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But how will we explain the fact that we are all present here, that we are in the present but not in
the same present as the fir-trees in the forest? We owe this complexity to chance .... Our life is an
intense complexity on which new layers of chance are constantly imposed. Chance allows this and
excludes that.
Does it therefore oblige us to consider presence and absence as complements?
It obliges us to reject the exclusions, the radical alternatives between opposites.
Translated by Daniel Moshenberg
The Dance of Signs
Sylvère Lotringer
"Even when immobile we are in motion."
-Merce Cunningham
"What counts is to put the individual in flux. One must destroy the wall of the ego; weaken
opinions, memory and emotions; tear down all the ramparts."
-John Cage
"That which is, cannot contain motion."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
Interpretive power: Freud analyzing Jensen's Gradiva. Not a mere "conceptual translation," not a
neutral, indifferent explication. An interpretation. But how powerful?
Structuralism obviously blurs the issue. It studies more possible than actual literature. At bottom,
an exploitation of the categorical capacities of discourse. Conceptual translation: power without
interpretation, or interpretation without power?
Language in itself is relational; it equalizes everything. A "science" of literature codifies these
relations in terms of a particular system, itself part of a more general mechanism. This in turn
functions as a repertory of possible forms. The original text returns as a measurable "difference."
Was it worth the trouble?
Objectivity is actually a pure fiction, an interpretation in its own right. But disavowed. The choice of
elements, their grouping, the logic at work, etc., are anything but neutral. Structuralists insist on
hiding behind a self-imposed logical organization; Freud defines a goal and arranges the facts
accordingly. The man of pure knowledge boastfully practices self-effacement: he preaches
liberation from all effects. Freud also promises access to truth, but he does not renounce the will.
His goal is to demonstrate the existence of repression. He does not merely explain. He interprets.
There is a violence of interpretation and Freud assumes it unabashedly. He clearly enjoys it.
My own inquiry begins at this point. If interpretation is appropriation and appropriation the
inevitable outcome of the will to power, are all interpretations on the same level? How is one to
choose among them? What happens if I reject them all?
But is it possible not to interpret?
Perspective Valuations
"How much of a piece of music has been understood when that in it which is calculable has been
reckoned up?" The Will to Power
The world has no value in itself; it waits for my evaluation. I never find it, though, in a pristine state:
it is always already shaped by interpretations. Evaluation substitutes a new interpretation for
another that has become narrow or weak. But what makes a "superior" interpretation in the world
of no truth?
Reading a text raises similar problems. However much I try to disregard previous evaluations, I
have to confront textual configurations whose economy I can never totally upset but merely modify.
All interpretation activates, or reactivates, the forces at work in the text. Gradiva, the final
hermeneutic novel, is no exception.
A literary text is not a psychic "object" waiting for the sage to coax it with the tip of his quill in order
to shatter cataplexy into light. A text has as many meanings as it has forces capable of dominating
it. Gradiva, obviously, was waiting for Freud to force it open.
Freud is not blind to this: "The producer which the author makes his Zoe adopt for curing her
childhood friend's delusion shows a far reaching similarity - no, a complete agreement in its
essence - with the analytical method which consists, as applied to patients suffering from disorders
analogous to Hanold's delusion, in bringing to their consciousness, to some extent forcibly, the
unconscious whose repression led to their falling ill" (Standard Edition, IX, 88). Such is the
powerful thrust of similitude. Freud has no more qualms to reduce "poetic creations" to real
persons or the "Pompeian fancy" to a simple "psychiatric study." Beneath the trappings of truth, on
the razor's edge of demonstration, forces are confronting each other in order to turn the process -
the text -into a product.
If Gradiva adheres so perfectly to the analytical mold, the analysis of the novel must serve as an
absolute proof, in Freud's words, of the theory of the unconscious. Absolute proof - or absolute
counter-proof... Even thought "absolute" is clearly too strong a word for such a circum-scribed
operation, to counter Freud's interpretation and thus unsettle he theory of the unconscious is
indeed the substance of the present attempt.
Not to replace Freud's elaborate construct with another, more powerful, mode of evaluation would
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Dobre pomysły nie mają przeszłości, mają tylko przyszłość. Robert Mallet
De minimis - o najmniejszych rzeczach.
Dobroć jest ważniejsza niż mądrość, a uznanie tej prawdy to pierwszy krok do mądrości. Theodore Isaac Rubin
Dobro to tylko to, co szlachetne, zło to tylko to, co haniebne.
Dla człowieka nie tylko świat otaczający jest zagadką; jest on nią sam dla siebie. I z obu tajemnic bardziej dręczącą wydaje się ta druga. Antoni Kępiński (1918-1972)
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