contre-pouvoir, il est plutôt dans l’impouvoir, ce suspens de la pulsion de jugement. Il instruit patiemment, et il déplace les points de vue et les certitudes, comme dans ce gigantesque travail éditorial A New History of French Literature.

Sans doute, cette manière aujourd’hui va à rebours d’une tendance contemporaine : Nous sommes plutôt à l’heure du jugement moral où les écrivains d’autrefois doivent passer au tribunal du présent. Denis est en retard, à nouveau, il relit même Marcel Jouhandeau, un écrivain dont tout le monde se fout comme de l’an 40. Et pourtant, lorsque Denis étudie la conversion de Jouhandeau à l’antisémitisme, il dit peut-être quelque chose sur notre temps. Denis est un penseur du contretemps, en fait, il écoute le temps, on pourrait dire qu’il est « tout contre » le temps.

François Noudelmann

Professor of French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

In his essay on Leskov, Walter Benjamin suggests that the art of storytelling, which draws on experience, is in decline and wisdom is dying out. This much everyone recalls, but perhaps less often remembered is the way that this art emerges from the impossibility of giving advice in the first place. You will recognize the lines written not in German, but in what Denis Hollier (citing René Lefèvre) names Benjamin’s idiom: “desperanto”:

In every case the storyteller … has counsel for readers. But if today “having counsel” is beginning to have an old-fashioned ring, this is because the communicability of experience is decreasing. In consequence we have no counsel either for ourselves or for others. After all, counsel is less an answer to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is unfolding. To seek this counsel, one would first have to able to tell the story.

These lines occurred to me as I wondered how to respond to this invitation. Bits of advice I received as a student came back to me. The most transformative suggestion I followed was to study with Denis Hollier. In his seminar on literature and sacrifice, many crucial connections were made and unmade, not least the possible relations between literature, sacrifice, and the sacred. For instance, we read Caillois’ Pontius Pilate which describes the procurator refusing to crucify Jesus, thus ending Christianity before it begins. My recollection of the rest of that course now resounds against the supposed pact of the Collège de sociologie in which each member was willing to be a victim, none the executioner.

“The museum,” writes Hollier, “is what the Terror invented to replace the King, to replace the irreplaceable.” This summer, I found myself facing a cabinet full of skulls at the Lombroso Museum in Turin. Beyond craniometry, criminal anthropology, and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading, I thought of Hollier’s work and the ways it tracks an “acephalic drive” that severs French literature and thought from the guillotines of revolutionary terror to the Collège and beyond. More recently, I was reading Proust on names and started toying with the dark precursors of “Denis.” Beyond the Mycenaean God of fertility, insanity, winemaking, ecstasy, festivity, and theater, we encounter Dionysus the areopagite, an Athenian judge in the first century, who was later misidentified with the martyr Dionysius, the first Bishop of Paris. This third century Christian martyr was decapitated with his companions. Soon after he became the most famous cephalophore in Christian legend, according to which he picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance.

The term cephalophore, the portable head, was first used in French in 1914. Around that time, a few decades after he was done measuring skulls with Vacher de Lapouge, dreaming of decapitating Mallarmé by inventing Monsieur Teste (“I watched his skull making contact with the angles of the capital”), Paul Valéry spoke about the fate of Europe in terms of headlessness by invoking the figure of deminutio capitis from Roman Law. “Le phénomène de la mise en exploitation du globe, le phénomène de l’égalisation des techniques et le phénomène démocratique, qui font prévoir une diminutio capitis de l’Europe, doivent-ils être pris comme des décisions absolues du destin?” The capitis deminutio (“decrease of the head”) invokes doctrines of Roman jurists designating the loss, reduction or alteration of an individual’s legal status or rights, especially the right to liberty, citizenship, and family. Valéry extends the meaning of the term to suggest Europe’s shrinking significance in political and economic terms. Before the grand remplacement came la grande diminution. In L’autre cap, Derrida places Valéry’s thinking about the crisis in a “singular configuration” with Husserl and Heidegger, locating the shared features of their otherwise divergent thinking in the opposition of Esprit or Geist and nature, meant to place history on the side of spirit. Europe is not a geographical or historically delimited zone, but a spiritual configuration. Hence, the crisis facing Europe is a crisis in the devaluation of Spirit.

“Man will escape his head as a convict escapes his prison,” reads an aphorism by Bataille to which Hollier draws attention. From cap to cape, from capital to decapitation, all that comes to mind are figures of losing one’s head. Perhaps, I am just inching my way back to Bataille’s big toe, sketching Judith with Holofernes’ head, or rewriting Hérodiade. But to me these lateral connections signal his singular authority which manages to live up to the demand that Blanchot transmitted to Bataille: to write as if he were the last man. Bataille invokes three principles, which arose in conversation with Blanchot, stipulating that any “experience spirituelle” could only: “1. - qu’avoir son principe et sa fin dans l’absence de salut, dans la renonciation à tout espoir, 2. - qu’affirmer de l’expérience intérieure qu’elle est l’autorité (mais toute autorité s’expie); 3. - qu’être contestation d’elle-même et non-savoir.” Absence of redemption, renunciation of hope, atonement for authority, and self-contestation as non-knowledge. In his remarkable, yet non-monumental editorial work in the New History of French Literature, Postwar French Thought with Jeffrey Mehlman, the Pleiades of Leiris and Bataille, correspondences, numerous exhibition catalogues and special issues, these principles are somehow inviolate, as if all writing were writing against the head. In his pages on Rimbaud, Sartre, Bataille, Leiris, Malraux, and more recently Jouhandeau, one learns to write and read without being taught. “Literature and the right to err” was the synaptic title of the paper he delivered at “Timing Blanchot,” a 2018 symposium here at the Maison Française. Its title seems to allude to “Literature and the right to death,” tactically cutting terror down to error. But then I recalled his vertiginous analyses that show how literature courts terror to plead guilty to its own error, escaping the work of meaning.

There would be much more to say and ask about the writing of “the dépossédés,” to recall the French title of Absent without Leave. I only recently got the implicit reference to Dostoevsky’s Possessed in the title of that book. I’ll end my remarks today with a proposal that we invite him to do an abécédaire like Claire Parnet did with Deleuze. What would the letters be? A…would have to be Acephalus, if not architecture, athéologie, or Arkadin, B would make things harder with Blanchot, Bataille, Butor, Barthes, Benjamin, Bersani, Berkeley. C could be Cuba, Caillois, Concorde, or the Collège de Sociologie, D, documents... But I’ll let you compile that list with Denis.

Zakir Paul

Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature

Director of the Program in Poetics & Theory

New York University

There is a Last Supper in every poem, which says: This is

my body, here and now. And you know what comes next: passions,

crucifixions, executions. Others would also say resurrections . . .

Jacques Derrida, “Rams”

I. The Threat of Weltlosigkeit

I don’t know if Denis has a theory of friendship because he is, like other long-haulers I have been close to, outwardly unsentimental even where his actions prove otherwise, subtly building on an enigmatic vocabulary of embrace and interspace, a herald of the Zwischenraum. Warm, consistent to the point of defiance, and unwavering—or, at least, unencumbered by ontic invasions of another kind, he stands by you, resolutely unfazed by existential punchouts. In the space he holds open, Denis H. appears to be immune to other offshoots of Gerede that pull certain kinds of friendship apart, riddling them with irreparable holes and the mediocre thud of abandonment. He’d mostly been in there with me, in the fight cage, a cushion against the crush of first-level Unverständlichkeit, prior to the swipe of upper level unintelligibility constitutive of friendship, according to Friedrich Schlegel. You can’t know what the other is thinking or why; friendship tosses you an upgrade of unknowing, drawing on the opacity of consciousness with regard to those neighboring beings managed by Husserl and refined by Lévinas.

We are sound and secure in matters of ungroundable friendship, I’d say—at least according to a philosophical lineage of world-bound imponderables, and following the cast of established rules that imply the perils of amity and tender alliance. To be sure, I’m not certain of having a reliable access code to the world he inhabits, even if we both incline to agree with the big guns of Franco-Germanic thought that the world, whether as mundus or globalized entity, is kaput, irremediably dashed. Hannah Arendt said that, in Lessing’s time, the world was shaken, but by our time—the sector of being and engagement that contours Denis’s thought—the world is shattered, and the best we could hope for is to reexperience it in the mode of poetic suffering, what she calls in her quotation marks, a “tragic pleasure,” a shattering emotion that momentarily frees us up to create a story, to endow something like history with significance and permanence, fusing a narration that carries to term an ”unendurable reality.” It may seem hyperbolic to place the burden of catastrophic pileup on our friendship, but I can’t help it, bringing in part of an unspoken inheritance partitioned between us in wildly non-equivalent terms of expectation and bestowal, especially as they slip away. This is where Denis Hollier comes in for me, as one who in my “world,” a thought-emblem irretrievably bounced, is, despite it all, weltbildend. That’s what she says, Hannah, with a dash of Heidegger, putting us in the weltbildende zone, horrified by the encroachment of Weltlosigkeit, the destitution they both grasp as worldlessness, shared by pariahs and animals.

Against all odds, acts that are weltbildend can assure a friendship ridiculously on course. The world welts, I’d say intra-linguistically, poached from “die Welt weltet.” We blister up and need friendship in the sense that Hannah ascribes to Lessing, reverting to freedom movements that keep it moving, pushing through the truth-pelted vacancy that each of us carries beyond ourselves and each other. Friendship is seen accompanying one through the desert trek without glomming onto you, without the dramaturgy of rescue or even a drip of compassion, adjunct to an identificatory impasse. Hannah kicks compassion to the curb, as a vexed revolutionary affect, passed down to us by Robespierre, reasserting a mark of the failed French Revolution, associated henceforth to any and all revolutionary movements whether directed by the tug of les malheureux (18^th century) or les misérables (19^th century and Broadway). I’m not sure of the scansion for Denis’s heart tugs, or whether his private outreach programs deign to fuel up on such tropologies of care and compassionate indignation, the cartels of social outcry.

* * * * *

“Die Wüste wächst!”—a Nietzschean announcement straddling the border between constative and performative speech acts. What prompts the desert’s relentless expanse, its manner of overtaking world, vacating meaning, its paradoxically cold encroachment? Ach! Unavoidably, the German language masters prep our encounter each time, according to a nearly unconscious cue. I tell myself, If there’s so much German crowding into the first sentences of addressing a thinking/thanking to Denis, this is also in part because we share the inheritance of a fraught Germanicity, not only in view of our more customized, personal itineraries, but the kind that was picked up and fatefully tossed around and repurposed by Kojève, by Bataille, Klossowski, Sartre, Blanchot, Kofman, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida, among other essential interlocutors. Our conversations were flavored by the French incursion that has made our friendship solid—well, as solid as groundless resolution permits in the precincts of an Entretien infini.

We’ve worked on a lot of projects together, Denis and I, and logged in many hours of planning, some of which expanded our friendship circle and contoured an adapted hermeneutic circle, starting with the salad days of my precarious engagement as a renegade Germanist. Early on, he pulled me over to the French side, refreshing my course while repeating phantom maneuvers that my father went through when leaving Germany for France. The signposts of repetition compulsion trained on a crypt-formation involves a secret that Denis and I may share in a decidedly clandestine way, I’m not sure, but there’s something there (and not there), a condemned site that we haven’t yet tagged in explicit discussion. Ach, ach. I refrain at this point from barging into unacknowledged spaces of catastrophes, shared and historically flexed, still working their contagion, reconfiguring the way we approach our texts. In a manner indicated by Celan, we are still working on the gegen in our Begegnung, the contre in our rencontre, shadowboxing an historical opponent, serving counterpunches at the limits of intelligibility—the atopos where Friedrich Schlegel locates friendship, as said, the nonunderstanding with which he replied to Fichte’s complaint of an incomprehensible alliance, unbreakably bound. Talking to Leo Bersani, in congruency with Marie-Hélène Huet and Ann Smock, he first settled me in the French Department at Berkeley, a jumping off point for the creation of a theory position to which I migrated in the still rogue field of comparative literature.

(I’m burning the bridge of transition and giving up on pretend continuity.)

II. The Commander Burns a Hole in Ex-istence

My presentation on behalf of Denis in the Maison Française was intended to give a Heideggerian jolt, the thinking Stoß. The initiating gesture did not start off with a bang, but glitched from the starter gate. I had choreographed a Chockerlebnis, the great experience of shock: lights dimmed, video up, silent interval, the scariest version of a mise-en-scène, featuring a Commander emerging, when, naming the accused, the host, unrepentant, proves spiked with libertine haughtiness; he’s summoned by the one summoned: “Don Giovanni!” I wanted to call up a scene of libidinal defiance unnerved, fixed by protocols of this-worldly politesse, pushing back on fearfulness to bow to the Other, invite in the ghost/guest, a vindicator and accuser, one of the morphs of Mozart’s paternal absolutes, wielding a power from beyond the grave, very Freud Totem and Taboo-ish, preparing to dig into a primal feast or remorseful morsels that seed dead Father’s oversized authority. So, bang! Enter the ghost.

My place on the lineup paying tribute to Denis Hollier was more or less that of last man out. Ann Smock led us in, with her elegant language, a precision of effacement taking in the breath of acuity, and her knack for generous self-substitution (she wishes, she says, that Denis could have been addressed by Leo, since Bersani carried the authority of first speaker. I recognized that, if Leo could have answered the summoning invitation, he would have doubled for the Commendatore, and we would have been group-reduced to the shaken servant, Leporello, barely able to serve up the next course.) My presentation was meant to start with the intrusive call of one’s infinite finitude. A feast linking many drifts and drafts joining Don Juan to Hamlet, mirth, birth, dearth. It’s all very primordial, and gruesome. Maybe overly unrepressed. To begin with, there’s a table, a table set, a glass of wine. The scene was followed up by the kind of invited yet unexpected figure of intruder that was ready to chow down fatefully, taking a bite of you, sinking immortal teeth into your flesh and everything that flesh implies here on earth, including a menu of prohibitions and inherited overrides. The appearance of morbidity armored for a final showdown is here to say, Your ride is over. There remains one possible exemption card for you to play: confess your depravity, just say you’re sorry, bring up remorse in its full capacitation, fulfill the prerequisite for any liberal bid for your amnesty, please: appease the moral accountant’s demand, do the math, buy out your penalty, do the time. (We shall tabulate the returns of Denis’s analysis of such accountants, scanning the columns of those who believe that the widespread notion of accountability can meet such a demand to satisfaction, without residue or incomprehensible trail offs, profiling a conclusive spreadsheet.)

Intruder, guest ghost, absolute master. “The absolute master has the last word. Don Juan, however, does not subscribe to it.” The heat is on.

In preparation for a syntax of wrap up, pushing back on the unwanted menace of Denis’s stepping off the stage, however deflatable, a portion of stage loaned by the university, I was beset by bad dreams, for there was, hanging over our heads and in unconscious chat rooms, the imperative of letting go, sending him off. What?! He’s already clocking out? The unconscious has no schedule but sits in the permanence of its intake. I am dumbfounded, “Ach! Sei nicht so dumm!,” remembering the number of occasions when my master Derrida, in icy assertion, would say to me, “Mais, c’est la loi” in the face of change-ups, and departure, or its tendril in betrayal and acts of condemnation, where offshore accounts are settled and you are sent to hell. Nietzsche takes a sidebar from his quarrel with Wagner, a “historial” quarrel that regards all of us, according to Heidegger, in order to dub Mozart as “Mozärtlich”—delicate, sweet, delightful Mozart, so zart. Nietzsche doesn’t complete the transvaluation (the lurking downside of a sweet tooth musically transposed), deciding that Mozart, unlike Wagner, should not swipe in as a poison pill primed to set off national alerts. Still, good drugs are always haunted by bad drugs, and there’s the matter of psychoanalysis. Freud reminds us of the genealogy of “sweet,” or why we call s.o. sweet—a stubborn remnant of our cannibalistic past. Sweet Mozart. I gulp down a Kaffee und Mozartkugel.

Sweetened or not, Mozart’s undertow is brutally set by patriarchal overkill, the double deaths described by Lacan and carried by the patriarchive of Mozart’s not so zärtliche takedowns by Zorastro, who topples the Queen of the Night, the lunar feminine, and the sounding of finitude’s score by means of the Commander in Don Giovanni who calls it, calling your name and the name of the oeuvre that seals your deal and commands the scene of ending it all, a final curtain: Don Giovanni! “The call comes from beyond me and within me”—so Heidegger. The call comes from the Don Juan legend (but Bataille drags Don Giovanni, too, the opera, exposing a particular operation of the returning master) turning in his grave, rising as embodiment of the accusatory verdict, trespassing a forbidden threshold, glacializing you, fixed by the hallucinatory approach from the dead, the law, the stone cold arrival that you have invited, whom you host, the ghost that says, you’re toast, a petit a on the menu of the departed, served up in full submission (yet, on the subject of submission, things get complicated, for Bataille corners us with a dialectics of submission, and Kafka has a lot to say about the servant who won’t be called, stalled in resolve at the edge of desire). Even with the rapid turnover of submission-domination, your name is called, your number is up; yet, even so: There’s a hint of libidinal autonomy—Dead authority, firing up a libidinized zone of the undead, a dead man’s beat that doesn’t necessarily scare you. “Leporello, set another place for our guest!” As with Melanie Klein’s depiction of serving the other, we all want to offer a good feed, even to the invasive tread of a wholly other vowing to take you down. Still (which, in German is a breast-feeding, still, an offrande that Jean-Luc collates as sein and Sein, a fateful homonymy: so, still, it is a matter of feeding, a dinner, a festival of paradoxical incorporation to which Don Juan invites the dead yet resurrected in-law.)

Really? They’re stepping away? Ach! Is their time is up?—What do you mean, they’re being retired, the untimely ones? Have they really elapsed—? Or, perhaps they’re slated to show up at midnight, like the Rat Man’s father, Hamlet’s ghost, aligning with Don Juan’s—and Marx’s— tomb in Bataille.

Don Juan was surpassed, according to Denis, only by Nietzsche, especially in the terms spelled out in Bataille’s “Nietzsche and Don Juan”—which takes the work of Denis Hollier on politics and sexuality to sovereignty and Kafka, an improbable but unavoidable place conjoining communism and Kafka, where literature stands guilty and the Commendatore switches up the cold shadow of law with the unmanageable account of surplus sexuality. After all, Denis, reminds us, Don Juan is a collector, a recordkeeper, the death-driven accountant who scores in this manner, cooks the books, inescapably becomes prey to bureaucratic gridlock, the idling and stall of the a Todestrieb, left to sit with the precarity of literature that provokes Kafka’s desire to burn, yes, “Burn it all, Max”, incinerate to the max, stir Nothing, scoring and scorching. Affined henceforth to Don Juan, a pre-Kafkan emissary, hording the records he must keep and the incessant count up leveraged on repetition compulsion, to the extent that this inventory of semi-conquest counts at all, because the bookkeeping pivots on a plenitude voided—there is the question in Troppmann of impotence, of scant ejaculative rapture, the politicized spillover to forms of fascist returns and communist disruptions, the shutting down of a literary right to exist, the returns of an excluded negativity, that of a burning Kafka, a crypt ensepulchered in Sovereignty, where Denis refrains from keeping his own inventory, shrouded in encrypted secrecy, a sentry stationed at a condemned site of the incalculable. And so Don Juan refuses to maintain the work of death that, to his way of reckoning, should be relegated, if at all, to the tabulations of another. That billing position would be taken up by the Marquis de Sade, who subs for Don Juan, heading—or beheading—into the hell of writing. “Sade is a Don Juan who writes. The fact that DJ does not write is part and parcel of his refusal to take into account what Bataille calls the paradox of pleasure: literature reserves for itself the pleasure of pleading guilty.” His refusal of guilt and the abhorrence of archaic forms of penance isolates DJ, though it would be illusory to suppose that writing, for its part and partitions, does not issue a one-way ticket to hell in economy class.

It is not fortuitous that Denis’ itinerary stalks art and literature, tagging their impossibles, their unavoidable ways of coming apart, squeezing the political edges of a faltering world. Denis’s writing consistently calls up a philosophical tradition of questions associated with literature and art, asking whether art can move the needle of immovable facticity and push back on encroaching despotisms, without going limp or offering remedies that are merely liberal in kind and apportionment. To what extent, for instance, should art expect to battle a sinister historical opponent, the returns of fascism, bourgeois complacency, or a circumscribed division of forces on the ground and in transcendental launches?

For his part, Denis walks into the line of fire where the literary and its offshoots, stare down politics, then suddenly reverse position into waiving the rights of legitimacy, firing off a suicidal round of defiance, like Don Juan refusing the Commander’s uber-performative command. The guilty party is impenitent, if anguished: But anguish, says Denis, “has become the revolutionary affect par excellence, the distraught summit of revolt.”

*****

Where were we? You were setting an extra place at the table for the intruder, your guest. It’s your finitude, coming for you. Who’s there? Your time is up, tempo, tempo, on your own invitation, at home, not at home, going home: an initiative without initiative, inviting the dead to supper, set us up to feast and begin the paradoxical process of incorporation. Lucky for us, there’s always a Leporello sidekick saying, ”Don’t do it!” or a Papageno saying, “Das Leben ist mir lieb,” Wait. Hold on, count me out, Don’t we love life? Freeze the pas au délà, back off, tell him you’re sorry, no trespass, no more. The servant says, “Close out finitude”, but, pre-dialectically set, he has no command. “Wir leben indem wir leiben,” says Heidegger—adding to Dasein a morph of Don Juan.

The predicament of Don Juan facing down the Commendatore, the wrestle of life-death, the step beyond the pleasure principle on crossing the line, the death-drive unfinished, libidinally refereed—this scene of encounter, stepping up the contre in the rencontre, the hard-nosed Be-gegnung, invokes the singularity by which Hollier calls it a wrap, provisionally, in the syncope of his work.

After the lecture Denis tells me that, for him, the scene continues to obsess him: It may count as his favorite in all literature, posing an unappeasable dare, the abyssal crossover repelled, yet defeating.

In the text I have brought in for discussion Denis calls it quits on the Commendatore, an encroaching figure that never quits us, tracking the politicized grave of Don Juan as it becomes Marx’s grave. Reading the duo DJ-Commander against the grain of its common interdiction-transgression grid, Denis pushes past Don Juan’s traditional rap sheet classing him in terms, donated by Bataille, of celebration, foisting the unrepentant in sheer expenditure. The Commander, by tentative contrast, imposes respect for interdiction, the imposition of a law of love, the strict version of libidinal economy, if skimming off the world construed by seriousness, work, savings, salvation—what keeps us going, blind and thirsty, creating pretend leaps over lines uncrossed.

*****

The friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy was one of the highlights of our Mitsein, points of which spanned across the country and Atlantic. We visited with Sarah Kofman in Paris, but Jean-Luc belonged to our Berkeley years, along with Lacoue. Sarah had written about Denis and Sartre, appreciating him on a number of levels socially pitched and intellectually reaffirmed at different times. In “L’amour en éclats” Nancy counts on Don Juan, Denis-style, traversing Bataille, to leverage an impossible wager that considers a necessity without law and its chiasmic double in a law without necessity. He targets “the heart of being” in order to read love in surplus of being: “One could say at the limit, the fundamental ontology and the caprices of love. The correlation would neither be causal nor expressive nor existential nor of any other known genre. . . But there is this brilliant, shattering constitution of being.” Nancy asks why we envisage Don Juan only condemned, “unless we represent his impunity as a diabolical or perverse challenge to the very law of love. And, yet, perhaps in spite of himself, Mozart let him be condemned. But even in hell, the figure of Don Juan testifies with remarkable force and insistence that this style of love as heart’s touch obstinately haunts the thinking of love as law of fulfillment.” I must suppose that I shall be compelled to pursue these still nascent thoughts in a more grounded way, linking love to friendship--even to the hell of friendship that belongs to the accursed share as yet undeciphered, but without which the indestructible alliance will never have been forged, at least not on our watch.

Avital Ronell

University Professor of German and Comparative Literature

New York University

When I was asked to contribute to this homage to Denis Hollier under the guise of the topic of self-effacement, I first thought that one could speak about the other Denis Holliers.

There are namesakes such as Denis Hollier, a French poet that, according to his website, has not “published any biography for the moment” (cet auteur n’a pas rédigé de biographie pour le moment”) and bears a taste for shopworn titles. There is also a “Dennis Hollier”, a Hawaii-based journalist who, among others, has written about the modern oyster in (where else?) The Atlantic.

But we, here, must imagine Sisyphus happy—and Denis’ career certainly carries a Sisyphean trait in tackling nothing less than the history of French literature, a topic so large that it finds itself, on a first glance, at odds with the erasure mentioned in the title.

And yet, we might ask who would not get crushed by the enormity of the corpus of French Literature – who would not, in the prolonged ends of empire, feel the imposition of the idea against and within the stories that one builds, and those built against them, beyond the page.

The authors in Denis’ works are all dispossessed by the idea of literature, the idea they sought to reach and the one they sought to flee. How would literature be possible in a world in which writing isn’t—or: how would literature be possible if there were means to write it?

The short-circuits of the avant-gardes were crushed in the second world war whose atrocities exuded a verbose silence upon experiences beyond words, forever circumscribed, hinted at, yet remaining private.

What can one build after the historical experience of language as a rubble, failed revolutions, and the metastases of grand narratives – can they simply be affirmed anew, can they be bypassed, can one relate to a past so close, and yet so different in its experience and possibility?

To some extent, these questions are no longer ours, or some have learned to call the nouveau roman vieux-jeu, the avant-gardes dead—we have plenty of prefixes to add to the big ideas and the -isms are not running out either.

And yet the push to the limit that Denis’ favored authors acted out seems to haunt the books written in their wane, as if, with straightened-out narratives and rationalized roles, the transgressions were no longer contained, seeping back into the world with comical banality, mocking feeble attempts at casting out evil on a page through individualized guilt and stereotypical compulsions, frowning at this search for God in a mirror or in the blind embrace of the bottleneck that is our present.

It is not that Denis’ authors were free of guilt from their written transgressions—or removed from the politics of literature, but we might say they were conscious of the enjoyment contained in their guilt, and the need to move beyond the narrow line of the first-person pronoun, beyond a melancholia that endures.

We cannot repeat their writing, nor long for its return, but we can admit the disappointing prospects of yet another apocalypse without pretending that things are not also getting worse.

Part of what Denis’s work attempted is to transmit a certain love for literature. It may be a strange kind of love: its object is phantasmatic, oozing beyond the boundaries of a page, and we never quite know where “literature” today, takes place. At once, we can sometimes sense that it fails, not in embodying “literature”, but in being its stand-in, a prop for a literature to come, a story that would no longer be one, a silence no longer conditioned by words.

I’d like to tell you the story of a game played in the south of France called “la mourre”. The word is said to derive from southern Italian dialect (morra), which can mean “delay”, but also “herd”, or, in its Sicilian form “murra”, a large stone.

In the game, two players face each other with their fists closed. At the same time as their adversary, each player must show a certain number of fingers with one hand and call out a number between one and ten. This spoken number is to correspond to the total number of fingers displayed by the hands of the two players. In other words, if the first player shows three fingers and says the number four, while the other player shows two fingers and utters the number five, it is the latter player that knows “la mourre” and wins the round.

What is peculiar about this game is that it can only be won in spite of one’s knowledge: one never knows whether one is right in the number one calls out and said number is not based upon what one might know of the other, it is per chance that it may comprise the signs the other shows. Further, the other player’s success retroactively hinges on one’s own signs, which jumbles the relation between loss and victory: one’s words escape the other if the guess misses the right number, yet one cannot say whether it was one’s own fingers or those of the other that were missed—at once, one’s own signing partakes in the right guess of the other.

In the encounter that one’s speech generates in a right guess, there is a delay, a community, or, in a wrong guess, an obstacle, echoing the double meaning of its name.

Literature might not show us fingers, nor does it yell. Yet we must imagine it as playing, we must get caught in its delays, in its shifts, throw signs at it, believe we know it, only to find, after the fact, that the moment in which we thought it was ours was but an invitation to play, once more, in spite of ourselves.

Literature is not something one can possess, and it may be because of this impossibility that we are here trading stories about what happens, hors-jeu and hors je, outside and in defiance of oneself. We derive the signs of its presence from what it reveals and hides only in letting go of the apprehension that we know it, that we own it—we must, for a moment, forget that we are writing, that we are reading.

Dispossession, then, is not a curse, so long as we know to hold it without it robbing us of itself, so long as we are not dispossessed of the capacity to move between our words, grease drops in suspension, awaiting, above alphabet soup, the right letters.

We may wonder if René Magritte knew the intricacies of the game of la mourre when he used it as a title for his 1966 painting of an apple with the words “Au Revoir”. Beyond the motive of the apple as temptation, it is unclear whether the painting is playing the game by showing us an apple and letting us read the words, thereby producing them, or whether it is the painting throwing them at us. What is the game this painting shows us, is it that of painting, is that of literature? How can we read this au revoir? Were I to answer, before this is effaced, I would like to imagine all of us victorious in reading these two words at face value, to see more of Denis in the time to come, pas un adieu, juste un au revoir.

Pierre Schwarzer

Ph.D. Candidate

Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture

New York University

René Magritte - Le jeu de mourre Oil on Canvas, 1966 Private Collection, Apple Corp.

For Denis Hollier

Introduction by Simon Leser

Salute to Denis Hollier by Ann Smock

Why Are We in America?: On Denis Hollier by Jeffrey Mehlman

Leave Without Absence by emily apter

Don by samuel holmertz

Support(s) by Emlyn Lih

Inactualité et impouvoir. Pour Denis Hollier par François Noudelmann

Headless by Zakir Paul

The Way Our Mitsein Shakes Out by Avital Ronell

For the “love” of literature ? by pierre Schwarzer