Sartre and Derrida: A Sculpture Garden

by Steve Martinot

 Written in the mid-1980s.

Introduction

It has not been fashionable, in these post-structuralist days, to discuss Sartre.[1] Part of the reason is that Sartre wants to be definitive about what he says. He desires language that is direct, unequivocal, message-ridden; he wants it to say what he thinks. Post-structuralist writing suggests this is an idle endeavor, that the polyvalence of language calls in question what "say" and "think" mean, what the "who" that does it is, as well as "about-ness" itself. Derrida continually demonstrates, for instance, that textual form, though built of discursive meaning, is not only a means but a meaning itself, and that it undermines textual content. One could say that if, for Sartre, consciousness produces writing as its text, for Derrida the inverse is the case, that writing produces consciousness as its text. And they seem to mirror each other in that Sartre avoids speaking about language as much as Derrida avoids speaking about intentionality.

But Sartre is not to be dispensed with so easily. Sebastian Gardner, for instance, claims that Derrida reveals a notion of the subject quite close to Sartre's. Christina Howell argues that differance is analogous to a Sartrean notion of consciousness in the way both address the indefinite.[2] And one would imagine, lurking behind the meta-textuality of the subject's deconstruction, the subject itself at play, autonomously and spontaneously (i.e. not subjected, or subordinated, as Paul Smith uses the term[3]). To cramp or disqualify the subject in one's writing seems a little like Plato, in the Phaedrus, condemning writing in writing. The form of the endeavor either transcends or falls prey to its content.

Beyond dispensibility, and in spite of doctrinal disagreement, there appear to be stylistic, textual, even programmatic affinities with Derrida. For instance, Derrida writes:

The text affirms the outside, marks the limits of this [its]
speculative operation, deconstructs and reduces to the status of 'effects' all the predicates through which speculation appropriates the outside.[4]

If one substitutes 'perception' for 'speculation,' and 'act' for 'text,' it reads as a phenomenological account of perception. In Husserlian terms, the passage would denote the noematic correlate's operation. For Sartre, it would recapitulate the notion that, in apprehending the world as meanings, we grant it objectivity. In this parallelism, we find another form of inversion. The Derridean textual 'outside' includes Sartrean interiority, and vice versa. Though for both, the inside sees the inside in the mirror of its own boundaries, their respective insides are on different sides of that boundary.

One could say that Sartre and Derrida have similar theoretical goals. In his exposition of subject-subject relations, Sartre seeks 1) to offer an alternative response to the problem of other minds, 2) to reconceptualize the ontology of persons, and 3) to elucidate the compass of interpersonal relations.[5] Derrida, analogously, seeks 1) to offer an alternative response to the problem of language and writing, 2) to reconceptualize the problem of metaphysics, in terms of an expanded view of textuality, and 3) to elucidate the compass of discourse with respect to surpassing the textuality of truth, metaphysics, the subject, etc. Interestingly, both pursue these aims by pointing out that Heidegger undermined his own attempt to do the same things. Where, for Heidegger, the other is always already grasped, since being-in-the-world is founded on Being-with (an "ontological co-existence" in which one is through others), Sartre points out that if, as Heidegger says, one's being is that by which there is (es gibt) a world, and hence, an Other, one is caught in a solipsism.[6] And where Heidegger relates to language from within his own poetic, thinking that language is always already grasped, Derrida argues that he underestimates the poetic openness of language itself, and the disparity thus created between its polyvocity and Heidegger's own certainty of its univocity and clarity for himself.

Finally, each proposes a deconstruction of the rationalist view of the subject -- Derrida to show it is a concept, a text, and Sartre to show it is a narrative. Ironically, for Derrida, the deconstructed subject is the subject matter of his text, while, for Sartre, the narrative nature of the subject is known only through the form of his argument.

Before we walk among these entangled textual beings that both shadow box and fraternize with each other, let me outline a horizon. If we privilege the literal content of a text, literary form remains a means, a carrier-signal for message (the author-artist's literary and ideational offering or gift). To deprivilege literal content, as deconstruction has done, is to open reading to the signification lurking within textual form. That is, elements of textual structure (different from "literary form," the poetic and grammatical structure of the text) become signifiers, a sign system. It is a sign system that does not reside in the language of the text, but in what the language does. That is, textual form is an act that embraces the state of all the text's acts, brought to light only in a meta-text, a reading. The space in which this interplay of state and act occurs, the mortise carved by the critical act (reading), becomes a field in which textual form can be 'seen' to have a meaning, and in which form achieves a certain non-textual entityhood that does not belong to the literal. In short, the arena engendered by elevating the carrier-signal to signifier status will be more like a sculpture garden than a play of linguistic signifiers; one must move through it rather than read it. The appeal there will be to the eyes -- though not to the visual.

To introduce what we are looking at, let us consider the terms 'differance' and 'neantisation.' Both are invented. Invention marks the limits of language, not the beginning. While one names to entitle by associating an existing sign with something already there, one invents because one cannot entitle, given the language at one's command. Neantisation,[7] built upon certain thought operations, is irreducible to them. Differance,[8] built upon certain grammatical operations, is not definable in the language silhouetting its necessity. Invention points to what is not there yet, and proclaims with respect to what is there that it is not that. Once invented, the term adumbrates a scene in which its instrumentality becomes possible; i.e. it releases an instrumentality that has yet to discover itself. By pointing something out (itself), it engenders what it points to (as the word "I" engenders the subject to which it points the moment it is used). In this sense, a text, such as a narrative, is always a discovery, although after a second reading it become a name for what it discovers. What it is on the first reading will perhaps be suggested here.

Derrida's derivation of "differance" exemplifies the scene of invention. For difference (the ground of meaning) to exist, he argues, it must be the effect of something. But that "something" can be neither substance nor object since the arbitrarity of signs implies the non-presence of what differs. For difference to be discernible, then, requires the inescapable play of difference itself. No cause for difference can be assigned. To speak of effects without causes destroys the notion of effect. Difference remains the non-effect of what will have been there as non-presence. Hence, 'differance' is to be thought as what is already implicated in, or the exclusive ground of, difference (as Being, for Heidegger, is already implicated in the existence of entities). The difficulty with differance, Derrida points out, lies in its own inconceivability. Though it is about a play at about-ness (the difference and and deferral of what it is "about"), conceiving it cancels "about-ness" itself (SP,143). Neither a concept nor a name, its form is the signified of its content as a sign.

In a similar manner, neantization (nihilation) is to be thought as the exclusive ground of consciousness. Referring to neither object nor substance, neantir means to "nothing" its object as a non-act. It is the (non)source of presence to consciousness, the mode of intending an object.

By a double movement of nihilation [one] nihilates the thing in relation to [one]self by placing it in a neutral state, between being and non-being -- and [one] nihilates [one]self from being in order to be able to bring out of [one]self the possibility of a non-being. (BN,23)

What an intention points to (the content of consciousness) is not the world since the world contains the object rather than that content (BN,26), and not itself since the constituted object is not intentionality itself. To silhouette the nihilated object as Spivak silhouettes the sign,[9] one could say that the object is "not there" in its deferral as non-being, and "not that" in its difference as a nihilated content of consciousness. Like differance, the form of nihilation is the signified of its content.

If nihilation can be expressed in terms that constitute differance, the inverse is also the case. Constituted by absence, the sign is what it is not. But if the sign is predicated on the deferral of the signified, it empties itself, loses itself in an 'elsewhere.' That is, it is not what it is. In effect, the sign can be read, or seen, as having the same form as the Sartrean for-itself.

Furthermore, in the play of differance, deferral is a non-act which always already empties the sign, while differing remains a state of its being, a state it always goes beyond to the absence of what differs, the trace. In Sartre, this translates into a form of temporality.

"The for-itself as the nihilation of the in-itself temporalizes itself as a flight toward." (BN,361)

Always ahead of itself, the for-itself pursues the future, perpetually in activity toward what it defers for itself. That is, as pursuit, the for-itself empties itself of what it is, in a form of non-act, to seek what it is not; it flees from nihilation to possibility, distinguishing and deferring its object. Both the pursuit-pursuing of the Sartrean for-itself, and its mirror-image, the difference-deferring of differance, are constituted by a "state" and a "non-act." Though Sartre is speaking about consciousness, and Derrida about the inability to speak about consciousness, both disclose the same parametric operations within their respective textual forms.

That is, the two exhibit a form of homology.[10] In effect, both nihilation and differance seem to be the same kinds of textual machinery -- or rather, the same kind of textual animal. As inventions, they exhibit a certain autonomy and, though they belong to different textual ecologies, with respect to those ecologies, they seem to have parallel roles and similar metabolism.

However, the notions of "state" and "non-act" are a particularly Sartrean way of putting things. It is the language of "consciousness [that] is always consciousness of something," enacting and invoking the non-act of consciousness and the state of "of-ness" -- intentional form and content. To use it to name the homological configuration is to impose it on Derrida, to look at Derrida through it. Is this permissible? For Sartre, the object rather than the sign is in question, while differing and deferring belong to a different way of thinking, the operations of signs as text. But we have already looked at Sartre through Derridean language. In Derridean terms, state and non-act are metaphysical notions belonging to the interior of a text. To look at Sartre through Derridean language is only to constitute the emptiness, the absence, as a text, that intentionality already engenders and sublates. To look at Derrida through Sartrean language becomes an intending of difference and deferral that is already its own difference and deferral, already a text that engenders and sublates intentionality. Sartre paints the object with the immediacy of the sign, while Derrida sculpts the way the object is entextualized. If each can be expressed in the formal terms of the other, the for-itself as difference and deferral, and difference-deferral as state and non-act, it is because differance and neantization are mirror-images of each other. On a morphological rather than ecological level -- that is, setting in abeyance (or bracketing) their differences of terrain and textual content -- they are isomorphic.

What is the isomorphic form we are teasing out of this pair of texts? It is not dialectical (though nihilation appears to be). Dialectical opposition unites and divides commensurables. But Sartre's dual nihilations of continuity and fullness (particularity and non-being) are incommensurable. The nihilation of fullness is an emptying act whose result is a non-state, and that of continuity is a non-act directed toward an empty state. Consciousness constitutes itself both as a non-state through the act of nihilating, and as a non-act through a state of separation. An act and non-state conjoins a state and non-act. Each relation is not only not dialectical, it is skewed: i.e. separate, unparallel, inseparable but not intersecting.[11] Neither is a negation, nor leads to a re-negation.[12] Consciousness is a double skew relation. In the case of differance, the separation and overlap of differing and deferring are similarly neither exclusive nor oppositional. Differing, as a state, is empty because its content is the non-act of absenting the already absent other; deferring, as an act, is empty because it enacts an already fulfilled non-state, a being temporally elsewhere. Like the heterogeneity of temporalization and spatialization, they are different kinds of difference; one is done, in the sense that deferral undoes, while the other is, as absence. Differance is also a double skew. Both nihilation and differance are double non-negations. The skew relation is not a totalizing principle. There is no necessity for it. It emerges from a meta-textual conflation of difference and deferral, state and act. Yet it reveals all the traits of a formalism, in that it maps textual forms onto each other homologously. As a formalism, the double non-negation is an arena of identity within a realm of mirror-image difference.[13] As a mapping, it removes nihilation and differance from their home environments, and freezes them into geometric forms, as abstractions of textual forms. Just as geometric forms provide the vocabulary for speaking about the composition of painting or sculpture, this formalism, already a link between the texts of Sartre and Derrida, will permit us to speak about what is meta-textually homologous, or sculptural, between them, and place them under the same bower.

Of course, this isomorphism at the core of a Sartre-Derrida homology would satisfy neither one. Derrida's intention is not to engender a formalism, yet we find one meta-textually. Sartre's intention is for his language to be direct and unequivocal, while we address, again meta-textually, the indirect, the unexpressed in Sartre's language. Ironically, what we are finding as form for each is proposed in content by the other. Let us return to the otherness between Sartre and Derrida, the otherness of the Sartrean subject (always in flight from itself), which for Derrida is always illusory because already textual.

In keeping with the visual character of a sculpture garden, let us look at the look. This site of discovery, an operation of nihilation and differance in discovering and being discovered (in the sight of the look) will be reread through Derrida's eyes, from which rereading we can then look back at Derrida. This will not be a deconstruction of Sartre, i.e. a reading of Sartre through Derrida's thought (which LaCapra has already done), nor an ontologization of Derrida, which Derrida himself has both obviated and performed. Instead, it will be a meditation on, and a tour around, the textual forms encountered. It may be a shame to disrupt the Hegelian polish of Sartre's account, but deprivileging the text's literal content with respect to its textual form has rendered that inevitable. And by addressing the indirect in Sartre, the form of his form, we can interrupt him in medias res, at the core of what he is doing.

Sartre's account of the look resides at the center of his approach to the question of other subjectivities, of the Other-as-subject. It escapes certain classical traps, principally the need to attribute and thus to assume subjectivity in the other. For Sartre, the Other-as-subject is not a subject known through oneself, but a disruption of oneself, an overlay of a 'social self' (Schroeder's term) upon one's grasp of one's own world. One is experientially beset. The Other remains unknowable, hidden, other; and one attains only certainty rather than knowledge of the Other's being. In that sense, Sartre's theory is unique. (Sch,177)

Sartre begins his account of the Other with a consideration of the Other as an object. As an object, the Other is different because it is "the object that sees what I see;" one's own objects also become objects for it. The Other, seen as seeing, presents an animal center (complete, like an object, yet hidden in its autonomy) that decenters one's own relation to the world (BN,255). Objects "flee the self" toward the Other, and their immediacy to oneself is replaced by an immediacy to the Other (BN,254).

The Other is defined not as the absence of a consciousness in relation to the body which I see but by the absence of the world which I perceived, an absence discovered at the very heart of my perception of this world. (BN,256)

"An element of disintegration" has been added to the world. Though nothing has changed, and the objects of one's own world still exist, they now have other meanings. Their differences become different. And they drain away, not into a future (because they are already past), but to a temporal elsewhere. To see the Other seeing is not only to render all objects different, it is to defer them. The Other becomes a hole in the universe through which the world escapes (BN,255). Through the objects of this convulsed world, one looks at the Other-as-object, and one sees what is not there; one interacts with the Other as object, and one interacts with what is not that.[14] As a deferral, the Other is a non-act (the encounter) and a state (of the world's being decentered), while the Other, as difference, becomes an act of draining the world into itself as an absence whose objecthood is a non-state. Differance surfaces in a world now immersed in the disruptive operation. In other words, the Other-as-object transforms a world written by and for oneself into what must now be read, and renders that reading of the world polyvalent. The Other becomes a sign, and the encounter an allegory, an enactment, of Derridean differance.

This is not an instantiation of differance, but its imprint (as language is the imprint, through Dasein, of Being in the world, in Heidegger). The isomorphism of differance and encounter with the Other-as-object has a textual form that is homologous to the very operation (of differance) it enacts. It positions differance at the heart of the for-itself, as the form of nihilation. That is, in Sartre's writing, consciousness is homologous to writing.

Sartre's narrative of the look reverses the relation of reader and writer; it recounts what occurs upon entering the real or imagined perceptual field of another, upon becoming "present to the eyes without distance" (BN,258), like an object. In the story, which Sartre tells in the first person, he is peeping through a keyhole, so engrossed in the scene that all self-reflection is submerged. Suddenly, he hears footsteps behind him and realizes he has been seen. The object of his attention becomes the Other's look for which he is the scene. His non-self-reflection dissolves, replaced by shame at being caught, and he finds himself the shameful object of the Other's attention.[15]

In this story, there is a narrator, the "I" who tells the story of (his)[16] own objectification by the Other, and a character narrated, the Other who objectifies. What is narrated about the Other, however, is not an action; the Other is "told" only as a narrator of a narrative (the narrative of shame, for instance) in which the first, the "I", is a character. Thus, the narrator (the "I") becomes a character in a narrative told by the Other as told for (him) by the narrator, and the Other becomes who (he) is (a subject, a freedom, one who looks and objectifies) by enacting an event told for him, an event that is itself only a narrative. In sum, the Other becomes a subject by narrating a story in which the "I" is a character, but also by becoming a narrator who is only a character in the "I"'s meta-narrative. (The term "narrative" here does not necessarily mean fiction, but signifies any text that recounts an event performed by an individual (or anthropomorphism, for that matter). What it represents, in some fashion, is an intentionality.)

This account's distinctiveness lies in its centering the particularity of narrative, rather than the generality of exposition. Re-presentation of the Other as subject requires a fiction to create it, to uphold the particularity of a subject and to surpass attribution of the Other's subjectivity. What is generalizable is the necessity of narrative to recount (rather than account for) the Other-as-subject.

There is a corollary to this argument. If a narrative is meta-narratively attributed to the Other, it is first, only an attribution to oneself, and second, something one is beset by only as if the Other had told it. One feels the shame told in the narrative given to the Other because one attributes to oneself a characterhood in the Other's narrative. This centering of narrative thus suggests that we know (cognize our experience of) shame, fear, love, etc. because we experience them through stories that tell us what they are, and that establish them as feelings to be encountered and felt at moments of being caught, attacked, caressed, etc.

Three transformations occur to the Self-as-object.[17] First, one is given a nature, an "outside;" the self (the "I") finds its foundation outside itself. Second, there is a loss of project, of instrumentality in the world. And third, there is a loss of mastery or autonomy; one is written by the Other's apprehension, while writing that Other's apprehension oneself -- that is, a loss of authority through authorship.

In the first transformation, one is no longer pure consciousness, pure project (Schroeder calls this a "loss of innocence"). The interruption of non-self-reflection obviates a return to autonomous self-reflection. Re-encountering oneself through the Other's apprehension, one is frozen in the form of what the Other has come upon, and the indeterminacy of the for-itself dissolves. One becomes an object, a given (BN,262).

It is not that I perceive myself losing my freedom in order to become a thing, but my nature is over there -- outside my lived freedom -- as a given attribute of this being which I am for the Other. (BN,263)

The Other, with no nature, no outside, is "here" at the center of one's unknowable given nature, while one only knows oneself as outside, "over there", a given because of the Other's look, not in it. Space and being become inverted.

I apprehend my possibilities from outside and through him at the same time that I am my possibilities, somewhat as we objectively apprehend our thought through language at the same time that we think it in order to express it in language. (BN,264)

One is determinate for the Other at the same time one becomes indeterminate for oneself. While being 'this being for the Other' (a state) whose freedom is here, one's own freedom becomes (his) over there (a non-act). One provides one's own givenness meta-narratively (an act), and that givenness is not oneself (a non-state).[18] It is a double non-negation. And the Other is a narrative text which one, as already a character in that text, reads to find oneself. One reads oneself as an already read text of the unreadable Other.

Schematically, this recalls Derrida's account of the supplement. The supplement forms part of Derrida's rethinking the relationship of speech to writing. In the classical account, writing "supplements" speech, as it unnaturally "diverts the immediate presence of thought to speech into representation and imagination" (Gram,144). In presenting (absenting) his notion of "writing in general," Derrida argues that speech is already a form of writing; that is, it is only apprehensible as having the same structure, a sculptural equivalence to writing. In other words, speech understands itself only by substituting itself for, or supplementing, writing in general, and then considering writing its own supplement; writing becomes the supplement of the supplement. Thus, Derrida finds writing the source, the telling of speech as a telling of writing. In general, for Derrida, the supplement describes how structure and activity find their core, their inside outside themselves, their origin in their own effect.

To introduce Derrida's use of the supplement, however, is to introduce Rousseau, since Derrida accounts for the supplement by recounting Rousseau's account of the supplement. That is, he relies on narrative for its development: in particular, on retelling the story of Rousseau's onanism from the Confessions.[19] Though Derrida begins with a disclaimer ("If we lend to the text below a paradigmatic value, it is only provisional" -- Gram,149), he is nevertheless affirming that Rousseau's story is central. "My ambition will be to draw out of it a signification which [a] presumed future reading will not be able to dispense with."

But Rousseau never does tell the story; he only suggests that he "learned that dangerous supplement" (Con,98) in the throes of his innocence, still engulfed in both his own self-proclaimed "maidenhead" and feelings of "sisterhood" and "friendship" for "Maman." For Rousseau, if onanism finds its source in Woman, She finds her source is his Self, onanistically encountered; it is the supplement of the supplement. To the extent Derrida meta-narrates Rousseau's story, that scene is seen as exemplary for Rousseau.

This onanism ... permits one to be himself affected by providing himself with presences, by summoning absent beauties. In his eyes, it will remain the model of vice and perversion. Affecting oneself by another presence, one corrupts oneself [makes oneself other] by oneself. (Gram,153)

A model for Rousseau, as told by Derrida: "Rousseau will never stop having recourse to" it. It is a substitution of representation and imagination that is already the template and the image of Derrida's substitution of himself for Rousseau, his application of representation and imagination to what Rousseau left carelessly metaphoric. The form of Derrida's text is homologous to its content: it is the signified of that content as a signifier.

But, in fact, for Rousseau, the imagined presence (his "object of desire") need not be a woman. To relive (releve) anything -- nature, education, an act of charity -- whether in retrospect or in actual presence, Rousseau must simply be "alone" at the moment. For instance, when alone, he feels for those who give him "cruel looks" as he does for "characters in a play."[20] Alone on his island, dreaming of the bliss of being alone on the island, he emerges "from ... reverie, seeing myself surrounded by greenery, ... I fused my imaginings with the charming sights, ... [and] could not draw a line between fiction and reality" (Rev,90-1). Immersed in the idyllic, he imagines the presence of the idyllic as an "absent beauty," and awakens unable to choose. Is this not a way of dispensing with the world, just as his onanism enables him "to dispose, at will, of the whole [female] sex" (Con,98)?

For Rousseau, his aloneness is more than a model (of perversion or anything else); it is his own real access to the other, that is, to his own "nature." For instance, he sees himself as a passionate lover of "Maman" when in her absence, her past shadow -- and his passion for her remains expressed always from afar (Con,98-9,178). He sees himself as a socialable man who becomes thankful to "Maman" for having taken him into her bed, thus "saving" him from the temptation of other's wives. He sees himself as a man who is concerned about his image in a Venice courtesan's eyes, a concern he ignores in her presence (Con,297-8). That is, he continually catches himself at the keyhole.

But his confession is to being affected, not affecting himself. He flies from another onanist, the one who 'knows what he knows,' feeling like a criminal (Con,150). He rages at the scowls of those who recognize him in the street; and only slowly comes back to himself (Rev,143). He protests that his detractors are out of mind when out of sight (Rev,132), yet he writes about them. They are in fact the obsessive core of his Reveries, not "there" when he writes of them, but wholly on his mind, represented in his text not only as presence, but as his text's addressees. Rousseau's narratives become his aloneness under erasure, his presence to the absent other, as an object. Though he catches himself at the keyhole, he doesn't catch himself catching himself. Thus, he is disengenuous about his aloneness.[21] By writing, he can 'make himself other by himself,' and lay it at the other's door. That is, his meta-text countermands what the text of profession confesses (that he does it to himself), what his text of confession professes (that he has risen above "all that"). By supplementing himself through imagining the other and representing himself in the narratives he tells, he is conflating a state and non-act; by supplementing these events with their telling, his writing, and by representing the other and imagining himself, he is conflating an act and non-state. It is a double non-negation. Each act of fantasy, desire, narrative, encounter, induces a non-state of objecthood; each state of "cheating" Nature constitutes the non-act of his onanism, of the nature he gives himself as a nature given by others.

There is no origin for this, for oneself as object, or the Other as subject. Like the look, or the reverie, the supplement is the form of non-presence whereby "all begins through the intermediary" (Gram,157). What mediates a relationship is what engenders it, and thus also engenders what is in relation. Ultimately, what is known is the form of knowing: the supplement. This is the case for Rousseau's "onanism," for the Sartrean look, and for the Derridean text about Rousseau. All are homologous; all are narrative. All follow a configuration for which the supplement is a glyph. In this glyph we read the shape of these three texts. It is a carving in language, residing in a certain dimensionality that is lost the minute it is "spelled out" (as any critical account of a sculpture must leave the sculpture itself in disarray).

The glyph, a reading of the non-textual, is thus a reading of the sculptural. That is, there is no 'real' meaning to what is read, only the reading given it, only the sculptural forms named glyphically. But if the glyph arrives at a meaning only because it arrives at being a reading, the reader, who enacts that glyphic naming of the non-text, becomes a narrator/character in a third narrative, that of reading. The reader becomes both a character given by the text read, and a narrator as interpreter of the text. The text becomes the meta-text of the reader as text at the moment it becomes the reader's (object) text. That is, the reader reads him/herself as the Other of the text, and thus enacts the text of the look.

Where the first transformation of the Self-as-object delineates knowing oneself as known and unknowable, of becoming who one is for the Other, the second enacts a loss of instrumental contact with the world, a loss of project. In becoming the Self-as-object, a character in the Other's narrative, one becomes separated from one's possibilities by the Other's freedom. In losing one's autonomy, one becomes an instrumentality in the other's hands (BN,264). One still apprehends oneself, though through the Other's freedom, as an absence, a project that is not one's own, that is both hidden and immediate. The Other becomes a theater and the Self-as-object an actor on that stage, performing to a script the Other has written.

This conflation of immediacy and separation suggests what Derrida calls (from Mallarme) the hymen: a separation that joins, a joining that separates. The hymen is also described using a narrative: in this case, Mallarme's critique of Margueritte's Pierrot. In the original scene, Pierrot mimes (mimics) a scene in which he tickles his lover, Columbine, to death. What he mimes, however, is a past in which the crime was a future, a project; he mimes [his] past deliberations" (Dis,200). Pierrot, projecting how he will kill his lover, enacts the crime, without the victim. The scene thus mimics an act that has never occurred, and hence represents nothing. "I killed her, yes ... But how shall I go about it?" (Dis,200) (In fact, the crime will never occur because Pierrot, playing both roles, the tortured lover as well as himself as torturer, dies under his own hand.) The mime mimicks the immediacy of non-mimicry in mime (Dis,198-9). That is, the mimesis works in reverse, a "repetition" before the fact, representing its own non-representation. It is the mimicked that must mime, the act that must copy its 're-presentation.' The performance (an act), in which time collapses, becomes other than a representation in representing (a non-state), and the content of the performance (a non-act), in which space collapses, becomes the presented for which there is no representation (a state). Yet "there is no longer any textual difference between the image and the thing" (Dis,209). The act, with its text, separates representation and presentation at an infinite distance, yet joins them in each being the other. This is the hymen. In effect, the hymen is a relation of a signifier to a content that is not a signified (Dis,240). "The hymen only takes place when it doesn't take place, when nothing really happens" (Dis,213). The content of the representation's enactment becomes a signifier which both separates its future non-signified, and joins it as itself. The represented becomes an outside, an absent meaning, yet inside the inside, since its signifier is the signified, the meaning of the text itself. Again, the form is the signified of the content as signifier.

In enacting a characterization that is at once its own, its immediacy, yet over there, written for it in another, the Self-as-object is a mime. The loss of instrumentality (of project) enacts a representation whose represented is non-existent, sourceless until that enactment, until the Self-as-object is enacted as a character. By representing itself as an object for the Other, the Self-as-object enacts in itself its loss of itself. The look, as the hymen, is a dramatization of loss enacted as a representation of nothing, infinitely distant and itself. (If the feelings we undergo, (love, fear, shame etc.), mime the narratives that have recounted them to us, that we appropriate as appropriate, then our emotions, as enacted meanings, can be seen as representations of what has no possible presentation except in that representation itself. I mention this in passing because it becomes a way of understanding the cultural specificity, the non-universality, the cross-cultural differences, of human emotion.)

The enactment (of the look as hymen) is not a narrative. The narrative invents, and then names what it finds, while the enactment enacts the name. The hymen becomes a glyph for the enactment of the Self-as-object in the look; it marks the identity and difference of the Self-as-object as metanarrator and character. And again, the structure of this glyph is an act and non-state conjoined to a non-act and state, a double non-negation.

The hymen becomes not only a glyph for the Sartrean enactment of loss of project, but for the Derridean joining with Sartre. Both enact a formalism that cannot be seen in the absence of the other. In seeing each through the other's text, joined and thus separated, we are not reading in an intertextuality. The meanings, the textual "ecologies" remain distant from each other, yet joined through the formalism that both texts engender in the folds, the re-plies, of homology space.

In a sense, the hymen symbolizes the existentialist notion that "Man is alone", and that the context required to shred the fabric of aloneness is a violent one. As the distanceless abyss between the self and the Other, it enacts the mutual exclusiveness of being a subject or an object, the mutuality of requiring that a "you" be an "I", and requiring a "you" in order to be an "I" -- a "you" which is not simply a reply, but a mirror of character and narrator in itself. Though Sartre is a phenomenologist, and thus essentializes, Derrida's glyph provides a language in which Sartre becomes non-essentialized, while Derrida becomes existentialized through his enactment of narrative.

In the third transformation, the self that had been autonomous suddenly finds itself no longer self-determining; its foundation is outside of itself, lost in one's being written by the Other's hidden apprehension. On top of loss of world (project) and knowledge of an unknowable self, there is both loss of self and knowledge of an unknowable Other (BN,261). One knows the unknowable Other because one becomes the Other's knowledge. One cannot apprehend oneself as a "who" any more, since that is now determined by the Other-as-subject, but in being known one thereby knows the knower. In other words, the classical attribution is reversed; instead of knowing the Other-as-subject through attribution to the Other of oneself-as-subject, one encounters and knows the Other in oneself as an attribution by the Other, not through the content of attribution, but the act. In becoming the Other's knowledge through loss of the ability to know (in becoming the form through erasure of the content), one mediates the character and the narrator in the Other.

In knowing the Other in loss as the Other's knowledge, one is both given (twice) and withheld (twice). One is given by the Other as the content of the look, and given by oneself through the Other (as a story one tells oneself the Other is telling about oneself behind the look). One is withheld by oneself in losing one's apprehension of oneself, and one is withheld by the Other as the Other's hidden knowledge. The self becomes form without (withheld) content and content whose form is elsewhere.

The Other's look makes me be beyond my being in this world and puts me in the midst of the world which is at once this world and beyond this world. (BN,261)

One's own world escapes, and the Other's world besets. Formless content and contentless form appear to the Self-as-object in the guise of the Other's freedom and a knowledge of belonging to the Other. The Other is known as act (a freedom to which one loses oneself) and as non-state (a knowledge of the Other's unknowability), and one knows oneself as state (an object) and as non-act (a lost freedom).

Derrida puts it a different way. "To lose one's head, no longer to know where one's head is, such is perhaps the effect of dissemination" (Dis,20). Derrida's pun is distorted by quoting out of context, but he too is presenting both loss and knowledge (since "no longer to know" is a form of knowledge where "not to know" is not). But Derrida is here speaking of prefaces. The preface, which precedes its text, also follows it, written after the text already written, and introducing it. That is, the preface is already a reading of the text, while announcing in the future tense the text to be read: a recapitulation and anticipation of the text (Dis,7). It must disappear, since at its end, one is at the beginning, yet it does not disappear, since, having already rendered the text a subject matter for itself, it surrounds the text. The preface cannot be sublated. It exemplifies the meeting of non-text (textual form) and meta-text (Derrida's) between which the text is a ghost; i.e. it constitutes the mediation between them.

If the text tells its own story through a preface which takes over and tells the text's story, then like the look, the preface intervenes as the text's loss of mastery, of self-determination. The origin of the preface in the text is lost to the origin of the text in the preface. The text engenders a meta-text for which it becomes the object, the subject matter. The preface is the look. Wholly outside the preface (a state), the text loses itself meta-textually within it (a non-act). Wholly within the preface (a non-state), the text makes the preface part of itself, a knowledge of itself (an act). With respect to the text, the preface is both loss and knowledge, a reading that will not have been a reading but a grafting of each into the other.

The interplay of text, non-text (textual form), and meta-text that constitutes dissemination is play that strews meanings among its various levels of form -- meaning that cannot be pinned down. Dissemination, in marking the textual form of the preface, becomes the form whereby the text becomes a meta-text, the form of textual form. Its articulation is at once the recapitulation and anticipation of non-textual meaning which is ungrounded in the text until found in the meta-text, in its own founding in a text that is about it. By articulating the way textual form arrives at signification, dissemination formalizes "the incommensurability of the signifier and the signified." The signified is exiled back to the text, its homeland, and the signifier (which textual form becomes in the meta-text) is left to both anticipate (by not "spelling" out) what it has deferred, and to recapitulate it (by being a meta-text "about" it). That is, the form of the preface constitutes the sculpture that 'dissemination' names. Again, the content of this form becomes the signifier for its form as signified.

As a reading, dissemination is the look. In a reading, the text is both given and withheld -- twice.

A reading must always aim at a relationship unperceived by the writer between what the writer commands and does not command in the language he uses. (Gram, 158)

We have returned to the text's inventing its reader as both character and narrator, that is, as the look. In its objectification by reading, the text gives the reader a knowledge -- but also a loss of itself. In losing itself to the meta-text of a reading, it becomes only the source rather than the being of meaning. The text becomes both more and less than it is: given as both metanarrative and object, and withheld as a reading that is at once too insightful (in anticipation) and inadequate (in remembering), precisely under the guidance of the text. The text becomes both form without content (the non-text) and content without form (the meta-text).

Or, to return to Sartre's side of the mirror, the look (of the Other) reads the Self-as-object, but tells him/herself the story of what is read in anticipation of the character to be engendered as read, while already recapitulating the seen (scene) as a reading. The Self-as-object (the text) is constituted by the story that both imagines (anticipates) the thought of the Other looking (the meta-text), and lives out (recapitulates) the object it narrates (textual form). The Self-as-object, like a text to its preface, remains both within and wholly outside the Other.

In sum, the look is an allegory for the incommensurability of signifier and signified, an allegory for which dissemination is not the title but rather the glyph. It is a glyph for loss and knowledge, for the interplay of narrative and metanarrative, pointing to the impossibility of reading ever fulfilling itself, and of ever not over-reaching itself. It is the abyss that mediates. The reader, like the textual form we have been following, is always beyond and falling short. If the previous glyphs have iconized the play of narrative and dramatics respectively, the stated and the enacted, dissemination is a glyph of the interplay of texts itself.

What can we say about these glyphs of loss and knowledge that emerge from and enfold the play of narrative and metanarrative.

[What] works the entire field within which these texts move ... itself is worked in turn: the rule according to which every concept necessarily receives two similar marks -- a repetition without identity -- one mark inside and the other outside the deconstructed system, should give rise to a double reading and a double writing. (Dis,4)

We already have a double reading of Sartre, and know what the double reading is in Sartre. The Self-as-object stands across the abyss of differance from the subject, and transforms its own subjectivity into a narrative "text" which is, in turn, read to it by the Other -- "a repetiton without identity." But both are also doubly written. We recall the "Other-as-object", which delineates (names) what already tells from afar the Other-as-object who "sees what I see"; it is a text of the Other-as-object that recapitulates the subject in its special objecthood and anticipates the subject of the look that objectifies. The text both signifies, and signifies itself as that "name" for that signification: a glyph. Similarly, the "Self-as-object" engulfs the Self-as-object that anticipates the subject in the distance while recapitulating (rewriting) the Other's past look. Thus, the double writing is first, of the text that signifies and engenders its meta-text in being read, and second, of the text that names itself and is engendered by its meta-text as a reading. In effect, the text as name for itself only names the mediation that disappears behind what it brings into relation (existence) through mediation. When Derrida asks "Why should 'literature' still designate that which already breaks away from literature?" (Dis,3) he is asking how the very name can cover and hide the mediation it is itself a part of, and float in the hiatus between the act of naming and the act of pointing out what remains to be named. What covers and hides the text is the text itself having become a glyph, a character at the hands of a reading, but only by already having written (told) the character reading it.[22] The most familiar example is the "I" that invents the subject that can say "I" within a given narrative of certainty as to its univocity (that is, its pointing out what is to be named renders it already the act of naming). That "I" becomes a glyph for the double reading and double writing, the dual narrative and dual character, of what points itself out in which it discovers and is what is discovered.[23]

Each of the forms, whose textual surface is narrativized by Sartre and englyphed by Derrida's "terms", are composed of a double reading and a double writing, in what Derrida calls (after Merleau-Ponty, perhaps) a chiasmus: what is read becomes a writing that is read by what had been read -- what is discovered becomes a pointing out that is discovered by what had been discovered. At this point, let us name (or englyph) Derrida's "terms" -- differance, supplement, trace, etc. -- by the term "instrumentalities," in light of the fact that they constitute the technology of Derrida's science of writing (grammatology). We can relate these instrumentalities, and their narrativization in the Sartrean look, in the following manner. Dissemination englyphs the disappearance of metanarrator and character in each other; the hymen englyphs the immediacy and absence of the character (metanarrated) in the narrator; and the supplement englyphs the unnatural nature (character) given the metanarrator by his/her narrative, as narrated by the other. There is no unlocking one from the other in the operation of these glyphs. Dissemination, one's being written by the Other, is the manifestation of the narrative as metanarrated, of its inside and outside disappearing in each other; i.e. the form taken by the supplement. The supplement, the exteriority of the self, its knowledge of being given, is the manifestation of the other's narrative being enacted; i.e. the form taken by the hymen. And the hymen, the loss of self in distance and immediacy, is the manifestation of character and metanarrator reading each other in themselves; i.e. the form taken by dissemination. Thus, Derrida's instrumentalities form a circle, which is also a circle of reader as character (dissemination), narrated knowledge (supplement), and enactment (hymen). Character is the form taken by narrative; narrative is the form taken by enactment; enactment is the form taken by character. In other words, character is the content of enactment; enactment is the content of narrative; narrative is the content of character. This wheel separates and relates form and content as different directions on the same circle. It is, itself, a form of dissemination.

Is this a reduction of Derrida, an over-technologizing of his language? Reduction to what? Even meta-textually interrupted, the freeze-frame of the sculpture garden is a system of differences that is its own way of understanding itself. The non-textuality of Derrida's instrumentalities has been preserved in a non-textuality. The wheel adumbrates an obedience to a formalism (the skew relation) that Derrida himself obeys. Like the shadow of a prior unity, the wheel presents itself as an analysand whose analytic products its components already are. The analysand is not Platonic; it has no 'existence' other than as the effect of precisely what it "will have been" the cause. Instead, it is an archaic ecology that bequeaths its components a secret nostalgia for each other. In its entityhood, it is, again, a glyph. Derrida's glyphs of the look engender a glyph of themselves. Rather than corrupt Derrida's language, the wheel englyphs the constitution of language itself. The separation of form and content of each glyph among the others is nothing but the operation of differance. But it is a system of differences in which difference is insufficient to generate language. What is required is literature, the mutual naming of character, enactment, and narrative by each other. That the glyphs constitute language is revealed not by their difference, but by their textual form, their being as signifiers whose form is the signified of their own content.

Is this any different from language itself? We learn from Jakobson's poetics that each word hides behind the text it engenders as its own context, while the entityhood of the word hides its every text behind itself. Each is the memory and anticipation of the other. In terms of the argument given here, word and text each provide founding narratives, formalizing readings, enactments of each other: that is, founding narratives that retell (are the form taken by) each one's enactment of the other; formalized readings that meta-textually characterize (are the form taken by) each one's founding in each other; enactments that meta-textually recall each as a reading (a text of its words, a glyph of its text) of the other. That is, behind each word is a relation of glyph and text, of memory and anticipation, whose dual interplay is in turn an analysand that cyclically relates the dimensions of literature that have broken away from 'literature.' The glyph remembers the text it englyphs, and anticipates the word that will name it. But in mediating word and text, it both remembers and anticipates a cyclic relation of narrative, character, and enactment, of text, meta-text, and non-text, such as is found in the text and meta-text of Sartre's narrative of the look. Derridas englyphment of Sartre has rendered Sartre's narrative a mythos of language. But it is also a characterizing of reading, at the hands (eyes) of which each text breaks away from 'literature' and returns englyphed, a textual form that names its text through its meta-text. This suggests Derrida overlooked the fact that when "literature broke away from 'literature,'" it brought the name along with it because it had not yet invented a narrative to make the break real.

Beyond difference, language is also constituted by memory and anticipation, by the non-textual whose entityhood is suspended vertiginously between a nostaliga it invents and a discovery of its invention. Where are these memories and anticipations, these recapitulations and deferrals, to be found? Who does them? Do we, as readers? Beside the metaphysical circularity of such a notion (pick a theory of intentionality), this would ignore the textual center of reading, and forget that the reader is the look, a character both narrating and enacting. If memory is a characteristic of the englyphed, it becomes so only because memory itself is told in the englyping story. When caught in the look, one remembers who one is, but does so only through a narrative that names that memory as it creates who will have been remembering; it points out the remembered nature of love or shame at the same time it engenders the one who will feel loved or ashamed.

Is narrative the domain? Is a word, with its memories and anticipations, nothing more than a memory of the narratives it englyphs? Narrative particularizes, and generalizes at the same time. It generates shame, fear, love, by narrating what is named by those words (as glyphs), but is generated by those names in the act of telling one's nature as narrative. Every narrative is a metanarrative because the act of reading becomes a narrative of the reader as character. Reading as an act renders the reader an allegory for the agent, at all times a narrator and character in the metanarrative "about" what the agent acts toward. Or rather, the agent is always only a reader, both character and narrator in the text that is the world read. But this is a tripartite relation of narrator and character that is already memory and anticipation.

If Derrida's instrumentalities and Sartre's narrative of the look only pose again the question of language, to read each through the other is to enter a realm in which one confronts a question that ceases to make sense the moment it is posed: "which came first, language or narrative?" Where then do the worlds of writing (in general) and intentionality, whose forms have met and become each other in the sculpture garden, themselves meet? The supplement is a reading that is founded in narrative as name, as coming upon the world coming upon itself. The hymen is a reading founded in enactment, a representation apprehending the world as representation. And dissemination is a reading founded in knowledge of loss (absence), a memory of the world to be discovered. That is, as readings, writing and intentionality are mirror images, for which the sculptures in the garden are the reflecting surface.

Derrida has not posed a theory of intentionality, and Sartre has not posed a theory of writing. Intentionality does not manifest itself as writing in the Derridean sense, any more than writing manifests itself as intentionality in the Sartrean sense. One can no more say that consciousness produces writing as its text, than that writing produces consciousness as its text. These are not oppositions between Sartre and Derrida. And neither is the subject. The formal parity of reader and Other -- in which the "I" that both tells its telling and enacts its own otherness, an "I" that is not only contingent upon a "you", but must render the "you" both a narrator and character in order to be rendered both narrator and character by it -- points back to the reader and Other as a pointing back itself whose total configuration is sometimes called the subject.

Endnotes

1 -- Denis Hollier points this out in a very personal way in The Politics of Prose (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1986): his attempt to make his post-structuralist peace with Sartre.

2 -- Gardner, Sebastian; "Splitting the Subject," Auslegung, vol. 13(2), 1983: p.186-92. Howell, Christina; "Sartre and Derrida: Qui Perde Gagne:" J. of Br. Soc. of Phenomenology, vol. 13(1), 1982: p.26-34.

     Dominick LaCapra, in his interesting Derridean reading of Sartre, A Preface to Sartre (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1978), does not discuss affinities between the two. Most opinion has supported the notion that Sartre and Derrida are philsophically incommensurable.

3 -- Paul Smith; Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1988), p. xxxiii-xxxiv. Smith nowhere mentions Sartre, which is perhaps why he is able to consider the subject as subjected. Though he essentially presents a travelogue of various deconstructions of the subject, he ultimately finds himself facing the present as history, with still no account of the site of the rebellion he cites as the seat of agency, except rebellion itself.

4 -- Jacques Derrida; Dissemination (Chicago: Univ. of Chi. Press, 1981), p. 35. Hereafter referred to in the text as Dis.

5 -- Schroeder; Sartre and his Predecessors (London: Routledge Kegan and Paul, 1984), p. 185. Hereafter referred to in the text as Sch. Schroeder's book is interesting in terms of the dialogue he carries on with Sartre. Often he asserts that Sartre is not exhaustive in his treatment, and seeks to supplement it. My critique of Schroeder would be that his supplementation is good because it tends already to be implicit in what Sartre has written. Though Schroeder does not discuss any relation between Sartre and Derrida, it is his book that provided the initial stimulus for this article.

6 -- Jean-Paul Sartre; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 244 ff. Hereafter referred in the text as BN.

7 -- Hazel Barnes translates this as "nihilation," and gives the following explanation in her Glossary.

"Nihilate (neantir): A word coined by Sartre. Consciousness exists as consciousness by making a nothingness arise between it and the object of which it is consciousness. Thus, nihilation is that by which consciousness exists. To nihilate is to encase in a shell of non-being. The English word "nihilate" was first used by Helmut Kuhn in his Encounter with Nothingness."

 8 -- See Jacques Derrida's article called "Differance" in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwest Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 129-160. Hereafter referred to in the text as SP.

9 -- Gayatri Spivak, in her introduction to Derrida's Of Grammatology (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1976) (hereafter referred to in the text as Gram), says: "Such is the strange "being" of the sign: half of it always "not there", and the other half always "not that" (Gram,xvii).

10 - This should not be construed as a return to a structuralist equivalence of consciousness and sign systems. Our question, here, is about the significance of this relational mapping.

11 - Derrida himself perceives such a configuration in a different context (Dis,11). He is speaking about Hegel's preface as both "impossible and inescapable."

12 - Sartre invents the term negatite to speak of absence, destruction, interrogation, without invoking dialectical negation. Negatite is a positivity which expresses absence in being itself: the distance between two points, for instance, as the basis for the idea of measurement. A relation can be drawn between negatite and Derrida's trace. Negatite is the avenue whereby negation is describable in Being; the trace is the avenue whereby absence is inscribable in presence.

13 - In effect, we have made use of three pairs of terms (differing-deferring, state-act, and "not there"-"not that"), all of which have a certain relevance to each other, a certain common sphere of operation. Each fulfills a certain function. 'State' and 'non-act' name, always at a certain meta-textual distance. 'Not-there' and 'not-that' describe, a textual form that relates to the sign as read, reducing distance to a pointing out, a directedness at what had been or will have been named as a result. And 'difference' and 'deferral' return the pointing out to its text. That is, they mediate the distance by being the immediacy, as named, of an originless nature of meaning (differance) or a double movement of nihilation (neantisation). These three operations are inseparable. To point out (which a name does) becomes a form of mediation between the name and its object, a mediation whose content is the fact of having pointed something out; to name becomes the form of pointing out whose content is precisely the fact of naming something; to mediate the distance becomes a form of naming whose content is the fact of having mediated something. The triad forms a circle, a braiding of form and content. The circle, like an ecology itself, has the aura of the archaic, of the prior, of a nostalgia, rather than a reprieve from isolation, as if it had always been there, an analysand of which the non-negational forms were the analytic products. Perhaps the anxiety entailed in apprehending the skew, the double non-negation, is an artifact of the circle having been broken. I mention this here only because it exemplifies a sense of an arche proper only to the meta-text that will be explained later in this essay.

14 - The other's difference from an object is what is contained in its being an object, and its difference from being an other as subject is what is contained in its otherness. It recalls the Derridean trace.

15 - It should be noted that what one feels under the other's look can be anything. Sartre's example is the shame of being caught peeking through a key-hole. But the other might be someone looking longingly, with love, at one; in such a case, one becomes the object of that love, a love whose reality remains hidden, unknown, mysterious, and always appropriating. Schroeder posits the "love look" as a supplement to Sartre's account, arguing that Sartre is too narrow to include such a case; but I suggest here that Schroeder's example is not at all outside Sartre's purview.

We might add that if the longing look appeared to violate a taboo, it would lead to repulsion rather than attraction, while the structure of the Self-as-object would remain the same. This suggests why love relations need reformulation in marriage structures, love stories, poems, and methodologies of divorce.

16 - I use the male pronoun because Sartre does -- and is, as first person narrator. I put it in brackets, however, as if the gender were immaterial. To do so means, of course, that it is not. Given gender roles as they exist in this culture, can the look be gender neutral, even as Sartre is using it? If not, then the subject and Other-as-object that emerges from the Self-as-object is gender-specific and gendered, a political operation of differance (not simply a difference) that must be understood.

17 - Schroeder breaks it down into five transformations. The three I use are in reverse order from Schroeder's. The fourth transformation for Schroeder is that one becomes the organizer of the world in terms of the Other, that objectivity arises from the upsurge of the possibility of the other as subject. And the fifth is that one falls into enslavement to the situation; one becomes "dependent at the center of a freedom which is not mine and which is the very condition of my being." (BN,267) Both of these transformations, though closely connected to the first three, function essentially as precursors to Sartre's notion of Being-for-Others, which will be dealt with in this paper.

18 - For Sartre, the double non-negation becomes almost a style of reasoning. It forms a meta-text for Sartre's narrative.

"[The other] is the being toward whom I do not turn my attention [a state and non-act]. He is the one who looks at me and at whom I am not yet looking [an act and non-state], the one who delivers me to myself as unrevealed but without revealing himself [an act and non-state], the one who is present to me as directing at me but never as the object of my direction [a state and non-act]." (BN,269)

    The emphasis in the second two is on the absence of content to a state and an act that can have none. Nothing is missing; only what is already there is not filled. It remains form without quiddity. The contentlessness here is an emptiness that is not an absence.

"The other's look as the necessary condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity for me [a filled state, and a general, empty non-act]. ... I am looked at in a world that is looked at [an act that fills itself, and a general empty non-state, empty because it is my world become a world for the other]. ... The other's look ... denies my distances from objects and unfolds its own distances [an empty non-state, and a filling act]. This look ... is given as that by which distance comes to the world at the heart of presence without distance [an act and non-state]."

     In effect, Sartre uses the permutations of its three elements: a state, an act, and absence, as a descriptive reasoning process. State and act are conjoined, and absence is given as an attribute of one or the other. It accrues the aspect of both a logic system and an aspect of style.

19 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau; The Confessions, trans. Anonymous, revised by A.S.B. Glover (New York: Heritage Press, 1955). Hereafter referred to in the text as Con.

20 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau; The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, trans. Peter France (New York: Penguin, 1979), p. 100-1. Hereafter referred to in the text as Rev.

21 - Paul de Man, in Blindness and Insight, claims Derrida presents Rousseau as revealing a "pattern of duplicity" in which Rousseau knew "that his doctrine (of unmediated presence) disguised his insight into something closely resembling its opposite, but chose to remain blind to this knowledge." Derrida, then "bring[s] to light what had remained unperceived by the author and his followers." (p.116) De Man further says: "The question remains why he (Derrida) postulates within Rousseau a metaphysics of presence which can then be shown not to operate, or to be dependent on the implicit power of a language which disrupts it and tears it away from its foundation." (119) His charge is that Derrida is inventing a duplicity in order to reveal it.

     But in Rousseau's obsessive concern with his detracters in the Reveries, the duplicity is there. Rousseau 's writing undermines what he attempts to "say." First, Rousseau's speech, against his detracters, if it were speech, and were addressed to them, would put him in total choler, on his own 'confession.' It is writing that modifies this, and indeed makes it possible for him to not address them while addressing them. Speech becomes possible because he writes. Second, Rousseau undergoes agonies, at his detracters' hands, at a considerable distance from any self-control or self-instigation, as presence. He runs from them to be alone, and thus unaffected, both manifests his affect in writing and dispells their presence to the level of the inoperative in writing of them as if they were not there, and thus do not have any affect upon him. The "delicate transposition from literary statement to its empirical referent" (120) that de Man invokes does not occur. The referent is re-written. Third, the detracters are a metaphor for Rousseau's aloneness, a state to which he fled not only at the moment of encountering them, but all his life. His fear of encountering them is metaphoric for this aloneness, the meaning given by the form of distance he adopts in both the Confessions and the Reveries.

    By presenting Rousseau's notion of fear as a utility rather than a passion, de Man rewrites Rousseau. In the quote Derrida presents of Rousseau's view of fear and its language (Gram,276), fear is again a passion. De Man criticizes Derrida for not seeing the figurative in Rousseau's passion, and thus rewriting Rousseau. That is, Derrida has not taken Rousseau's psychology into account. But there is a psychology in Derrida that de Man is missing. If the passions can be known only through a figure, then the figure becomes the only referent for knowledge of the passions, and hence literalizes itself as that passion. Because fictions are literary and figural, de Man thinks they must operate as such; that is, the passion represents the figure. But they can operate only literally, otherwise 'operation' itself makes no sense. There is no metaphoric meaning if only the metaphor is possible.

     De Man is correct, however, when he says that there is a difference between Rousseau's story, and Derrida's story of Rousseau's story. But what he points to is not the difference.

22 - In effect, a name can be seen as the title of (a) narrative(s) that "tells" what that title comes to name (narratives that may articulate experience, use, explanation, etc.). To separate the title, always part of the narrative, from the narrative, is to render it a thing, a glyph.

23 - This conflation of active and passive reconstitutes the middle voice, that lost mode of language without which the subject is unapprehensible, inarticulable. Its loss was the burning of bridges.