Jacques Derrida and Michel Deguy: Knowing what witnessing as a poet means.

Christopher Elson
Poetic nomination cannot [] be arbitrary, but must wait to receive saving/greeting [salut] in order to save/greet in return. Michel Deguy, Apparition du Nom
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he risk and the chance of the poem. I would like to begin with a quotation which raises the question of the risk and the chance of the poem and which relates it to the problems and status of the name deconstruction: What deconstruction is not? well, everything! What is deconstruction? well, nothing! For all these reasons, I do not think that it is a good word. Above all, it is not beautiful. It has certainly rendered some service in a well-determined situation. In order to know what imposed it within a chain of possible substitutions, in spite of its essential imperfection, it would be necessary to analyze and to deconstruct that well-determined situation. That is difficult and I wont be doing it here. One more word to hasten the conclusion, for this letter is already too long. I do not believe that translation is a secondary and derivative event with regard to a language or a source text. And as I have just said, deconstruction is one essentially replaceable word in a chain of substitutions. That can also be done from one language to another. The chance for (D/d)econstruction would be that another word (same and other) might be found or invented in Japanese to say the same thing (same and other) in order to speak of deconstruction and to draw it off elsewhere, writing it and transcribing it. In a word which would also be more beautiful. When I speak of that writing of the other which would be more beautiful, I mean, obviously, translation as the risk and the chance of the poem. How to translate poem, a poem? (Lettre un ami japonais 392-3; my translation) In the passage preceding this closing orchestration, Derrida examines a whole range of neighbouring terms, terms in a sequence, an historically observable series of quasisynonymous terms in the evolution of the Derridean gesture, alternatives we might simply say, to the heavy, oh-so-heavy, even over-determined DECONSTRUCTION. It is not my goal here to recount the history of the vocabulary of differance and dissemination, far from it. But I want to situate everything I have to say about Derrida and the poets, and in particular his relationship to his friend the poet Michel Deguy, in the ambit and the vicinity of this difficulty of the beautiful name and the salutary contribution of a writing of the other. In respectful imitation or emulation of the infinitely cautious and precautionary ethos of Derridean deconstruction, it is necessary to say a few words about the welldetermined situation from which I am speaking. My remarks on Derridas treatment of poetic testimony flow from a project nearing completion: the preparation of a hybrid volume, In the Name of Friendship: Deguy, Derrida and Deconstruction (forthcoming

Translation mine. Hereafter, AN in the body of the text with page reference to the original French text.

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with Rodopi Editions), which treats the relationship of Derrida and the poet and theorist, Michel Deguy. In this forthcoming book of annotated translations, commentaries and collaboration, the risk and chance of the poem of which Derrida speaks are engaged, and my co-editor and I have been drawn into a kind of generalized translation, a wide-ranging interpretative gesture, itself bound up with the singular character of an individual poets giving and the improbable possibility of attending to the unique call of his writings. Among Derridas many terminological innovations, we find in The Politics of Friendship the notion of teleiopoiesis, a making at a distance. Such a beautiful name affords me the pretext and the means to salute at a distance, in our common making from afar, my collaborator on this volume, and thereby to furnish you with a little bit more of that precious context which, as deconstruction teaches, is both co-extensive with meaning and infinitely extensive. Teleiopoiesis makes the arrivants comeor rather, allows them to comeby withdrawing; it produces an event, sinking onto the darkness of a friendship which is not 2 yet. (Politics of Friendship, 42-43) This withdrawal structure, possessing deep analogies to the retrait of metaphor, marks the friends in their arriving which is always to come. Friendship is perhaps nothing other than the event of unaccomplished, promised and anticipated arrival. Deconstruction knows that we are always being surprised by the friend and therefore always making friends, never stabilized in a comfortable condition of completeness which, as we shall see below, would be the end of true friendship. Teleiopoietically, then, I would like to acknowledge the co-editor of In the Name of Friendship, Garry Sherbert of the University of Reginas English Department. Garry Sherbert is the name of the friend with whom I have been able, over a far longer period than we could have initially imagined, to work on and with two formidable texts, Derridas Comment nommer [How to Name] 3 and Deguys De la contemporanit: Une causerie pour Jacques Derrida [Of Contemporaneity : An Informal Talk for Jacques Derrida], 4 working toward some kind of enhanced understanding, each from his own side, of what Derrida, Deguy and Deconstruction might mean for us, as contemporaries. This has been a demanding task, full of material, logistical, intellectual and psychic interruptions, and we still feel there are no guarantees that we have it right. That is our chance and our risk of translation and interpretation. I will have occasion to cite Sherberts Calling Names: Derrida, Deguy and Spectro-Poetics from our forthcoming book in what follows but our work together is implicit in everything I can bring forward here. This recognition is something like a dedication, here, in the name of friendship. I am also conscious, in further considering the well-determined situation in which I find myself, of being part of a series: the Kings Contemporary Studies Programme lecture series of the 2005-6 academic year, Derrida: Legatee and Legacy. A lecture series is a sequence which obliges a kind of prolonged listening and its attendant responsibilities. It is not possible to ignore the situation of this contribution, centred as it is upon Derridas analysis of Deguys poetics of witnessing, falling as it does after a
2 3 Politics of Friendship. Hereafter, PF in the body of the text. Hereafter, CN in the body of the essay, followed by a page reference to the original French text. Another translation of this text may be found as a postface in Wilson Baldridges translation of Deguys Gisants, titled Recumbents in English,191-221. When Wilson Baldridge and I discovered that we were each working on an English version of the essay, we considered collaborating on a single translation. We agreed instead to proceed independently and believe that the existence of two quite distinct English versions of this text will be a service to readers seeking to plumb its difficulties and to understand better what it is to translate the untranslatable. Hereafter, DC in the body of the essay, followed by a page reference to the original French text. The causerie in the French title may be translated by the English informal talk. Deguy is using this self-deprecating heading as rhetorical understatement in the context of an academic conference devoted to a thinker renowned for his difficulty and rigour.

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consideration of the formers relation to the father of Destruktion, Martin Heidegger, and after a consideration of quintessentially postmodern religiosity, in that enticing and troubling hybridity announced by John Caputos title, the first in our lecture series, The Jewish Augustinianism of Jacques Derrida. The relation to Heidegger and the relation to religion are not absent in what I will be saying. Indeed they are inextricably linked in Derridas reading of Deguys poetic naming and witnessing. Before following Derridas reading of Deguy, a few words about the content and structure of In the Name of Friendship are in order. Containing hitherto unpublished translations of three essays found in collections but never in books published by either of the two authors, In the Name of Friendship presents to an English-speaking audience the unique and powerful links between the work of these two exemplary contemporary French writers, one a philosopher and one a poet. But that separation is itself too absolute and the two men could perhaps equally bear, each in his own way, the complexly inventive multilingual appellation which Derrida once applied to his friendfrench[sic] Dichter-Denker, (CN, 182). The French Poet-Thinker, a name which must be grasped, somehow, in the undecidable hesitation marked out by the untranslatable GermanEnglish compound noun intersecting with the French of the original essay and yet belonging to none of the three languages. Expressions like antidosis, hypallage, chiasma and others abound when Deguy sets out to talk about Derrida in Of Contemporaneity and in For J.D. They are figures of exchange, substitution, re-combination, suggesting multiform crissings-andcrossings between, across and amongst language(s) and things. Deguys reading of Derrida (like Derridas work on Deguy in How to Name) is a naming of the other, the friend, in a way that only the other friend can manage. Read together, these figurations of otherness come to salute and to (re)found one another mutually. They save one another, we might even say, emphasizing the poetical salvation elaborated by Derridas How to Name. Like the flying stars and shooting fish which Deguy cites as examples of the chiasmatic figure of hypallage, orienting us as revelations of the radical suggestiveness of poetic exchange in For J.D., his contribution to the Cahier de lHerne on Jacques Derrida 5 or in Posie et valeur/Poetry and value, what we might call Derridas poetic deconstruction and Deguys deconstructive poetics come to inform one another. In the Deguy-Derrida relation, as we present it in our book, there is made visible, audible, comprehensible, a figure, a kind of chiasma of friendship, the friendship of poetry and philosophy themselves. We should perhaps think of Dichter-Denker as a hypallage unfolding its possibilities in this way. In preparing In the Name of Friendship, we keenly felt the obligation, so central to deconstructive ethics, in both its Derridean elaboration and in Deguys neologizing notion of a po-ethics, to maintain and underscore the real and deep differences between the two works even as we have drawn them together for consideration. We have tried to learn from and respect the import of Deguys work on comparison which stresses, in a theory elaborated over the course of many years, that the comme of comparison, the English like/as, must always maintain the right distance, and respect the identity and the difference of what is bound in comparison or metaphorization: the comparants. The strength of (the) friendship, too, understood comparatively, so to speak, lies in its binding-loosing character, the way that it so discreetly, even secretly, proceeds and unfolds, revealing itself only while, in at least an equal measure, hiding itself in its singularity. Derridas 1995 essay, Comment nommer, like a number of his other crucial texts, is preoccupied with naming and specifically with naming the friend Michel, the poet, Deguy the french [sic] Dichter-Denker: someone who I still do not know how to
5 Hereafter, PJD in the body of the text with a page reference to the original French text, Pour J.D.

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name, properly name (CN, 183) after more than forty years of friendship. Derrida has also observed that [t]he question of the proper name is obviously at the heart of the friendship problematic (PF, 251). His meditation upon Deguy falls within the general consideration of that problematic. Despite his avowed uncertainty about a definitive, proper, literal act of naming, with all of the reductive, essentializing, mortifying risks attendant upon such nomination, we should note that Derridas title is not put as a question. He will find the necessary resources to name Deguy respectfully, adequately, ethically, through a reading of Deguys own poetics of naming. Part of naming the friend is to attend to the friends singularity, a uniqueness that brings with it something precious, something unexpected and potentially surprising, a discovery of uniqueness which can provide something valuable for the consideration of matters of common concern like metaphor or culture and indeed the understanding of nomination or friendship themselves. Friendship should always be poetic (PF, 166) and in reading Deguy, Derrida poeticizes their friendship through attentiveness to the poets own writing. It is not too much to say that through Comment nommer, Deguy teaches Derrida how to name Deguy (CN 195). Derrida makes his intention and his choice of focus explicit in this way: Saluting Dante in [Apparition of the Name], Deguy surely also speaks of himself. But through a kind of self-portrait, like the autobiographical presentation or the nomination of Michel Deguy by Michel Deguy, which makes more than one, the poet is speaking no less of Dante. Of Dante himself, put another way, of the other, put another way, already, of Dante and his other. As we shall hear. Of Dante, of Beatrice and of their saving/greeting. In reading with you this poem through which Michel Deguy names saving/greeting, renaming the acts or the verbs of salvation, saluting [saluer] and saving [sauver] themselves, I am not trying any the less, myself, to salute him, himself. I do not call Michel Deguy any the less by his proper name, I am no less appealing his name to his name, in his name. (CN, 183-184) This sentence and much of the essay plays on the two possible meanings of salut as saving and greeting. In what follows, I have sometimes opted for one or the other side of the untranslatable hesitation, if the context allows. At other times the double meaning is operative which I tend to preserve by writing saving/greeting. We might reduce the complexity of Derridas gesture here to a set of overlapping namings: Deguy, speaking of Beatrice and Dante, and Dantes attention to her name, names himself. Derrida, speaking of this reading, detailing its poetic originality, names Deguy, in the name of friendship. Near the beginning of How to Name (Comment Nommer), we find a crucial articulation of the name, the capacity for bearing witness and the responsibility of the poet: What is a proper name anyway? A name is never proper, it promises (to) itself, it promises to become proper, it remains promised, it remains called when, ceasing to be or not being yet a definition, a description, a classification, the appellation greets, salutes, when a called calling [une appellation appele], at the instant that it is addressed to someone who, finding himself called, happens to find himself there, on that day, and is supposed to be responsible, capable of responding here to his name, for his name, and in his name. Capable of witnessing. As for knowing what witnessing as a poet means, it is necessary to read and listen to Deguy, we will do that in a moment. (CN, 183) This characteristically dense and linguistically tireless passage poses a number of questions to be kept in mind as we move along. How can a name ever fail to congeal as

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definitional, descriptive or classificatory? How might it cease to correspond to one or all of those functions? How can a name both call and remain in some kind of suspense, maintaining itself at some uncertain distance from the thing or person named, and to what end? What does it mean for it to remain promised? A called calling is one which seeks to maintain itself as an appeal with no guarantee of response, implying no possessive grasp on the one being called, allowing the friend both to appear and to withdraw from the proffered call and, if the naming is a true naming, to do both at once. There is no presumption that the call obliges the other to anything whatsoever. The finding oneself called is vital here. A naming which genuinely greets, which salutes and saves, in the double sense of the French salut (about which more in a moment), will reach the one called and perhaps, though there is no formula or predictability, no reproducible schema in such a conception of nomination, find him or her capable of responding in his or her name, capable of testimony, responsibility, reciprocity. This preliminary consideration of vocabulary and guiding principles leads us now to consider the actual work of analysis performed by Derrida in How to Name. Derridas essay reads Apparition du nom (Apparition of the Name), Michel Deguys 1966 poetic reflection upon the opening of Dantes Vita Nuova and relates it closely and intensely to a strictly limited number of major poems and fragments of poetics from Deguys work of the 1980s and 1990s (while expressing, in characteristic Derridean fashion, a desire to do more and to do it more extensively, more rigorously, with a wider sample of Deguys corpus). I will concentrate on separating out three motifs from this complexly interwoven set of preoccupations: the singular bivocity of the French word Salut, the status and generalizability of the comely name, and the poets capacity and responsibility to bear witness. Salut In Apparition of the Name, Deguy writes, Beatrice is salut [saving/greeting], in the secret, the singular bivocity of this word. She is the one who salutes in the Vita Nova, she who saves in the Comedy(AN, 246). The 1966 text analyzes what we might simply call Dantes epiphany, that moment when the real person, Beatrice, and her name come together: The Vita Nova is that book which is written to found the double meaning of salut. Beatrice is that name which has received a visage in order that its truth be heard, that is to say for a poet, for it is he who has the passion of the etymon, he for whom the sound, the sense, the name, the appearance are all one, that is to say: that which is there, present in its presence. The model of this extraordinary event, central, properly poetic, is the only event in the life of the poet: the event of the hearing of the sense of a name thanks to the paradigmatic apparition that this name was made for naming without anyone knowing it, and that it was waiting. (Nine times already, since my birth, the sky of light had come around again to the same point in its revolution, when to my eyes appeared for the first time the glorious lady of my thought, she who was called Beatrice by many people who do not know what it is to give a name) 6 (AN, 246) The only event in the life of the poet: Deguy speaks of Dante and of all poets including himself here, we may be sure. The event expressed is that of a name which presents a unity of appearance and meaning through its etymon, the true literal sense of
6 I am translating from Deguys French. The Italian reads : Nove fiate gi appresso lo mio nascimento era tornato lo cielo de la luce quasi a uno medesimo punto, quanto a la sua propria girazione, quando a li miei occhi apparve prima la gloriosa donna de la mia mente, la quale fu chiamata da molti Beatrice li quali non sapeanto che si chiamare (47).

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a word according to its origin; its true or original form; the root or primary word from which a derivative is formed (OED). Of course, as Deguys entire theoretical trajectory would suggest, the etymon really has nothing to do with literality or with fixed, determinable origins and everything to do with ongoing metamorphoses of language and being, everything to do with understanding the meaning of a name through the poetic fashioning of its phenomenal presence, everything to do with envisaging truth rather than excavating or merely demonstrating it. The poet is the human being who has the passion for the etymon, (AN, 246) a transformative, welcoming attentiveness to language and being. What is true of Beatrice and the rightness of her name, the paradigmatic apparition of her name, is also true of the salut, understood as both greeting and salvation. Following Deguy, Derrida speaks of the double foundation of salut in and by the Vita Nuova. Salut, such saving/greeting, will have founded the Vita Nova which will have founded saving/greeting in its turn, and will have founded it by fusing salut to itself, in the nomination of the name, the double sense of the word salut, the greeting which one addresses to the other and the salvation which saves: the salut, on the one hand as a call launched or relaunched in a salvo, in the salve of the apostrophe, the vow or the blessing, even in the toast (recall Mallarms toasts to his poet friends), and on the other hand, the salut of salvation. The two saluts greet each other from nearby or from afar, one like the other, one operating and co-operating in the other which remains nevertheless apart, a sort of homonym or metonymical doublet. (CN, 184-5) In the salut, we might say, Derrida sees the foundation of Deguys insight into the particular appearing which belongs to the name. It is because the name may both save and greet that it can be a paradigmatic apparition. Derrida devotes nearly half of his reading of Deguy to a close examination of just a few paragraphs from Actes. With his characteristic investment in the passions of aporia, fruitful paradox, he follows the singular bivocity of the French salut, ratcheting up its already considerable complexity by setting it against another sort of double horizon, not semantic but philosophical and cultural, one compellingly and compactly conceived and articulated by Deguy. On the one hand, in Deguys poetics the conception of the name and acts of naming seem to participate in Christian concepts and traditions of onomastics and soteriology and, on the other hand, they steer very close to Heideggers concept of the holy, so profoundly anti-Christian in its accents and emphases. Deguy is after all a translator of Heideggers commentary on Hlderlin and a poetic commentator himself of that summit of the Christian Middle Ages, Dante Alighieri. But according to Derrida, he is not bound by any exclusive or essential duality. Indeed, in his activity as translator and poetician, he somehow holds the two sidesDante and Heidegger, the heritage of Latinity and the Greco-German line together, deconstructively, giving expression to an exhilarating new poetics. For Derrida, this double foundation of Deguys own would account for the extraordinary justness of texts such as Apparition of the Name and the fascination they exercise. Going far too quickly over ground patiently surveyed by Derrida, here are just a few points of explanation of Deguys differentiating and synthesizing achievement. Derrida notes, that, unlike Heidegger in his commentaries upon Hlderlins poems, there is no hint in Deguys work of any celebration of the popular and national language in poetical salvation, in saving/greeting through its double inscription in the idiom, here the French or Latin idiom (CN, 189). Deguy has shown himself to be able to think and work the Heideggerian Heimkunft, homecoming, with no reference to the national or popular on the horizon. If poetry saves in part by allowing us a return to a renewed earth and to

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promised lands, that return for Deguy has nothing to do with a particular, privileged natural language or with the historical destiny of a given people, nation or country. For Derrida, this is a singular achievement and praiseworthy. But Deguys distance from Heidegger is marked out by Derrida in such a way that the Latin, Christian side is also problematized. The subtlety of what Deguy has drawn from that side of his heritage is neither simplified nor lost. [Not] only do we find in Deguy no [] reaffirmation of the people in what links the poem to thought, and the future to the return home (Zukunft and Heimkunft, Heimkunft as Zukunft), but the inscription of this saving/greeting in salvation, in the memory or the promise of a poetic event of Latinity, is even less Heideggerian in its operation of writing and in its historical determination, because to the sin of Latinity is added that of the interest shown, at least in this passage, for that which links poetic nomination, and therefore salvation in this place, namely the Vita Nova, to a Christian onomastics. Not that Deguys atheological poetics would be secretly Christian, that is understood, not secretly Christian even at that moment, but this poetics has for us the interest of situating the place where sacrality, the sacro-sanctity, the untouchability, and even Christian soteriology, like others, draw from what is first a poetic source. They proceed from a poetic sacro-sanctification of any naming. (CN, 189) It is because of this poetic source that Deguy can celebrate the genuinely poetic moment in the Vita Nuova where the name appears as a revelation. It is because of this poetic source that he can translate Heidegger and align his whole poetics with the Heideggerian responsibility with respect to being 7 all the while maintaining critical perspective on certain fundamental inadequacies of the Heideggerian theory of metaphor, inadequacies which compromise, in his carefully explicated view, poetrys ontological capacities. 8 Derrida pushes the implications of Deguys insight into the name as a potential saving-greeting, a poetic, atheological sacro-sanctification, even further with this important observation: Apparition of the Name demonstrates, through the grace of a poem, what might be, in the single poetic word, the alliance, in the name, of reference and saving/greeting (CN, 184). What Derrida has seen in Deguys Apparition of the Name is the way in which a poetic word can both refer to, and therefore seize and possess for memory and oral or written transmission, something lying beyond language and yet recognize, greet, conserve salute and save some of that singularity. Nomination, reference, what Deguy has called the whole affair of ference 9 which implies transport, differentiation, describable relation and publicly verifiable systematicity can also preserve, greet, maintain and welcome difference, irreducible singularity, unforeseeable futurity the secret in its many forms. Derrida underlines the brilliance and import of Deguys commentary on the Vita Nuova because of its affirmation of the possibility of such a complex joining, a joining of Salvation and of
7 8 See Deguys text, Rapport Heidegger, a text cited by Derrida in CN. The expression la responsabilit lgard de ltre (responsibility with respect to being) occurs in the first paragraph of this text. These few sentences condense a great deal of material treated by Derrida in How to Name and by Deguy throughout his corpus. Please refer to the Editors Introduction to the forthcoming In the Name of Friendship as well as to Sherbert and Elsons accompanying essays for a more sustained discussion of Deguys atheology, his nuanced Heideggerianism, and his in-effacement of traditional Judaeo-Christian figures (theologemes, relics) within a resolutely poetic perspective. The suffix -ference means to carry or to bring, deriving from the latin fero: I carry. For what Deguy calls the affair of ference, see Lcrivain et intellectual. The Postface to his Pomes II in the Gallimard collection posie playfully enumerates the suggestive forms of ference as does the closing poem of Gisants, translated by Wilson Baldridge in Recumbents as Memorandum: Where are we? /The circumstance makes the relation/The poem is quotable/Deference preference difference/Afference.

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Gelassenheit to express it in conjoined Heideggerian and Christian terms. It is by such an affirmation of the indissolvable unity of saving and greeting within the structure and operation of reference in any name that Deguys text confirms and demonstrates poetic naming as precisely a kind of sacro-sanctification. Deguys text shows Derrida how all poetry and every poem is a form and an instance of naming. The poem is a nomination because, like any proper name (and we sense here why Derrida had to begin with the name of the friend, with the uncertainty about naming Michel Deguy properly), it makes clear reference (operationally and definitionally) to something unique while opening language up to the otherness of that unknown other. The name can salute and save the other if it does not subjugate the other through the mastery of its presumed knowledge, if it does not seek to fix the other once and for all in nominations necessary appeal to pre-existent concepts and differential systems. The ethical imperative of an absolute respect for the thing or person being named obliges a commensurate uniqueness in the act of naming. Derrida is lavish in his praise of Deguys whole poetic from this perspective: Through that which is a new act, an operation without precedent, Deguy redefines the poetic art. In a performative and irruptive gesture, he gives to it a new definition, a new name (he rebaptizes it) and with that, in another space, from the invention of another cartography, he assigns it a new task. He assigns this new task to it, that is, he signs a new concept of the poetic art, a new correspondence to its old name and a new responsibility. And in signing, he signs an order, a task and a charter, a duty. But this new task, which says the saying, which appeals to the appellation and salutes nomination, it is and must remain double or ambiguous. The ambivalence, like the double meaning of salut, greetings/salvation, does not destroy, it neither destabilises nor ruins in any way. On the contrary, it institutes the tension of thought in poetry, of the thinking as poet (CN, 193). Following one path of that thinking-as-poet, and remaining focused on our thematic of naming, we may consider another poetic fragment which points to the singularity of each new poetic task. The double or ambiguous character of poetic naming as conceived by Deguy and glossed by Derrida is well illustrated by a very simple example. The Comely Name In Le nom et la chose (The Name and the Thing), taken from the second subsection of Actes, entitled Le Royaume est semblable (The Kingdom is like), Deguy paints a kind of primal scene of naming. We see and hear a father engaged in simple dialogue with a child, identifying, naming and renaming a flower, a process in which at least three languages interact (four, now, in my English translation). The name and the thing. Saying to his son the name of a flower (If it does not forget its first verse the poem declines). Liseron but why, fragte er,Isnt this flower called white? Climb-aceous Alba convolvulus [grimpace] The comely name would mime genesis [le nom qui convient] (A, 31) Note how the parenthetical second line performatively engages the first. It might be paraphrased as stating that if the saying of the name is not forgotten that is, if the poem recalls and thinks its intimate association with nomination that the poem may fully decline that name. (Here we must understand the metaphorical force of decline, in both French and English, as a product of its function as a term of grammar: To inflect (a noun, adjective, or pronoun) through its different cases; to go through or recite in order the cases (OED)). This declining of the name is exactly what the remaining four lines enact. Why isnt the flower just called white? we imagine the childs voice asking (and

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the poet hears there a question of a genuinely philosophical nature, signalled by fragte er in the other language, German, with its probable suggestion of Heideggers thought on just such matters). The poem/poet replies, without replying, that it is called white, through the citation of the scientific name which begins with the latin for white, Alba. The scientific name adds the adult definitional sophistication of convolvulus, meaning trumpet-shaped, but at the same time the poem pulls back from the comfort offered by the conceptual mastery of a well-ordered latin name, through the ludic invention (the presence of the child cannot be forgotten) of a surprising and delightful adjective, grimpace. What is characteristic of the liseron flower, bunchweed? It climbs, a grimpe, and with the flourish of neologizing invention so characteristic of Deguy, the French infinitive verb grimper is overlaid with the latin suffix, -acae, normally reserved for the designation of a subspecies, producing something which belongs in a radically original way to the poem, to the event of the childs question and to the possibility of any calling of the flower. This is a called calling, to use Derridas language from How to Name. This is a name held in its trembling, unique utterance, ceasing to be or not being yet a definition, a description, a classification. The last line of this brief art potique is full of implications. Miming genesis implies no straightforward, essential, originary relationship between word and thing, there is no would-be cratylism here or rather there is a pushing into the beyond of historicallydetermined cratylism. In its appealing coming-along-with [con-venir], the poetic name imitates first creation and first nomination but for something ever coming to presence. Derrida is fascinated by Deguys choice of the expression, le nom qui convient, which I have translated as "the comely name to preserve the suggestion of coming in the French con-venir but le nom qui convient also carries the more prosaic sense of fitting or suitable. One cannot admire too much the art and the chance, the oh-so-just and oh-sofelicitous appropriateness, like brilliant affinity, of this syntagm, the comely name which, beneath its discreet appearance, names at one and the same time the name, the like or as or the how of the name [le comme ou le comment], the con of what is convenient, coming-with and allying itself to the named thing in the coming or the having-come of the event, according to the suitability and the convention of the name. (CN, 195). Marking an ephemeral moment in its passage (much of Apparition of the Name is about passage and passing), the comely name opens up the possibility of a witnessing to circumstance. The comely name, as fragile, ephemeral and unknowable in its uniqueness as the thing or person being named, is a motivated greeting, founded in existential or ontological exchange. Poem is the nomination which is capable of saluting such a manifestation, receiving and giving salvation, since saluting/saving is exchange, greeting. Poetic nomination cannot therefore be arbitrary, but must wait to receive the saving-greeting in order to save/greet in return. (AN, 247) As Garry Sherbert writes in Calling Names: The poem itself is a salut that saves and greets the thing it names, such as the singularity of a flower. The poem cannot be arbitrary, or merely random. Because it must await the call of the other and respond in order to keep a trace of the other in language, the response to the other initiates the poets responsibility to name. The Poets Duty In How to Name, Derrida addresses the question of poetic responsibility through two interlocking triptychs which structure the whole essay (or, perhaps we should say,

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which structure the essay, supporting and supported by his fascination with an atheological salut, with an ontology that, through the apparition of the name becomes a hauntology, and by other deeply-rooted, infrastructural fascinations of Derridas corpus signature, debt, adieu, etc.).The two triptychs are nomination-salut-responsibility and witness-act-signature. This is not the place to thoroughly unpack the relatedness of the notions and the correspondence between the two triptychs, some of this careful reading has already been done or at least suggested in what precedes, more still is worked through in the essays of In the Name of Friendship. It is my intention to move outside of the logic of the triptychs, displacing the central question of bearing witness toward Deguys own conception of responsibility as he has explicitly conceived it in relation to the challenges laid down by the Derridean oeuvre. In the 1995 essay devoted to Deguy, Derrida gives an account of poetic witnessing that emphasizes its autonomy, from the perspectives of both external reference and internal self-coherence. The testimony of the poem refers only to its own act of testifying. Witnessing here, poetic witnessing, the news, does not report anything different, nothing but itself, in its act. It says nothing other but nothing less than its act which enacts itself and which is archived, operates, gets operated and recorded. Operating in an inaugural fashion [] It is related to nothing but itself, it is not narration, reportage or a process of knowledge, information or culture. [] It makes a martyr of itself and thereby says the immanent truth of the testamentary attestation. (CN, 196) The truth of literary creation, fiction in the broadest sense, lies within itself. It produces its own reality and Derrida sees it as exemplary of testimony in general for that reason. The making a martyr of itself operative in singular acts of poetic testimony may be taken to mean that in its own enacting a poem, a poetic act, destroys its own singularity. By opting for repeatability, for workedness and iterability, it sacrifices its own secret. Think of the event of naming the flower in the above-cited text. By entering into a work of art, a book, a body of writing, by its association with the signature of a writer, the event of naming the flower with and for the child can find itself the object of external intrusions, recastings and retellings. No matter how respectfully we might proceed, there is necessarily a violence done to the moment, to the circumstance, to the names and their calling, in the kind of analysis we have performed; and in its repetition of the event, the poem must necessarily miss something, leave something behind, it does its own kind of violence. But, to put it in the terms so carefully meditated by Deguy and Derrida, poetic testimony, like any testimony, must run that risk if it is to both greet and save. A poetic of the utterly unscathed would not be a poetic at all. [I]rreplaceability must be exemplary, that is, replaceable, as Derrida has put it. 10 Derridas Demeure Fiction and Testimony builds up some related issues regarding the link between fiction and testimony in general through its reading of a purportedly autobiographical fragment by Maurice Blanchot. The martyrdom evoked by Derrida in relation to Deguy might be understood better in terms of a double duty which emerges in Demeure and which Deguy emphasizes in a powerful reading of Derridas The Other Heading elaborated in Of Contemporaneity, one which deserves to be better known by scholars of deconstruction. I will conclude with a few thoughts about this double duty understood as poetic responsibility. Demeure puts the matter very clearly: The singular must be universalizable; this is the testimonial condition (D, 41).

10

Demeure 41. Hereafter, D in the body of the text.

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The testimonial condition the condition of testimony and the condition for testimony corresponds to what Derrida also calls the capital paradox of universality in The Other Heading (71). 11 Whether in the context of a reflection on cultural identitys impasses or on the aporia of bearing witness, Derrida brings out similar formulae, sometimes explicitly expressed as axioms. In Of Contemporaneity, Deguy is unequivocal about drawing the demands of The Other Headings axioms together with his own sense of poetic duty, a responsibility which must affirm the invention of the impossible through the full recognition of and assumption of responsibility for two laws, two apparently contradictory injunctions. This is, condensed in just a few words, why Deguys poetics are so profoundly deconstructive. Both poetic experience (that variable equation of disposition, insight and productive activity) and poetic operations (technique, precision, preciousness) are drawn and guided by the laws of antinomy. Let us rapidly consider the axioms generated by Derridas reflections in The Other Heading. Although the whole of Derridas essay, with its complex turns and digressive, cumulative readings, is steeped in axiom-like propositions and to the reader feels, in general, less constative than prescriptive, Derrida explicitly applies the term axiom to only three statements in his essay. Axiom 1: We are younger than ever, we Europeans, since a certain Europe does not yet exist (OH, 7). Axiom 2: what is proper to a culture is to not be identical to itself (OH, 9). Axiom 3: We have, we must have, only the thankless aridity of an abstract axiom, namely, that the experience and experiment of identity or of cultural identification, can only be the endurance of these antinomies [tr. notethose referred to as the capital paradox of universality](OH, 71). These axioms about culture articulate the notion of difference at the heart of self and the exhilarating and puzzling horizon of an unprogrammable future which obeys a similar logic of withdrawal. They are organized by the final expression, the endurance of these antinomies, and come into focus in relation to that guiding law which is founded upon the self-contradiction of law. Derridas law of antinomies plays on two meanings of antinomy. A contradiction in a law or between two equally binding laws and a contradiction between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable or necessary; a paradox; intellectual contrariness (OED). In the sense that he is using it, it really is a law of the contradiction of law. This is the doubling up of the paradox which Deguy signals from the side of thinking poetics. Deguys reading of The Other Heading hinges on this. Putting the duty of thought and the thought of duty into a loop, a circle, is of interest to an art of poetry which can not only accept but [] claim this putting to the test of the antinomy in the forms, for example, of the double constraint, the undecidable, the performative contradiction, etc. (DC 34) The laws which Deguy is making his own, and seeking to have recognized as poetrys own, are dependent upon the capital paradox of universality which, in terms of either collective or personal identity, always implies becoming responsible through the confrontation of singularity and universality: the self-affirmation of an identity always claims to be responding to the call or assignation of the universal (OH 73). There is a necessity to respond to the call of the universal and the call of the particular which is a double duty and which is the condition of testimony: The value of universality here capitalizes all the antinomies, for it must be linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity, of an idiom or a culture, whether this singularity be individual, social, national, state, federal, confederal or not (OH 72). Whether individual or social, the subject must work out ways of dealing with
11 Hereafter, OH in the body of the text.

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such a double requirement. I have, the unique I has, the responsibility of testifying for universality. Each time, the exemplarity of the example is unique. That is why it can be put into a series and formalized into a law (OH, 73). The last movements of The Other Heading, like the last movements of Deguys reading-with-it in Of Contemporaneity, tell of ways of comprehending the law of double duty opening, welcoming, criticizing, assuming, respecting, tolerating, responsibilizing to use the verbs employed by Derrida in his final axiomatizing rush to the finish. What Michel Deguy makes of this acceptance and assumption of the implications of antinomy for a specifically poetic duty can be seen in many places in his work. One of his most recent books finds him grappling explicitly with questions of the double bind and the double duties of antinomic propositions or commandments. One rich passage in particular casts an interesting retrospective light on the conversion of the endurance of antinomy into a programme for the artist. The short pieces of Au Jug, recorded for the France-Culture radio network as monthly philosophical chronicles from 2002-2004, are the work of a poet-moralist of thoughtfulness seeking to ally poetic reason and philosophical judgement. The title itself exemplifies the logic of responsibility in a Derridean filiation and constitutes an undecidable. Au Jug is an idiomatic expression signifying the act of shooting from the hip or firing blind. In a chronicle that focused on Thoughtfulness, Deguy aligned the ethical claims of the principles of equality and those of thoughtfulness or consideration. The two make the law: a double injunction, of two contraries; but here distinctly pronounced in two explicit sentences, unlike the paralyzing ambiguity of the famous double bind, when two opposite imperatives dissimulated within the litteral identity of a single commandment force the subject to oscillate, in order to obey, from one pole to the other. Perhaps in any problematic there is to be sought a substitution of the paradox of an explicit contrariety for a confounding double bind. (Au Jug 140) This quotation would open the way to a discussion of many aspects of Deguys poetics which are only alluded to in Derridas 1995 reading. In the writings since Derridas disappearance, such moments also mark out a gesture of salutation, an adieu to the friend. In this, too, Deguy has shown that he knows what it is to bear witness as only a poet can. In his own distinctive interpretation and application of the Derridean sense of responsibility, a reading both appropriative and inventive, Deguy aligns his never-ending search for a poethics with Derridas paradoxes of universal and absolute responsibility. Through the texts examined above, the poet and the philosopher reinvent their neighbouring gestures and thereby, we might say, elevate the singularity of their unique friendship event to the level of the friendship of poetry and philosophy themselves.

Dalhousie University
WORKS CITED Dante. Vita Nuova. Trans. Dino S. Cervigni and Edward Vastor. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1995. Deguy, Michel. Apparition du nom. Actes. Paris: Gallimard, 1966. 245-7. -----. Au Jug. Paris: Galile, 2004 -----.De la contemporanit: Une causerie pour Jacques Derrida. Traverser les frontires. Colloque de Cerisy 1991. Paris: Galile, 1992. 215-226. -----. Michel Deguy, Lcrivain et lintellectuel. Cahiers internationaux du symbolisme 74-75-76 (1993) : 29-63. -----. Gisants. Paris: Gallimard, 1985. Translated by Wilson Baldridge as Recumbents. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2005.

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-----. Posie et valeur/Poetry and value. Trans. C. Elson. Halifax: Editions VVV Editions, 2005. -----. Pour J.D. Cahier de lHerne 83, Jacques Derrida. Ed. Marie-Louise Maillet and Ginette Michaud. 78-83. Trans. C. Elson in In the Name of Friendship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming. -----. Rapport Heidegger. La Posie nest pas seule. Paris : Seuil, 1987. 31-37. Derrida, Jacques. Comment Nommer. Ed. Yves Charnet. Le pote que je cherche tre, Cahier Michel Deguy. Paris: Editions Belin/Editions La Table Ronde, 1996. 182-206. -----. Demeure Fiction and Testimony (with Maurice Blanchot, The Instant of My Death). Trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2000. -----. Lettre un ami japonais. Psych Inventions de lAutre. Paris : Galile, 1987. -----. The Other Heading. Trans. Michael Naas and Pascale-Anne Brault. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. -----. Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997. Sherbert, Garry Derrida, Deguy and Spectropoetics. In the Name of Friendship. Amsterdam: Rodopi, forthcoming.