Countersignature1

So I do not begin. But even before beginning, I shall read some lines from a great book that was not yet published when I was writing Glas, a book I love and admire, in spite of some questions that leave a kind of wound in me, in a disconcerted, divided me, proving Genet both wrong and right, today more than ever. The book is Prisoner of Love. Countersigning without countersigning what is said there for example about an occasionally undecidable frontier between a Jewish question and an Israeli question. We shall doubtless be speaking again later about the Jewish question, precisely between Hegel and Genet. Facing each other in Glas, Hegel and Genet perhaps say something analogous about the Jewish people and its history. Prisoner of Love can be read, especially in its nal pages, as the last signature of Jean Genet that countersigns all the others. I shall begin and end there. So, before beginning to begin, I would like to use as an epigraph some lines from Prisoner of Love concerning what I would call the betrayal of truth. Leaving this expression betrayal of truth all its chances and risks of ambiguity. Its polysemy [plurivocit] is obviously e terrifying, oscillating endlessly between at least three distinct possibilities. I say terrifying deliberately. I say it deliberately, for terror, terrorism (and not only terror in letters as Paulhan would say) are on the programme of a semantic instability oscillating between an objective genitive and a subjective genitive. Three possibilities therefore: rst, the betrayal of truth means that if truth is betrayed, this can only be by a lie, falsication, nonveracity, indelity, perjury, simulacrum and a countersignature that, instead of authenticating a rst signature, sets about imitating it, that is counterfeiting it. It would already be a betrayal. A betrayal of truth and of an authentic countersignature. Second possibility: truth, without itself being betrayed, is what betrays, lies, deceives, perjures, is unfaithful. Truth is then a lie. A well-known Nietzschean theme. But to whom, to what, how can truth or veracity lie? How can a truth not only be betrayed, but betray? Third possibility: truth is betrayed, it can only be betrayed in the sense that one says in French that truth is revealed, that is unmasked, denounced or demonstrated by someone or something, in a moment of unveiling that is also a moment of denunciation. For example, in writing, a ction or a simulacrum that does not

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pretend to be true and because it does not pretend to truth and authenticity betrays the truth, suddenly lets it appear, manifests or signies it as if despite itself. In this sense too, truth can be betrayed, but this time in a logic of the symptom or of ction and through an effect of countersigning. The countersignature can thus betray itself in betraying what it countersigns. Supposing that a countersignature betrays the truth of an earlier signature, in what sense does it do this? If the betrayal of truth in its three meanings counterfeits and contravenes by means of a counterfeiting that can, in certain singular cases, make the truth (Veritatem facere, as Augustine says), it can be said that the countersignature betrays the signature by counterfeiting it or, on the contrary, respects it by not imitating it, by not counterfeiting it, for example by signing very differently. The question becomes: what does it mean to countersign and counterfeit? And especially, what does it mean to betray? In French, a symptom is said to betray a truth. This expression does not operate in every language. I am posing these questions here very quickly, but they shall remain unresolved, watching over the development of this introduction. I could of course have begun by a long lecture on Genet as a poet and partisan of betrayal, and evoked his ethics as an ethics of betrayal. As you know, there are a thousand elements that support this view. In Glas, I had moreover tried to think the possibility, thus the necessity, of this betrayal at the very heart of the signature and to posit the authentication of the signature in the countersignature as the rst betrayal of the signature, beyond all disciplines, literary criticisms, exegesis, etc. Before the quotation from Prisoner of Love that I announced, allow me therefore to read a passage from Glas on the question of the betrayal lodged at the heart of the signature [au sein du seing]. Not by chance, this passage is opposite a reading by Hegel of Judaism and circumcision. Here rst is a fragment in the Hegel column:
What comes and deposits itself in the Abrahamic cut? Two remarks on this subject: (1) Errance, the war with nature and nations, the ruse, the control, the violence do not dissolve the Jewish family. On the contrary, the Jewish family constitutes itself in isolation, the jealous closure of its identity, the erceness of its endogamy. Abraham will have cut his bonds with his family and father only in order to become the stronger father of a more determinate family. What remains of/from the cut becomes stronger. In order to remark the isolation, to reinforce the identication, to call itself a family (a family less natural than the preceding but still too natural by the very fact that it opposes nature): circumcision.

Countersignature 9 Circumcision is a determining cut. It permits cutting but, at the same time and in the same stroke [du mme coup], remaining attached to the cut. The Jew e arranges himself so that the cut part [le coup] remains attached to the cut. Jewish e errance limited by adherence and the countercut. The Jew is cutting only in order to treat thus, to contract the cut with itself. [One could play endlessly at transposing these motifs into certain passages of Prisoner of Love.] He [Abraham] steadily persisted in cutting himself off from others, and he made this conspicuous by a physical property imposed on himself and his posterity. (. . .) (2) Opposing himself to hostile, innitely aggressive nature and humankind, Abraham behaves as a master. Through his innite opposition, he reaches that thought of the innite the Greek lacks. In this sense the spirit of Judaism elaborates a negativity or an abstraction indispensable to the production of Christianity. (. . .) He could not even love his son [that is what Hegel says]. Just as he imposes on himself the sign (or simulacrum) of castration, he is constrained to cut himself off from his son, or at least to engage the operation that remained, it too, a simulacrum of sacrice.2

In the Genet column opposite this passage on Hegel, here is the passage of the notice given to all experts at reading:
Departed [second movement of the crowd on the theoretical agora] are those who thought the ower signied, symbolized, metaphorized, metonymized, that one was devising repertories of signiers and anthic gures, classifying owers of rhetoric, combining them, ordering them, binding them up in a sheaf or a bouquet around the phallic arch (arcus, arca, , which trap you fall into K K doesnt matter). Departed then are, save certain exceptions, duly so considered, the archeologists, philosophers, hermeneuts, semioticians, semanticians, psychoanalysts, rhetoricians, poeticians, even perhaps all those readers who still believe, in literature or anything else. Those still in a hurry to recognize are patient for a moment: provided that it be anagrams, anamorphoses, somewhat more complicated, deferred and diverted semantic insinuations capitalized in the depths of a crypt, cleverly dissimulated in the play of letters and forms. Genet would then rejoin this powerful, occulted tradition that was long preparing its coup, its haywire start from sleep, while hiding its work from itself, anagrammatizing proper names, anamorphosing signatures and all that follows. Genet, by one of those movements in (n)ana, would have, knowing it or not I have my own views about this, but that doesnt matter silently, laboriously, minutely, obsessionally, compulsively, and with the moves of a thief in the night, set his signatures in (the) place of all the missing objects. In the morning, expecting to recognize familiar things, you nd his name all over the place, in big letters, small letters, as a whole or in morsels deformed or recomposed. He is no longer there, but you live in his mausoleum

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or his latrines. [The book opened on an allusion to latrines.] You thought you were deciphering, tracking down, pursuing, you are included. He has affected everything with his signature. He has affected his signature. He has affected it with everything. He himself is affected by it (he will even be decked out, later on, with a circumex). He has tried, he himself, properly to write what happens between the affect and the seing. How does one give the seing to an affect? How does one do it without a simulacrum to attract the attention of all? By postiches, fetishes, pastiches? (. . .) Visibly dreaming about becoming, so as to resound, his own proper (glas), to attend his own interment after giving birth to himself or performing his own decollation, his own ungluing, he would have been watchful to block up all that he writes in the forms of a tomb. Of a tomb that comes down to his name, whose stony mass no longer even overows the letters, yellow as gold or betrayal, like the gent. Letters without a pedestal, a contract with writing as a e funeral rite. [And here is the betrayal:] More precisely, the contract does not have the burial (place) as its object. Burial is not an event to come, foreseen by a contractual act. Burial is the signature of the contract. So much so that in determined places those that seem to interest us here this so-called literature of betrayal would itself betray itself; concealing, stealing the signature would have its stoolie in the text. (40-3)

And here now, twelve years later, is Prisoner of Love that I follow in its letter. What really should be done, to hear properly the ten lines I am about to read, and what I cannot do here, is to reconstitute the sequence without sequence, the organized breaks in construction, the discontinuities, the series of anacoluthons, the play of narrative ellipsis that both connects and isolates pensive maxims, aphorisms resembling asides like apostrophes apostrophizing another addressee in the audience, in a word the art of writing. These sequences, these aphorisms are separated by gaps that seem to interrupt all relation, all signicant complicity, all internal and logical complicity between them, as if there were a leap and an arbitrary break in construction, even though precisely the secret link is thus revealed and can retrospectively be interpreted, revealed, betrayed. The sequence preceding the passage I am going to read concerns a scene of photography, the would-be capture of the truth by faithful reproduction. Photographers, then, from all countries, want to capture images of the fedayeen and ask them Genet underlines it to pose: The French made one fedayee pose twelve times for a single picture.3 Sometimes, photographers, notably Italian, want to show that they know how to take low-angle shots, what Genet calls lart

Countersignature 11

de la contre-plonge [literally, the art of counter-diving]. I shall read e two or three lines before and after the passage most important to me in an attempt, in my turn, not to overly betray this masterpiece of the staging of writing, that is of betrayal speaking about betrayal, of a traitor who makes truth by betraying it and by saying the betrayal. Since it involves photographers, reporting or information, it is also a meditation on the testimony and politics of the media:
A photographer is seldom photographed, a fedayee often, but if he has to pose hell die of boredom before he dies of fatigue. Some artists think they see a halo of solitary grandeur around a man in a photograph, but its only the weariness and depression caused by the antics of the photographer. One Swiss made the handsomest of the fedayeen stand on an upturned tub so that he could take him silhouetted against the sunset.

Here there is a gap, then these lines that should be read in a different tone:
What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comes into existence of its own accord when what etymologically should be called mediocrity is in the ascendant.

Again, a space, and then this aphorism isolated between two gaps: Betrayal is made up of both curiosity and fascination [vertige]. Obviously, Genet is still talking about photography. The sentence is again followed by a space and then there is a long paragraph talking about writing and lies in general:
But what if it were true that writing is a lie? What if it merely enabled us to conceal what was, testimony being only a trompe-lil? Without actually saying the opposite of what was, writing presents only its visible, acceptable and, so to speak, silent face, because it is incapable of really showing the other one.

Here Genet is speaking about his book, about what he is doing as a witness, a would-be witness to truth:
The various scenes in which Hamzas mother appears are in a way at. They ooze love and friendship and pity, but how can one simultaneously express all the contradictory emanations issuing from the witnesses? The same is true for every page in this book where there is only one voice. And like all the other voices my own is faked [truque, retain this word, we shall come back to it], and while the e reader may guess as much, he can never know what tricks it employs. [In other words, you may know its faked, you may know that I betray, but as you do not know how, it is as though you knew nothing.]

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The only fairly true causes of my writing this book were the nuts I picked from the hedges at Ajloun. But this sentence tries to hide the book, as each sentence tries to hide the one before, leaving on the page nothing but error: something of what often happened but what I could never subtly enough describe though its subtly enough I cease to understand it. Hicham had never been shown any consideration by anyone, old or young [I stress this because I shall be coming back constantly to this question of age for Genet]. No one took any notice of him, not because he was nothing, but because he did nothing. But one day his knee hurt him and he put himself down for medical inspection. . . (32-3; translation slightly modied)

The text returns to standard narrative mode, but you can see the work of writing. The question of the knee will moreover come back. Everything follows on. Thus on the next page we cross an enormous narrative mass to nd the word truqu, faked, again: e
The show theyd put on for me demonstrated their disillusion, for to play only with gestures when your hands ought to be holding kings and queens and knaves, all the symbols of power, makes you feel a fraud [donne le sentiment de truquer], and brings you dangerously close to schizophrenia. Playing cards without cards every night is a kind of dry masturbation. (34)

A brief notation concerning age that you might scarcely have noticed if I hadnt laboured the point Hicham had never been shown any consideration by anyone, old or young initiates at a distance the reections that, two pages later, after a long narrative digression and the description of the card game where the word truqu reappears, e pursue a meditation on the truth of testimony, but this time from the point of view of age. The age of the signatory and witness, as if there was an age of truth as much as a truth of age. A little later, just after a gap:
At this point I must warn the reader that my memory is accurate as far as facts and dates and events are concerned, but that the conversations here are reconstructed. Less than a century ago it was still quite normal to describe conversations, and I admit Ive followed that method. The dialogue youll read in this book is in fact reconstituted, I hope faithfully. But it can never be as complex as real exchanges, since its only the work of a more or less talented restorer, like Viollet-le-Duc. But you mustnt think I dont respect the fedayeen. Ill have done my best to reproduce the timbre and expression of their voices, and their words. Mahjoub and I really did have that conversation; its just as authentic as the game of cards without cards, where the game existed only through the accurate mimicry of hand and nger and joint.

Countersignature 13

And here is the question of age:

Is it because of my age or through lack of skill that when I describe something that happened in the past I see myself not as I am but as I was? And that I see myself examine myself, rather from outside, like a stranger; in the same way as one sees those who die at a certain age as always being that age, or the age they were when the event you remember them for happened? And is it a privilege of my present age or the misfortune of my whole life that I always see myself from behind, when in fact Ive always had my back to the wall? I seem to understand now certain acts and events that surprised me when they happened there on the banks of the Jordan, opposite Israel acts and events unrelated to anything, inaccessible islets I couldnt t together then but which now form a clear and coherent archipelago. I rst went to Damascus when I was eighteen years old. (34-5)

And if you want to follow the thread of age, of the truth of the age of peoples or the age of the signatory, I refer you one hundred and ten pages on to another passage that I detach from a narration and where the question of age recurs:
A few days later came what might be called the childrens revolt. Some Palestinian boys and girls of about sixteen, together with a few young Jordanians of both sexes, all laughing and smiling and shouting, Yahya-l-malik! (Long live the king!) went up to a line of Jordanian tanks in the streets of Amman (. . .) Those children make me think of a fox devouring a chicken. The foxs muzzle is covered with blood. It looks up and bares its perfect teeth white, shiny and sharp. You expect it to beam like a baby at any moment. An ancient people restored to youth by rebellion and to rebellion by youth can seem very sinister. I remember like an owl. Memories come back in bursts of images. Writing this book, I see my own image far, far away, dwarf size, and more and more difcult to recognize with age. This isnt a complaint. Im just trying to convey the idea of age and of the form poetry takes when one is old: I grow smaller and smaller in my own eyes and see the horizon speeding towards me, the line into which I shall merge, behind which I shall vanish, from which I shall never return. (133-4)

And about two hundred pages still further on, the question of age comes back yet again:
As Im not an archivist or a historian or anything like it, Ill only have spoken of my life in order to tell the story, a story, of the Palestinians. The strangeness of my position, then, appears to me now either in threequarter or half-prole or from the back. Never from the front, with my age and stature apparent. I calculate my dimensions from the scope of my movements and

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those of the fedayeen reconstruct my size and position in the group from the pattern of a cigarette moved downwards, a lighter upward. (237)

These two themes, age and the betrayal of truth, are linked together in the interview with Antoine Bourseiller:
I hazard an explanation. Writing is the last recourse one has when one has betrayed. There is still something else I would like to say to you. I knew very early on, from the age of about fourteen, fteen, that I could only be a vagabond or a thief, a bad thief of course, but at any rate a thief. My only success in the social world was, could have been of that kind, if you like: a bus conductor or perhaps a butchers assistant or something like that. And as that sort of success horried me, I think that I prepared myself, while very young, for having such emotions as could only lead me towards writing. If writing means experiencing emotions or feelings that are so strong that all your life will be shaped by them, if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation or their analysis can really account for them to you, then, yes, it is in Mettray and at fteen that I began to write. Writing is what remains when you are driven from the domain of the given word.4

First denition: writing is the last recourse one has when one has betrayed. And last denition: it is what remains when you are driven from the domain of the given word. Thus betrayal, perjury, writing D betrayal, perjury, etc. What remains. Genet also uses the word betrayal in the interview with Madeleine Gobeil when he wishes to dene what pederasty, an outlawed experience, represents in terms of revolutionary force, that is, as a radical questioning of social values (ED, 24). As a pedagogy too. Pederasty as pedagogy. That is, as the art of guiding children; as an initiation when pedagogical pederasty is linked to writing into the revolutionary adventure or, as we shall have occasion to examine further, into the poetic adventure insofar as Genet, as you know, never separates the two. The interview weaves all these words and motifs together: pederasty, pedagogy, betrayal, writing, outlaw. To the question: Have you ever been interested in women? Genet answers: Yes, four women interested me: the Holy Virgin, Joan of Arc, Marie-Antoinette and Madame Curie. To the question: What meaning does pederasty have at this moment in your life? he answers:
I would like to talk to you about its pedagogical side. Of course I made love with all the boys I took care of. But I took care not only to make love. I sought to repeat with them the adventure I lived whose symbol is bastardy, betrayal, the

Countersignature 15 refusal of society and nally writing, that is the return to society, but by other means. Is that an attitude unique to me? Pederasty, because it places the pederast outside the law, obliges him to question social values, and if he decides to take care of a young boy, he will not take care of him in a at way. He will make him aware of the incoherencies, both of mind and heart, that are obligatory in a normal society. At the moment, Im taking care of a young racer, Jackie Maglia.

The thematics of betrayal insists yet again in a passage of Prisoner of Love where, again at the heart of a narrative sequence, it is linked to the motif of translation here the translation of the Koran and of venal treachery:
What inspired leap launched the naked child, warmed by the breath of an ox, nailed with nails of brass, hoisted up nally, because he had been betrayed, into universal glory? Isnt a traitor one who goes over to the enemy? That among other things. The Venerable Peter, abbot of Cluny, in order to study the Koran better, decided to have it translated. (69)

So: betrayal, tradition, translation. Further down:

Once we see in the need to translate the obvious need to betray, we shall see the temptation to betray as something desirable, comparable perhaps to erotic exaltation. Anyone who hasnt experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothing about ecstasy at all. The traitor is not external but inside everyone. (69-70)

And a little further on: Treason was everywhere. Every kid that looked at me wanted to sell his father or mother; fathers wanted to sell their ve-year-old daughters (70). And nally, in the same perspective, a quotation from That Strange Word. . . (I remember the time when Genet was writing this text, I saw a lot of Genet around then):
To betray is perhaps traditional, but treason is no repose. I had to make a great effort to betray my friends: in the end, there was a reward. So, for the great parade before the burial of the corpse, if the funeral mime wants to make the dead man live and die again, he will have to discover, and dare to say them, those dialectophage words that in front of the audience will devour the life and death of the dead man.5

Now, after this long epigraph, I can nally begin to begin. Countersign is a word I love, a word I have much loved. There is a sort of love story the story of a love that holds me prisoner between

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that word and me. I shall perhaps say more about it in the informal interview arranged for later with Albert Dichy and Patrice Bougon. Through them, I also thank my Cerisy friends and hosts for welcoming me, yet again, unwearyingly, where I, for my part, am afraid of being wearisome. So I will tell this love story between this word, this lexical family (with its homonyms: seing, contreseing, countersignature) and me with lots of suspension points and ellipses, through the story of a friendship, as Albert Dichy recalled earlier. A friendship for someone who shares or shared with me the sometimes unavowable, sometimes cruel, often painful, often treacherous, taste for the words of the French language. That doesnt mean of France, or even of French literature. In his interview with Madeleine Gobeil, Genet says (how much I understand him, right down to his denial!): I never looked to be part of French literature (ED, 19). Even if it is false, even if Genet ultimately failed to not be part of French literature, this sentence, the tone of this sentence, this derisory be part, is a stroke of genius in a burst of laughter. It rallies, in its feigned vulgarity, so much scorn and irony towards a French literature that would rally together, protect itself in a gregarious, national way, like a private club or a social class or a family or a clan, a clique, a band of which one is or is not part, from which one is or is not excluded, of which one is or is not a recognized member, with a passport, title, identity card to legitimate it. . . I would like to inscribe what I will say under the sign of testimony, but you have heard what relation exists between testimony and betrayal, or between testify and sign. With this hypothesis, this hypothec of a betrayal of truth that threatens testimony in advance, whether its a matter of the words of language, of writing, or of friendship, I would like to bear witness and counterwitness to a certain friendship between Genet and me, a friendship, however enigmatic it was and stays for me, that remains a chance for which I am grateful and that I will consider a blessing until the end. A friendship without apparent contrarieties [contrarits], upset [contrarie] by nothing, to my knowledge. Nothing ee e even political and I say this with an awareness of contradiction and betrayal inspired by the previously unpublished 1970 text that Albert Dichy placed as an epigraph to LEnnemi dclar and that, had I known e e of it, I should have quoted and commented on in my book Politics of Friendship. In it, speaking of himself in the third person, Genet says:
J.G. is looking for [cherche], or seeking [recherche], or wants to discover, without ever discovering, a delicious enemy (. . .) And irreconcilable with me at any rate. No friends. Especially no friends, a declared but untorn enemy. (ED, 9)

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No friends: does that not echo with the entire tradition from Aristotle to Montaigne: O my friends, there is no friend. Genet: No friends. Especially no friends (. . .) I seek a declared enemy. Having read this text, I am obviously not going to draw authority from my friendship with Genet. The friends signature, countersignature can doubtless always be converted into the enemys signature or, in the other sense, countersignature. Nietzsche, for example, has many texts that I quote in Politics of Friendship, where, like Genet, he complains of the disappearance of the enemy: there is a need for enemies. Enemies are lacking, not friends. . . In the story of this friendship, it is thus right to give the word the inverted commas it needs. I am coming back to the word countersignature (or counterseing) that, according to the Robert dictionary, designates: a second signature destined to authenticate the main signature or to mark a commitment in common. This preliminary denition, that we will have to complicate endlessly, tells us two or three essential things. Firstly it indicates an apparent order: there is a rst signature that comes before another. In principle, the signature precedes the countersignature. The signature is thus rst, it preexists the countersignature. And apparently nothing can make this antecedence disappear. The denition of the countersignature says clearly that it is a second signature destined to authenticate the main signature. The countersignature is thus a second signature which can second the rst one to mark an agreement but which, in all cases, remains secondary. The one countersigning intervenes after the one signing. In the words technical history, the countersignature was initially a signature authorizing someone to sign in anothers place. For example, a secretary has the right to sign a letter in place of the minister who merely adds a little sign so that it can be posted without a stamp. In this case, the countersignatory is authorized to authorize, to take the place of the author or authority in order to sign in his place or to conrm or authenticate a protosignature, an archi-signature that has already taken place. I would like to say a word about the word counter in countersignature, that can be an adverb and/or a preposition. The word contre, counter or against, can equally and at the same time mark both opposition, contrariety, contradiction and proximity, near-contact. One can be against the person one opposes (ones declared enemy, for example), and against the person next to us, the one who is right against us, whom we touch or with whom we are in contact. The word contre possesses these two inseparable meanings of proximity and

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vis-` -vis, on the one hand, and opposition, on the other. Clearly a in countersignature, the word has the meaning of proximity and vis-` -vis. It is what is facing us, beside us. We shall of course come a back to this double meaning of the word contre that summarizes what is at stake in this discussion. When its a question of the indelible, irreducible anteriority of the signature, the proto-signature, in relation to the countersignature, authorized or authorizing, things immediately get complicated and are contaminated precisely by the betrayal of truth. In effect, a performative value determines every signature and every countersignature. The signature, like the countersignature, is a performative. When one signs, one doesnt merely write ones name, one afrms: Yes, I am signing, and naturally I promise to conrm this yes. Or again: Yes, its I whos signing and naturally I can conrm that its I who signs by countersigning if necessary. This performative value is already affected by an immediate iterability: as soon as I sign, I promise that I can do so again, that I can conrm that it was I who signed, etc. There is thus a repetition that, from the moment of the proto-signature, from the rst act of the rst signature, prohibits distinguishing a before and an after. The repetition of Yes, I sign, Yes, yes, I sign is at work from the moment of the proto-signature. Rather than repetition, I would say repeatability or what I call iterability, the possibility or need to repeat. Iterability, to determine it, is already haunting the proto-signature, or archi-signature, which is therefore from the outset its own countersignature. Consequently all future countersignatures come to countersign what was originally a countersignature, an archi-countersignature. To stay at this level of preliminary generality, before getting to the text, to more than one text, I want to stress further the ambiguity of the counter that means less opposition, even dialectical contradiction you can see this is Hegel country than the proximity of the vis-` -vis. So here countersigning, like the word contract in Latin, a adverb or preposition, before or beside the opposition of contrariety, is in the situation of something facing, something that is across, or near, or next, right against, and consequently designates the accompaniment or inseparability of two terms vis-` -vis each other, two terms that can a meet [se rencontrer] or nd themselves in a chance encounter [rencontre] with each other, as well as reect each other face to face, double each other, mirror the others image, as a signature and a countersignature are meant to do to conrm each other. They should be close to each other, in relation to each other.

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This abyssal double meaning of counter, of the contract, reecting proximity or opposition, is of course at work in Glas, not only in the Genet column, but between the two columns, the Genet one and the Hegel one and their spyholes [judas]. So many traitors. I would even say that this oscillating law rules their relations, for sometimes the two columns contradict each other, in an opposition whose dialectical formalization itself evidently contested, queried in Glas is revealed to us by Hegel, sometimes they do not contradict each other but rather wink at each other the word clin, wink, like the word class, obviously echoing all the cl of the text. The Hegel column and the Genet column are not only opposed, they sometimes conrm and countersign each other, strangely, surprisingly, with slight displacements and occasionally even authenticate or betray themselves by betraying the others truth. That would be the case, for example, not in Glas, but in what I could think of Genets politics generally concerning a Jewish question, where the discourse of a certain Hegel is a strangely close rival to that of a certain Genet. If I might add a very quick note before returning to the text, I would say that, even beyond my love for the word and the abyssal thing called countersignature, it happens that for a long time I have cultivated or allowed to be cultivated in numerous texts the formidable ambiguity of this contre, as determined in the French idiom. The word contretemps, for example, designating exhibition less than time-lag, anachrony; the word contrepartie [counterpart], that marks not so much opposition as exchange, the equivalence of a gift and countergift; the word contre-exemple [counterexample] that, like an exception, challenges the generality of the law. All these words recur in many of my texts, often to designate the relation between me and me, as close as possible to the authenticity, the authentication of my own signature. Here and there, I have had occasion to say that I am at the wrong time [` contretemps], or that a I am my own counterexample or counterpart. Allow me to read a passage from Circumfession, emphasizing the words encounter and counterexample:
not only I do not know anyone [but] I have not encountered anyone, I have had in the history of humanity no idea of anyone, wait, wait, anyone who has been happier than I, and luckier, euphoric, this is a priori true, isnt it?, drunk with uninterrupted enjoyment, haec omnia uidemus et bona sunt ualde, quoniam tu ea uides in nobis, but that if, beyond any comparison, I have remained, me the counterexample of myself, as constantly sad, deprived, destitute, disappointed, impatient, jealous, desperate, negative and neurotic. . .6

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And, after the counterexample, the counterpart:

too late, you are less, you, less than yourself, you have spent your life inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing commanding sacricing, what, the witness, you my counterpart, only so that he will attest this secret truth i.e. severed from truth i.e. that you will never have had any witness, ergo es, in this very place, you alone whose life will have been so short, the voyage [I underline the word voyage] short, scarcely organized, by you with no lighthouse and no book, you the oating toy at high tide and under the moon, you the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses who will never come down to the same. (314-5)

If I underlined the word voyage in this text, it is not only to beckon towards what will surely one day be an approach towards Genets work based on travel, that is, Genets displacement, his geopolitical wanderings, his whole text being a series of bordercrossings, expulsions, exiles, but also to authorize myself (please forgive me again) to quote another passage, a letter in a book that is a book on the journey called La Contre-alle, where I try to explain e to my correspondent my fascination for the lexicon of counter, the very term counterpath being only one example. Before doing so, I would like to recall that at the opening of one of his articles, Lenins Mistresses, to which Ill come back, Genet describes himself in the third person as a traveller:
When a traveller returns from abroad, for example from Morocco, he reads in LHumanit an article on Cohn-Bendit both article and man inset designe ating him as a fanatic and a German; he leafs through Minute [I can testify to this: Genet read many newspapers at that time, he was all the time reading papers, all papers]: Cohn-Bendit is a dirty Jew; he buys LAurore and Le Figaro: Cohn-Bendit is an agitator. (ED, 29)

In La Contre-alle [sidepath, literally counterpath], the contre refers e less to opposition than to the proximity of a path parallel to the main alley. All in all, it is a little like the countersignature that itself is a sort of counterpath. The passage in question gures in a letter:
Spacing itself, the spatiality of spacing, distancing, that is not derived, and what is a priori original, absolutely prior, is encounter, the en-counter with space as land [contre]. [Countersignature in German is called Gegend or kontrasignieren. We e should stop in order to think travel on the edge of the encounter.] Everything isnt equivalent to an encounter but can you imagine a crossing without encounter?

Countersignature 21 We should cultivate the virtualities of this lexicon between with (Apud, hoc, cum) and contra. In Latin, then, against Heidegger (I always travel, as I told you, and I think against Heideggers order, I am on the side of his counterexample or his counterpart. Small-minded prosecutors will claim that it amounts to the same thing; perhaps, its not sure.) I would have liked to write to you on postcards full of memories of hundreds of words derived from contra, from contre to contrada. e To (Siena) and to Country. Contradictions, contretemps and contracts would be there to show us the way, directing [renvoyant] us to what in the idea of countering [encontre] and encountering [rencontre] sets us travelling again, and thus sends us away [renvoie]. Besides, I wonder if I dont travel so much because (Ive the feeling that from France) Ive always been, as from school, sent down [renvoy]. Does one travel because one is expelled [renvoy] or to run towards an e e encounter? To run counter? What is meant by counter? and counterhospitality? and counterpath? Is it really a question of travel? (There would thus be travelquestions, like travel-kits, travel-bags, travel-agents.) But there, if one travels with a view to encountering, there is no encounter, nothing happens. The encounter is the undecided rush, without any preparation, at the mercy of the other who decides the irruption of what one has especially not seen coming and that can happen, oh yes, at home.7

I would now like, in one last detour, to come closer to Genet and Glas in relation to the countersignature. A detour via Cerisy. For it happens that, on three occasions, in 1975 for Ponge, in 1982 for JeanFran ois Lyotard, and now today, I have had the chance, the honour c and the privilege of speaking there about writers or thinkers who were friends. Admired and respected friends. All three are now dead.8 But two of them were present at the conference devoted to them. I have always been very afraid of speaking about the living about Genet in particular, as I said in Glas: he will vomit all that. . . These three friends are all dead but only Genet was not present in Cerisy. Those who knew him can easily imagine that, rightly or wrongly but at no price would he have come here to attend or participate in a conference about his work. There too, I would have a lot to say concerning his irony in relation to such things, particularly in relation to academics I myself was often his rst target. . . If I refer to the two other conferences during which I dared to speak about two friends in their presence, it is because at the rst of them, devoted to Ponge in 1975 Ponge who said to me one day, perhaps a year or two before his death: You see, I am someone who doesnt die about a year after the publication of Glas, I had proposed a sort of general logic of the countersignature that came from Glas without coming from it but especially from Ponge who had elaborated a theory, a

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discourse on the countersignature. This is the strange junction that I would like to reconstitute here between my reading of Ponge in 1975 following closely on the writing of Glas, and the fact that it is in Ponge, not in Genet, that the word countersignature echoes insistently and literally. I had given a lecture here entitled Signponge, e in the presence of Francis Ponge, where the words seing, signature, countersignature were to be found, as were other words coming from Glas such as colossus, colossos, colossal. . . I talked of Ponges colossal corpus that, while being countersigned by the Ponge that I was countersigning in my turn, came both from Glas, as I showed earlier, and literally from Ponge. For, curiously, whereas Genet very rarely uses the word, Ponge, as you will hear, brilliantly and emphatically uses the noun countersignature and the verb countersign. Without claiming to have done an inventory, I only found a single occurrence of the word in Genet, moreover a banal, slightly furtive one, in the article published in May 68, Lenins Mistresses, that I just evoked. There Genet says, still in relation to Cohn-Bendit to whom the article is generally devoted: Some students are asked if they could countersign not all but nearly all what Cohn-Bendit said and wrote; many answer yes, but they also say that he brought to orgasm the ministers daughter who brought him to orgasm, that he got paid for his photos, and his interviews with the big papers (ED, 29). A severe indictment, then, of those, including the students, who are interested not in Lenin but in his mistresses, not in Cohn-Bendit but in the fact that he brought to orgasm the ministers daughter, etc. I quote this article of Genets for several reasons. Firstly because of the use of the word countersign, of course, that is followed by a yes the yes being what always doubles a countersignature, being itself a countersignature, since the signature is constituted by a yes as in a wedding. Yes is always an answer, and it is structurally the answer to the others question, an answer subjected to the others law like the countersignature itself. Yes, yes: the doubling of the yes is irreducible. That begins by a yes yes as the promise to say yes to the yes, that is to conrm, authenticate, countersign the rst yes that already carries iterability, thus the countersignature, within it. In other words, the rst yes inscribes the second yes in itself. The second yes is there before the rst, so to say. Or, at any rate, as early as the rst. The second reason I quote this article is that its date (May 68) marks a very powerful moment for Genet, the beginning of his engaged period, the departure point of his political itinerary as Albert Dichy

Countersignature 23

rightly emphasizes in his edition of LEnnemi dclar (335). I do not e e know if the common expression political engagement is appropriate for Genet, for his engagement was always that of a writer and poet who acted only at the margin, by speaking and writing, and who never separated the idea of revolution from that of poetic event, whether for May 68, the Black Panthers or the Palestinians. The third reason, nally, is that I was seeing Genet a lot at that time, in May 68, and I remember him not only writing and publishing this article with jubilation but walking with me until dawn in the streets of Paris empty of cars. . . It was the greatest general strike the country had ever known, the greatest and the longest: there was no petrol, no cars for eight days. And Genet, in these carless streets, confronted with the country suddenly immobilized, paralyzed, stunned by the lack of petrol, would say: Ah, how beautiful it is! Ah, how beautiful it is! Ah, how elegant it is! And I found the same tone in two passages that I want to quote because they display this affect of May 68 that was so critical for Genet and the combination of the poetic and the political allied with the motif of the traveller:
Cohn-Bendit is the origin, poetic or calculated, of a movement thats in the process of destroying, at any rate of shaking, the bourgeois apparatus and, thanks to him, the traveller crossing Paris [Genet is still speaking of himself as a traveller] knows the sweetness and elegance of a city in revolt. The cars, that are its fat, have disappeared. Paris is nally becoming a thin city, shes losing a few kilos, and for the rst time in his life, the traveller has a sort of joy, returning to France, and rejoices in seeing faces he knew dull, at last joyous and beautiful. If the days of May had only produced that, already. . . (31)

May 68 is evoked again two years later in the text entitled It Seems To Me Indecent To Speak About Me:
Then there were ve or six years of silence, then I suddenly wrote ve plays, and the last, The Screens, was a long meditation on the Algerian War. And that happened twelve years ago. In May 68, I saw that, without seeking to be, I was completely on the side of the protesters, students and workers. In May, France, that I so hated, existed no longer, but, for a month, only a world suddenly freed of nationalism, a smiling world, extremely elegant if you will. And May was wrecked by the strong comeback of the Gaullists and the reactionaries. I can thus say that in June 68, my sadness and my anger made me understand that henceforward I would not pause until the spirit of May in Paris was found again, in France or elsewhere. If I indicate a very subjective mood of my person, it is so that you will better understand the extent to which I feel close now to the Black Panthers. (. . .)

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Since I have known them, I keep discovering in them [the Black Panthers] this liberty and this exchange of fraternal tenderness. (ED, 41-2)

I point out and highlight the word fraternal because, having sharpened and mobilized my permanent suspicion of the theme of fraternity some years ago in Politics of Friendship, in relation to something like a male homosexuality, the dominant model of friendship, my rst impulse on reading the word fraternal was one of disapproval or, more discreetly, of worried disappointment. Why does Genet say fraternal? As if Genet, as a homosexual who explicitly declared the link between his sexual desire and his political choices, was actually conrming my most suspicious fears about the fraternalistic schema I tried to deconstruct in Politics of Friendship as a Christian schema, a phallocentric, macho schema and a genealogistic, familial schema. Ones neighbour, in the Christian sense, being rst of all a brother. But not at all. On the contrary, in his May 1970 Letter To American Intellectuals, Genet displays his distrust of the word brother, by following moreover one of the themes (it was not the only one but one of the important threads) that I followed in Politics of Friendship to deconstruct a certain tradition of the canonical model of the friend, that is, the brother in the Christian, even evangelical or Pauline sense of the term, man as brother, neighbour as brother, and what is valid for the Christian is naturally also valid for the Muslim. Here is what Genet writes, once again linking the poetic to the revolutionary political:
I believe the time has come to use an equally new vocabulary and a syntax capable of making everyone mindful of the double poetical and revolutionary combat [in other words, to make revolution, language, vocabulary and grammar must be changed. There is no true revolution without such change] of the movements among Whites that are comparable to the Black Panthers. For my part, for example, I refuse to use the word brother that is steeped in evangelical sentimentalism and when I speak about the Blacks, I want to speak of armed comrades ghting the same enemy. (ED, 46)

The word brother is thus denounced as Christian, evangelical. In relation to this Christian, evangelical tradition that Genet knew only too well, an ineradicable culture, I would like to specify and highlight two features that lead in the direction of the countersignature of and in Glas towards which I am moving. Firstly, the question of Christianity in all its aspects and they are numerous is clearly at the centre of Glas, posed between Genet and Hegel who are often close. Playing with proximities and contradictions, one can

Countersignature 25

say that they are close in what opposes them and in what connects them. In Glas, all the scenes from the Gospels are replayed in both columns, on both sides, squinting at each other because of the analogies, staggered or opposing each other in every way. Its one of the reasons I emphasize the Christian aspect. Secondly, one of the oppositions between these two great Christians Hegel and Genet remains that between a Protestant, Hegel, who believes that Reform has a privileged link with philosophy and absolute knowledge (many of Hegels texts show that Protestantism makes thought possible, makes Hegelian thought possible), and on the other hand a perverse, very Catholic choirboy, very marked, as Genet himself says, by faith, by a faith initially carried by the Catholic catechism then freed from the catechism and religion but especially from a theology that Genet holds to be more Protestant than Catholic. In other words, he liberates himself more easily from Protestantism than from Catholicism. In the interview with Madeleine Gobeil, he distinguishes his faith from theology and religion, in a way from all Churches, but in passing he makes a barbed remark about theologians as Protestant theologians:
M.G.: Do you believe in God? J.G.: I believe that I believe in him. I dont have much faith in the mythologies of the catechism. But why must I account for my lifetime by afrming what seems to me most precious? Nothing compels me. Nothing visible compels me. So why do I feel so forcefully that I must do it? Previously, the question was immediately resolved by the act of writing. My childhood revolt, my revolt when I was fourteen wasnt a revolt against faith, it was a revolt against my social situation, my condition of humiliation. It didnt impinge on my deep faith, but in what? M.G.: And do you believe in eternal life? J.G.: Thats the question of a dying Protestant theologian. [Then he comes back to the Catholic Church:] Are you a Vatican II Council Father? Its a meaningless question. (27)

This pirouette is typical of Genet. In Glas, it is sometimes from a Jewish or Arabo-islamic outside that the Christianity, Protestant or Catholic, of Hegel or Genet, is both observed and deconstructed. I leave that aside for the moment. But if for me, Ill explain it better later, the act of reading a work is or should be or has always been an afrmation rather than an act, its because this afrmation is not only active or actual but involves a submission, a subjection, a certain passive receptivity in the decision as decision of the other. It is thus not merely performative. If the experience of reading a work as such has always been for

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me an afrmation of countersignature, that is, of authentication and repetition without imitation, without counterfeiting, a doubling of the yes in the irreplaceable idiom of each yes, as at a wedding where each yes says yes to the other, doubling it without repeating it and I could insist on this paradigm of the wedding, the conjugal couple, spousal conjugality, countersignature joining two conjoined afrmations, absolutely identical and different, similar and radically other well, the formulation of what may here resemble a theory or working out of a theory of reading-rewriting is linked for me to the tangling together of the different Cerisy conferences and my texts on Genet, then Ponge and Genet. I recall that Glas was written but already contained references to Ponge whom I was reading a lot at the time, to whom also a great friendship bound me, after I met him in the same years as Genet through our common friend, Paule Th venin. Glas was thus already written, with all its work e on homonyms, Genets proper name, the very fac simile of Genets signature, his falling signature, his relentless pursuit [acharnement] of signatures, seings, the mothers signature and countersignatures, driven ercely [acharn] indeed by the lure of the signature (this is the very e sense of acharn [erce, literally meaning with the taste for meat], a e hunting term: the lure for a falcon is given the taste of meat). When I wrote Signponge for Cerisy, in it I elaborated a sort of formalized e discourse that had been a long time in the making, dating back as far as texts such as Signature, Event, Context where at the end of Margins Of Philosophy I play with the imitation by someone else of my own signature on the experience of countersignature which is to be found in Ponges text and which nds in that text an extraordinary and exemplary support. Not being able or willing to make too long a detour via Ponge and what in Signponge, in an allusion to Glas, I called the colossal structure e of the seal [seing], I shall quickly read some passages whose rereading I would like to relate to the event of consenting to marriage, to more than one marriage. A consent to a provisional conjugality, the double yes of the spouses, the nuptial experience of the countersignature here being a not fortuitous paradigm. In this passage, an anguished question from me to me emerges that is the same as the one echoing in Glas: will Ponge accept this? How will he bear it? Will he approve what I say about him? In other words, will he countersign my countersignature? This anguished question involved Ponges text as much as Genets. It wasnt merely a matter of knowing if Francis Ponge or Jean Genet would approve or accept what I said, but

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whether their text would reafrm my own countersignature. So it was as much about the texts as the then living subjects, my friends. That is why I have emphasized the friendship, the fact that those friends were alive and present at the time. Would these friends, Ponge or Lyotard, approve what I wrote about them? Would they even be able to read it? In a way, I will never know, I know that I will never know. I learned that Genet said kind things about Glas, Ponge about Signponge, but did they read those books and how did they read e them? I do not know. That could be said of all readings, but at any rate its the question echoing in Glas:
Anyhow, he will vomit all that (a) for me, he will not read, will not be able c to read. Do I write for him? What would I like to do to him? do to his work? Ruin it by erecting it, perhaps. (200)

Here now is the passage from Signponge concerning the countersige nature:
The colossal structure of the seal assumes a number of aspects, all of them original. (. . .) Someone now [the passage concerns Ponges play on his own name, Franciscus Pontius Nemausensis Poeta] but who? will have signed Ponge and pulled it off. He now needs the countersignature of the other, of the thing that is not yet his own and is to be found in representation in the whole of phusis. [What I am trying to show there is that ultimately Ponge wants to countersign or rather sign the thing itself, and wants the thing to countersign what he writes about it.] Chance obliges. But despite the chance of this extraordinary double name (others can carry it without obligation) the immense autograph would have remained consigned to the invisible, a sort of murmuring, impotent autoaffection, an infatuation bound to a minor narcissism, had he not, in obedience to the mute and tyrannical law of the thing, expended so much force to effectively sponge off the debt: in the world. To acquit himself by washing his hands [like Puntius Pilate, as Ponge himself says], I dont wish to exaggerate, of a spot, the task of spot checking, the task of his name, entrusted to him by the thing. Of a debt, contracted with Nature. All the nominal signatures together would not have produced this colossal text if the signatory (but who?), in order to sponge off the slate and give a gift without counterpart to the thing in its own turn, had not interested the thing in the signature. Not only by entering a contract with the thing but a contract where nothing is exchanged, where the obligated (impossible, unapproachable) parties remain irrelevant, released from everything at the very moment when they are most

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bound up with each other, a contract where all is exchanged for nothing, a contract without contract where what is exchanged is not something determinate to be signed at the end, but the signature itself, all by itself. (. . .) Now there is no text here which, in the nal analysis, lacks this effect of countersignature by means of which, setting my seal at the bottom of an IOU made out for an innite debt in regard to the thing as something other, I interest the thing that regards me, I interest it in signing itself, by itself, and in becoming, while remaining the thing it is, entirely other, also a consigned part of my text. This is also the condition allowing my text to escape me and y like a rocket along the path of its own trajectory, freed up, in my name and in the laws of my language, from my name and my language.9

I now get to Ponges own text on the countersignature:

This has to do with a kind of countersignature. With the signature of the other, your momentary partner [conjoint, spouse; this is the marriage]. To the signature (always the same) of the artist, is eventually added a far more voluminous, grandiose and impassioned one (and different each time), the one imposed by the emotion aroused by the encounter with the object, by an emotion which was the occasional cause of the work, which one can nally surrender to all risks: it doesnt regard us any more. It is thus from the countersignature that a signature is properly carried off. And it is in the instant when it is thus carried off that there is text. You therefore no longer know which of the two partners will have signed rst. Rightly or wrongly, I dont know why, I have always thought, ever since childhood, that the only worthwhile texts were the ones that could be inscribed in stone; the only texts I could proudly agree to sign (or countersign), ones that could not be signed at all; texts that would still stand as natural objects in the open air, in the sun, in the rain, in the wind. This is precisely the property of inscriptions (. . .) In sum, I approve of Nature . . . I countersign the work of Time (or Weather). [This quotation from Ponge comes from For a Malherbe.] (130)

There, I now come to the theatre of the countersignature in Glas. My interest in the countersignature in Ponge and in Genet, in what it does in their texts, has always been in competition, if I may say as a sort of counterpath with what in essence, spontaneously or deliberatively, will have always been of the order of an ethics or law of my writing when it responds to the others, to anothers work. What I here call, with a word that leaves me a little dissatised because it is ambiguous, the ethics of my writing, the law it is out of the question I should infringe, is to say yes to the work that comes before me and that will have been without me, a work that was already afrmed and signed with the others yes, so that my

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own yes is a yes to the others yes, a sort of blessing and (ring of) alliance. Not infringing this law thus means doing everything not to betray it, not to betray either the law or the other. But, rstly, the possibility of betrayal is part of respect for the law. It must be constitutive of respect for the law. To obey, to be faithful, it must be possible to betray. Someone who couldnt betray couldnt be faithful. Secondly, there is also a terrible law of betrayal, as in the declared friend-enemy we spoke of earlier, a terrifying law meaning that the more I betray (by writing differently, signing differently), the less I betray; and the less I betray (by repeating the same yes, by imitating, counterfeiting), the more I betray. This means that perjury or betrayal, if you prefer is lodged like a double band at the very heart of the countersignature. That is the betrayal of truth as truth of betrayal. That is also, however terrifying it may seem, faithfulness. One must faithfully recognize it and be as faithful as possible to faithfulness. But in order for my countersignature, that is, this law that comes before any literary theory, before any critical methodology, before any concept of exegesis or hermeneutics or criticism or commentary, in order for this absolutely anterior, absolutely original countersignature, subject to this law, to attest both to knowledge [connaissance], the best and most competent knowledge possible, and to recognition [re-connaissance, also gratitude], for it to be both knowing and recognizing and this both is a double bind or, to borrow the word organizing all of Glas, a double band it must both respect the absolute, absolutely irreducible, untranslatable idiom of the other, of what Ponge or Genet did and was only done once, and inscribe in my own yes, at the moment I recognize the others singularity, the work of the other. In my yes, in my own untranslatable, singular idiom, I must countersign the others text without counterfeit, without imitation. It is obviously impossible. One must imitate without imitating. One must recognize, countersign, reproduce the others signature without reproducing or imitating it. What can be done to marry the singularity of a non-counterfeiting countersignature with the equally irreducible singularity of a protosignature? A protosignature, however, that, like all language, let me say it again, is itself already divided, repeats itself in a double yes. In other words, how can my yes yes also attest to the singularity of the others yes, to which I say yes without imitating it? How can one imitate without imitating, when the others rst yes, the protosignature, already involves a repetition, involves a division and an iterability, and thus in a way imitates itself? That makes for a strange

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arithmetic. How can this be done? Well, I ask the question but I have no answers. Not only I have no answer, but I hold that there must not be an answer in the form of a general norm, a rule or a prior criterion. By denition, there can be no prior answer or method or technique. Each time it is necessary to invent the singular law of what remains and must remain a unique event, held in this aporia or double bind. That is in any case what I tried, with no certainty of success, each time I wrote in the alliance, in the sense of the nuptial bond or hymen with all the paradoxes of the hymen that I evoked with respect to Mallarm s Mimique in La Double S ance with Artaud, e e Celan or Ponge. In relation now to Genet, I shall limit myself to picking out a number of places in Glas that, more explicitly and quickly than others, can situate what is at stake in the countersignature. Naturally I shall fail to catch, even on a single page, the crisscrossing plays of consonances, displacements or agglutinations, collages, gluings, parallelism, counterapposition (the plays of the contre as proximity and opposition) that work, are at work in Glas. What I will do, perhaps unjustiably, is to outline four centres of focus. This number is clearly arbitrary, given the system of contagion or radiation between the places of the text, the columns and the spyholes [judas]. I called spyholes, if you recall, the inset sequences of text that are precisely like spyholes, like openings made or pierced in columns to spy and to lie in wait, to see without being seen. Judas is also the traitors name, the gure of the disciple, the Jew who betrayed Jesus, his master, precisely by kissing him. Again to go quickly, let me say that the rst three centres of focus congure in Glas the knell [glas] of the signature or seing that is also the tocsin, alarm-bell, and somewhere in Glas, according to its etymology, I believe, the toc seing [fake signature] as signature. The fourth centre of this elaboration would assign its knell, and the sound glas, to the countersignature. So three focusing on the signature and one on the countersignature. The rst centre staged, from the opening pages, the counterpoint or contradiction between, on one hand, the suppression, repression, withdrawal, exclusion of the signature and the proper name by philosophical discourse and, on the other, its teaching, especially by Hegel whose discourse on the religion of owers or on the family I follow throughout the book. The contradiction, then, between a discourse of philosophical teaching that represses, effaces and excludes the signature, and Genets poetic text that carries his own signature,

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is or becomes or incorporates his signature. Everything in Genets text begins with a question of the remainder the signature being precisely a remainder that, throughout the book and beyond, orders a problematic of remaining [restance] that I cannot reconstitute here, but that escapes all ontology, all philosophy that sees in the remainder what remains, that is, a substance, persistence or even a state. The remaining of the remainder is not a substance that subsists or stays, it isnt a being that resists time. That is the books philosophical ambition: to think a remaining or a surviving that doesnt fall into the philosophical category of ontology, substance, being, existence, essence, etc. To give some reference points to anchor this centre that, all in all, opposes signature and teaching, I shall skim through the rst page of Glas gleaning some words, for example concerning the undecidable syntax of the remainder, and pick out, in a doubtless insufcient way, some elements in both columns. The left-hand column, devoted to Hegel, starts thus: what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel? This of the remain(s) [du reste, also meaning besides] is clearly undecidable in its syntax. What does that mean: what of the remain(s)? what after all? and at the opposite angle, at the bottom of the text, in the Genet column, there is again an overlapping of the remain(s) whose syntax is equally undecidable. Facing the what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?, there is the beginning of the text by Genet entitled What remained of a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down the shithole. This text is divided in two and, as Marco Siscar earlier recalled, this sentence describes Glass structure in advance as the remainder. Two lines lower: As the remain(s) will divide in two. . . There will thus endlessly be an interpretation of these two interpretations of the remainder. The word already intervenes on the fourth line of the Hegel column. For us, the words here, now are already and always quotations. We learned them from him. They refer to the beginning of The Phenomenology of Mind where Hegel discusses the meaning of these terms. Who, him? The rst column devoted to Hegel emphasizes the fact that he doesnt sign, that a philosopher doesnt sign, that the name of a philosopher isnt essential to his discourse. After some reections on Hegels name, here are the passages. The word siglum [sigle] appears immediately: Sa from now on will be the siglum of savoir absolu [absolute knowledge] (1). Sigle is a word that simultaneously designates the initials of a proper name and allows the sound, the syllable gl to echo from the rst page. Whether he lets himself be

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taught [enseigner], signed, ensigned is not yet known. Perhaps there is an incompatibility (rather than a dialectical contradiction) between the teaching and the signature, a schoolmaster and a signer. Perhaps, in any case, even when they let themselves be thought and signed, these two operations cannot overlap each other. A remainder the word overlap reappears across the page is necessary. Of the remain(s), after all, there are, always, overlapping each other, two functions. The word in the Hegel column that plays with countersignature is counterproof. It is in a spyhole: it (a) does not accentuate itself c here now but will already have been put to the test [preuve] on the e other side. Sense must conform, more or less, to the calculi of what the engraver terms a counterproof. It thus already denes, on both sides, the law organizing the relation between the two columns, and that continues in the two following pages. Genet column:
Perhaps the case (Fall) [thus the fall, case also means fall] of the seing. If Fall marks the case, the fall, decadence, failure or ssure, Falle equals trap, snare, springe, the machine that grabs you by the neck. The seing falls (to the tomb(stone)). (2)

In the Hegel column on the next page, theres a mention of the colossal statue of the Egyptian Memnon, kolossale Klangstatue in a way the entire book develops as a reection on the word Klang, on the birth of sound vibration before the voice, nur Klang und nicht Sprache. . . Just opposite, the following announces that the book will focus on the question of the signature:
Between the words, between the word itself as it divides itself in two [the word in question is reste that can divide in two as noun or verb, but also the word tombe] (noun and verb, cadence or erection, hole and stone), (to) insinuate the delicate, barely visible stem, an almost imperceptible cold lever, scalpel, or stylus [the word style recurs constantly in this form, this syntax of the stylus], so as to enervate, then dilapidate, enormous discourses that always end, though more or less denying it, in attributing an authors rights: that (a) comes (back) to me, the c seing belongs to me. The stake of the signature does the signature take place? where? how? why? for whom? (. . .) perhaps the seing represents the case, the place for (topically and tropically) overlapping the intrinsic and the extrinsic. Initialling the margin, the incessant operation: signing in the margin, exchanging the name against a revenue, paring down, trying to reduce the margin (. . .) Case and scrap. What remains of a signature? (3-4)

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All this refers to the rst centre of focus, concerning the signature and countersignature at work in the book and engaging both Jean Genets proper name rst name and surname, constantly worked on by their homonyms, their associations to owers, horses, the John of the Gospels and of the Apocalypse and my own proper name, whose occurrences can be read in the text, if one wishes to, in the adverb dj` [already], composed of my initials, or in an expression like ea derri`re le rideau [behind the curtain] when I say that I already see my e fathers name, the letters of his name in gold on his tomb. My proper name is thus like a countersignature constantly at work in my reading of Genet. The second centre of focus would be the place of the mother, the holy mother and/or the prostitute, the Immaculate Conception, IC, the Virgin Mary, Saint Mary of the Sea. . . For example, one scene evokes Saint Mary of the Sea, taking place between Hegel and Genet, between Genets Mary, the Virgin Mary, and Hegels Mary, between his wife and sister. This mother is the one who signs and the one who survives. In other words, the remainder in my interpretation, the signing remainder, is always of the mother who survives her son and follows his obsequies. That is why I call her the obsequent. Its in a spyhole in the Genet column:
I am (following) the mother. [I, so I, me, I am the mother or I am her, she who follows her sons obsequies like an obsequent and survives him]. (. . .) The mother is behind [my name is there: derri`re] all that I follow, am, do, seem the e mother follows. As she follows absolutely, she always survives a future that will never have been presentable what she will have engendered, attending, impassive, fascinating and provoking [in other words, this remaining that I said escaped ontologys authority is also the situation of the mother. She remains. Like a remainder which has never been present. Which thus never presents itself and consequently can never be a being in the present under ontologys authority]; she survives the interring of the one whose death she has foreseen. Logic of obsequence. [The entire book follows this situation of the mother who survives or is experienced as surviving:] Such is the great genetic scene: the mother secutrix denounces, then lets the son die whom she transforms because of that into a daughter leaves her, because of that makes her die and simulates, the divine whore, a suicide [I shall come back later, at the end, to the question of suicide in Genet]. See, farther on, that calculus of the mother. (. . .) What can a mother do better? But to the extent that she is there, to represent herself and detach herself from herself, you can always sign yourself to death, she transforms your act into a sin

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in all tongues, your text into ersatz, your paraph into a fake. She takes you by the hand and you always countersign. [In other words, the protosignature is the mothers and even when you countersign, you are letting yourself be signed by the mother.] Subject of denunciation: I call myself my mother who calls herself (in) me. To give, to accuse. Dative, accusative. I bear my mothers name, I am (following) my mothers name, I call my mother to myself, I call my mother for myself, I call my mother in myself, recall myself to my mother. I decline the same subjugation in all cases. The calculus of the mother that I am (following): Ah! if my mother could assist me at my interment. (117)

In Our Lady of the Flowers, during the trial, in a writing anal in style, Divine testies for Our Lady: I think hes very nave, very childlike. (. . .) He could be my son.10 All of this is organized around the names of owers, Genets name. If, for example, you were to make the conjunction between the rose, the mystical rose everywhere in Miracle of the Rose and the word Rose that opens The Screens without our knowing if its a proper name or if it describes the colour of the sky, this rose that chimes with the proper name Warda (Rose in Arabic) and the nuptial acquiescence in Our Lady of the Flowers evoked above, the yes yes of countersignature (remember the spouse in Ponge), then you would develop, as a photographic negative is developed, the scene of a lover giving a nuptial ower day after day, under Our Ladys hospitable protection. Yes yes yes under the double sign of the rose and Our Lady of the Flowers: that is all expressed and implemented in Glas and beyond. That is why the word mother and the determination of maternity bother me here. Because with the syllable gl, its a matter of going beyond the mother or womb, towards what in other texts I termed Kh ra, trying to save the interpretation of Kh ra in Platos Timeus o o from interpretations that precisely made a womb, a mother, of it. Kh ra, the receptacle, the space that receives the impressions of the o copies of paradigms, has often, and by Plato himself, been compared metaphorically to a womb. I tried to show how Kh ra isnt one, how o it doesnt even correspond to a maternal gure. Well, I would say that the gl that organizes Glas escapes the primordiality, the so-called primordiality of the mother or womb. Concerning this mother-son couple, as I interpret it in Glas in relation to the question of the signature, if you leap across the twelve

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years separating its publication and that of Prisoner Of Love, you can read on the last page:
The Palestinian revolution lives and will live only of itself. A Palestinian family, made up essentially of mother and son, were among the rst people I met in Irbid. But it was somewhere else that I really found them. Perhaps inside myself. The pair made up by mother and son is to be found in France and everywhere else. Was it a light of my own that I threw on them, so that instead of being strangers whom I was observing they became a couple of my own creation? An image of my own that my penchant for day-dreaming had projected on to two Palestinians, mother and son, adrift in the midst of a battle in Jordan? All Ive said and written happened. But why is it that this couple is the only really profound memory I have of the Palestinian revolution? (430)

What remains for Genet, then, of the Palestinian revolution, is the couple, this couple mother-son/son-mother. Logic of obsequence. The third centre of focus is that of jealousy. The mothers jealousy. It has often been noted that the theme of jealousy recurs in many of my texts. In this one, its also a matter of my jealousy of Genets mother, explicitly thematized for example in the column facing the one on Hegel concerning the umbilical cord and the question of the child:
When talking about the Colony I sometimes refer to it as The Old Lady, or The Motherfucker. These two expressions would probably not have sufced to make me confuse it with a woman, but, in addition to the fact that they already usually designate mothers, they occurred to me in connection with the Colony, since I was tired of my solitude as a lost child and my soul called for a mother. The breast [sein] of this mother steals away from all names, but it also hides them, steals them; it is before all names, [then, in a spyhole:] as death, the mother fascinates from the absolute of an already. Fascination produces an excess of zeal [zeal means jealousy in Greek]. In other words, jealousy. Jealousy is always excessive. . . (133-4)

Interpretation of a jealousy that, beyond all the pretexts it can take, concerns the absolute past, what has never been present and what I can therefore never overcome. Jealousy is always jealousy of the past and so
can never be presented nor allow any hope for presentation, the presently presenting. One is never jealous in front of a present scene even the worst imaginable nor a future one, at least insofar as it would be big with a possible theater. Zeal is only unchained at the whip of the absolute past. Madame Edwarda

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would be a bit of foolishness, running herself dry, producing her apotrope in the spectacle, as far as she were open to a present experience. (134)

In other words, the worst deception or betrayal of the other, were it to present itself, could never elicit as terrible a suffering as a past deception or betrayal. Jealousy is exasperated by a past that there is no question of either effacing or making present: It [jealousy] has a chance to be terrible only by thrusting within itself a past, an absolute already: in giving itself to be read, not seen (134; translation modied). One is thus jealous only of what one reads and not of what one sees, of the mother or death, never of a man or woman as such, only of a seing or, what comes down here to the same, of an already. Jealousy is always exasperated by a past signature. This is why metaphysics, which is jealous, will never be able to account, in its language, the language of presence, for jealousy (134). The thesis here is that metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the present, is jealous but cannot account for its own law, that of jealousy: This is why the mother (whatever forename or pronoun she may be given) stands beyond the sexual opposition. This above all is not a woman. She only lets herself, detached, be represented by the sex. Femininity is only a representation of maternity. That is why the thief distinguishes between the maternal and the feminine (134). This motif of jealousy at the centre of Glas is also at the centre of many other of my texts. I come now to the fourth centre of focus. The rst three concerned the signature or seing, the last the countersignature itself, this time named as such in Glas. The countersignature that is both free and captive, thus subject to the other. Free as all countersignatures must be. When I say yes, I must say it freely, but this yes to the other is naturally captive to the other:
What I wanted to write is the texts GALLOWS [POTENCE] [potence in the right column rhymes with what is said about potens in the analysis of Hegel and Schelling on the left]. I expose myself to it, I tend toward it very much [beaucoup], I stretch much on it. Anyhow, the scene will nish badly. He is going to be furious with me [men vouloir a mort; thats my fear of Genets reading], I know from experience the law ` of this process [we know a writer cant tolerate any reading whatsoever]. He will be furious with me for all sorts of reasons I will not undertake to enumerate. And at all events and cases. If I support or valorize his text [hell be furious either way, whether I say good or bad of it makes no difference], he will see in

Countersignature 37 this a sort of approbation, verily of magisterial, university, paternal or maternal appropriation. It is as if I were stealing his erection from him. His death: And the picture showing the capital execution of a convict in Cayenne made me say: He has stolen my death (Miracle of the Rose). And if, furthermore, I expose as a professor the Great(er) Logic of this operation, I do nothing but aggravate the case. If I was not valorizing, not magnifying his glas (but what have I done on the whole?), the ringer would fuck me again. Anyhow the signer recalled to Roger Blin a lost letter in which he had conded to Blin that his own books and plays were written against himself [There! Against himself ! He signs against himself !]. But he added: And if I do not succeed through the text itself to expose myself, then you have to help me. Against myself. . . Elsewhere, that his actors had to show him, he himself, naked. So, anyhow, I am judged and condemned, that is what he always sought to do: if I write for his text, I write against him, if I write for him, I write against his text. This friendship is irreconcilable. [There is the theme of irreconcilable friendship from LEnnemi dclar, how can a friendship e e be irreconcilable?] Anyhow, he will vomit [the theme of vomiting is constant in Glas: its the gl] all that (a) for me, he will not read, will not be able to read. c Do I write for him? What would I like to do to him? do to his work? Ruin it by erecting it, perhaps. So that one reads it no more? So that one only reads it starting from here, from the moment I myself consign and countersign it? (199-200)

In other words, is what I wanted that one only read him after, starting from, my countersignature? There follows a quotation from Warda, and a repeat of there are always, after all, of the remain(s), two functions overlapping each other, and two mournings that, each time transforming it, repeat a theme that appeared earlier and will reappear some fty pages further, the canopy of the upturned eye [dais de lil rvuls] (260) or the e e milk of mourning [lait de deuil]. His tomb, he loves only that (201). On the same page, the opposite or facing column on Hegel deals with an asexual brother-sister relation, and then a word that can mean the contrary. The theme of contrariety, and of the Christian mother can also be found in Hegel. . . In other words, reading the two columns, one can see the play of signatures, countersignatures, proximity and contradiction, enacted in permanence. To conclude in a few words, thanking you for your patience, I shall at least outwardly move away from Genets texts and those of mine that countersign them, but without really leaving Genets path and the ways it crossed mine, despite innumerable and massive differences. It would be impossible to imagine two more different existences than

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Genets and mine. How could these paths cross? I call Genets path a certain trajectory, an irresistible movement making its way, the way of a single signature, through journeys, return trips [allers-retours], counterpaths [contre-alles], wanderings, in a erce race towards death. e Genet runs to/on death [marche a la mort]. Somewhere, I wrote that ` about myself: I run to/on death. In other words, I run towards death, but also I run on death like a fuel, as an engine runs on petrol. I run on death, death is what makes me run. In this erce race, he runs on death implies a suicidal signature, if such a thing is possible, a signed suicide, a consigned suicide, a signature destined to sign only to bring about its own effacement [arriver a ` seffacer]. That is, to attain, to arrive at its own effacement, but also to come about, to happen, as its own effacement. Simultaneously event and effacement. There lies the betrayal as self-betrayal, as if the only possible, or impossible, event were a suicide worthy of the name. This suicide can happen in a moment or last, or accompany, or inspire an entire lifetime. It can be decided in a second, but it involves decision. Thinking the signature is inseparable from thinking the decision and the moment of decision. This decision, as I tried to show elsewhere, is anothers decision. My suicide is always a murder come from the other, a heterocide, a non-suicide or a homicide. What does that mean? What do I want to suggest by this dream of an impossible suicide? And why did I always feel close to Genet, right against him, despite all the differences? perhaps because of this obsession, this theatre of the possible and impossible suicide. The possible-impossible suicide haunts every signature as signature and as countersignature. Today and elsewhere I have stressed the yes, the double yes etched by the countersignature, the afrmative, performative force it implies. Nonetheless, at this moment I also believe that the afrmative and performative force at work in a countersignature is doomed to failure and suicide. It is doomed to fail any way, in at least two ways I shall indicate in conclusion. It is doomed to fail, to commit suicide, rstly, because it is impossible that the counter of the vis-` -vis, proximity, iterability a or afrmation should not be encroached on by the counter of destructive opposition. There is complicity, contagion, contamination between these two counters. At work even in my signature as countersignature-conrmed-and-authenticated by itself is a self-destruction that must accept the survival of the signature after the signatorys death thus countersigned or countersigning.

Countersignature 39

The signatory, the signature is swept away and suicidal amnesia unites with the memory of the yes yes unable to avoid the deathly rigidity of mimetic or mechanical repetition. This is the rst reason. The second is that the defeat of the yess performative force is as inevitable as the catastrophe whereby a performative necessarily disappears in the face of what happens. This is a theme I have been trying to develop for some time, suggesting, in sum, that where there is an event, the performative must fail. Its the performatives limit. It is often rightly said that a performative produces an event, produces the event it speaks of. That is the denition of the performative. It does what it says, makes what it says happen. I say yes marriage, yes thus I produce the event I speak of. I sign, countersign, and that in effect produces the event at the side of the work or at the level of the work. But, insofar as every performative, every performative power is authorized by an I may, I can, is authorized by conventions and, by its decision, remains the master of the event thus produced, the subject of a performative act by denition masters the event it produces, it is supposed to produce. Well, that very mastery neutralizes the event it produces. Where there is mastery, there cannot be event. Nothing happens. An event must happen or touch me unexpectedly, unanticipatably, that is, without horizon, with no horizon of waiting, like the others coming. When the other comes, there is no performative. The others coming outstrips any performative force or power. In this sense, the event, the others unexpected coming, never signs or countersigns. Thus the word countersignature can assume another meaning, neither that of authenticating conrmation, the performative yes yes to a signature, mine or anothers; nor merely (or more) the dialectical opposition to the signature; but the very event that designates, countersigns in another sense the countersignature itself, that suicides the signature, so to speak, carries it away, undoes it, exceeds it, effaces it, derides it. It is suicide itself. In this sense, if the marrying, the becoming conjoined I spoke of, especially in relation to Ponges text, is to be an event worthy of the name, it must exceed the performative legitimization of the conventional yes yes, that is of the signature or countersignature. It must take place, if it takes place, unexpectedly, invisibly, secretly, wordlessly, without a patronymic or matronymic name. Beyond the fathers or mothers name. A decision that reckons unconditionally with the undecidable only by trusting to a perhaps or an as if, where performative mastery fails. It is perhaps as if I had married or as if I

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was committing suicide. Waiting for death a waiting that moreover waits for nothing, expects nothing is the experience of something like an event exceeding every performative, and thus every signature and every countersignature. That is why I cannot sign my death, even if I sign my death sentence, even if I believe I am killing myself. This waiting without waiting, this waiting with no horizon of waiting, makes the excess of death both lighter and graver. To nish, I would like to quote Genet again from LEnnemi dclar, e e in the interview, one of the funniest ever, with Bertrand Delpech:
B.P.-D.: The Screens present death as something not very dreadful or important after all. Is that your opinion? J.G.: Its Mallarm s opinion also: This shallow stream. . . , you know the rest. e [This has also an autobiographical resonance for me: when my friend Paul De Man, suffering like Genet from cancer and knowing he was going to die, wrote me a letter, he too quoted this shallow stream. . .. ] Death. . . at least the passage from life to non-life to me seems not very sad, not very dangerous for one if the vocabulary is changed: the passage from life to non-life instead of life to demise is suddenly nearly consoling, isnt it? The change of vocabulary is whats important. Dedramatizing. The word is frequently used these days dedramatize the situation. I dedramatize the situation that will make a dead man of me by using other words. B.P.-D.: A dramatic author who dedramatizes? J.G.: Precisely. If I tried to develop a sort of dramaturgy, it was to settle a score with society. Now, Im indifferent, the score has been settled. B.P.-D.: Youre not angry, youve no scene to make? J.G.: Oh! I afrm it so peremptorily, so sharply that I wonder if truly I am not angry, have no scene to make. There you may be onto something. I believe I will die still with anger against you. B.P.-D.: And hatred? J.G.: No, I hope not, youre not worth it. B.P.-D.: Who is worth your hatred? J.G.: The few people I love deeply, and who touch me. (ED, 232-3)

And again, in the interview with Nigel Williams at the close of LEnnemi dclar: e e
N.G.: And what do you do with your days there? J.G.: Ah yes, you want to address the problem of time? Well, Ill answer like Saint Augustine in relation to time: Im waiting for death. (306)

My thesis, my hypothesis, is that the thought of suicide was impossible for Genet who, besides, as he says himself, wrote Prisoner

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of Love at a moment when his cancer had already manifested itself. He truly wrote it between the rst operation for cancer and his death. My thesis, my hypothesis, is that this thought of the impossible suicide is nevertheless readable everywhere in his writings. As proof, and these are my last quotations, it is enough to read this passage in Fragments. . .:
The thought not the summons but the thought of suicide, appeared to me clearly around my fortieth year, brought, it seems to me, by the boredom of living, by an inner void that nothing, except an absolute decline, seemed able to abolish.11

There are many other passages I could quote as evidence of this thought of suicide, but I shall stop with this one:
Before knowing him, I had wanted to commit suicide. But his presence, and then his image in me, then his possible fate, coming not from him but from that image, overwhelmed me. He refused to exist according to this image. (30)

JACQUES DERRIDA Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Translated by Mairad Hanrahan) e NOTES
1 Text pronounced on the occasion of the conference Potiques de Jean Genet: e La Traverse des Genres, held at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisye la-Salle, 14-21 August 2000. The original French version is due to appear shortly in the Acts of this conference, edited by Albert Dichy and Patrice Bougon (Paris, IMEC, 2005). 2 Jacques Derrida, Glas, translated by J. Leavey and R. Rand (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 41-2. 3 Prisoner of Love, translated by Barbara Bray with an introduction by Ahdaf Soueif (New York, New York Review Books, 2003), 32. 4 Entretien avec Antoine Bourseiller in Jean Genet, LEnnemi dclar, edited e e by Albert Dichy (Paris, Gallimard, 1991; henceforward ED), 225-6. 5 That Strange Word. . . in Fragments of the Artwork, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 111-2. 6 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, translated by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1993), 268; translation modied. 7 La Contre-alle, avec Catherine Malabou (Paris, La Quinzaine litt raire-Louis e e Vuitton, 1999), 57-8.

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8 I do not include in this series the Cerisy conference devoted in 1998 to H l` ne ee Cixous, another admired and respected friend. For luckily she is alive. 9 Jacques Derrida, SignpongeDSignsponge, translated by Richard Rand (New e York, Columbia University Press, 1984), 124-8. 10 Our Lady of the Flowers, translated by Bernard Frechtman (London, Panther, 1966), 261. 11 Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 23.