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AT THE LIMIT OF SUBJECTIVITY: ETHICS, COMMUNITY, BIRTH,
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PYNCHON, SAMUEL R. DELANY, STEVEN SPIELBERG, AND
JOEL AND ETHAN COEN

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AT THE LIMIT OF SUBJECTIVITY: ETHICS, COMMUNITY, BIRTH, AND THE
POSTHUMAN IN THE NARRATIVES OF THOMAS PYNCHON, SAMUEL R.
DELANY, STEVEN SPIELBERG, AND JOEL AND ETHAN COEN

By

Todd A. Comer

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2005

ABSTRACT

AT THE LIMIT OF SUBJECTIVITY: ETHICS, COMMUNITY, BIRTH, AND THE
POSTHUMAN IN THE NARRATIVES OF THOMAS PYNCHON, SAMUEL R.
DELANY, STEVEN SPIELBERG, AND JOEL AND ETHAN COEN.

By
Todd A. Comer

At the Limit of Subjectiviy explores whether, in the aftermath of such
calamitous events as World War II, the Shoah, and Vietnam, the subject and the
structures it initiates retain any ethical resonance. After marshalling a diverse
assortment of American films and novels by Steven Spielberg, Joel and Ethan
Coen, Samuel R. Delany, and Thomas Pynchon, I respond in the negative. My
project interrogates the ethical limits of the subject—its presumption of
beneficence, its diversity—and its metaphysical cousins (community, city, nation,

and Humanism). Ultimately, I argue for what I term “singularity,” defined as a
non-exclusionary, intrinsically plural being-with (“community”). I detail how myth
and subjectivity are concurrent, symbiotic creations only to then critique the
essential hermeneutic and literal violence of this economy which elides
singularity. Against such violence, I argue for singularity as that which can be
glimpsed when a subjectivity falters (when such “faltering” is not a ploy to rebuild
the subject), or its myth (work/oeuvre) is interrupted. At the Limit of Subjectiviy
contributes simultaneously to the debates on subjectivity and postmodern ethics,

paying close attention to how these novels and films formally communicate this

ethics. The above singularity is repeatedly represented through the mourning of
the dead other. Mourning is the limitless non-work upon which no project can be
built and, lacking a project, this singularity also lacks the borders requisite for
exclusion: the “inside” and “outside” are exposed to one another in a strange sort
of spacing. Postmodernity is represented in these works, then, as a period of
mourning in which rational agents struggle to re—work reality, but to no avail.
Since singularity is glimpsed when myth is interrupted, l closely examine how

these films and novels interrupt their own mythic coherence.

For Dawn and Baby E.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At the Limit of Subjectivity could not have been a more collaborative
venture. I extend my thanks to my committee, Patrick O’Donnell (dir.), Eyal
Amiran, Clint Goodson, and Scott Michaelsen. Early in my academic career, Clint
was kind enough to lead me through two independent studies of Foucault and
Derrida; around the same time, Eyal guided me through my first critical essay
which developed into my thesis; Scott introduced me to the work of Jean-Luc
Nancy whose influence on these pages is unmistakable; and, in addition to
influencing my literary and filmic tastes, Pat has had the ill fortune to have been
the ultimate organizer of these disparate influences. Thank you.

I also extend my heartfelt thanks to Dana Hollander (now of McMaster
University) and Joseph Natoli (retired MSU), for their comments and guidance as
I struggled through the aporetic world of The Big Lebowski. To David Sheridan,
Associate Director of the MSU Writing Center and a good friend, for reading my
pages and influencing my thinking on technology and pedagogy. To the editorial
staff, anonymous and othenrvise, of SubStance and The Journal of Narrative
T_hegy for their immensely helpful feedback and for publishing two of my
chapters. To Scott Juengel for providing invaluable advice as I entered and
defeated the monster that is the job market.

Many MSU friends—including Kirk Astle, Christine Cavanaugh, Maureen
Lauder, Amy Nolan, and David Wilson—have provided valuable feedback on my

work. Innumerable others have made my time at MSU a joy: Huang-hua Chen

and Ying-ju Lai, Jenn Nichols, Christopher Chase, Basuli Deb, Shruti Tewari,
Emron and Marlene Esplin, Patricia and Dan Sithole, Tammy Stone, Olabode
lbironke, \firgene Kirby, Melissa Hasbrook, Scott Huggins, Sergei Urazhdin,
David Prestel, David Wetzell, Keith and Agnes Vlfidder, and the emerging
Atlantikos editorial collective.

As a final note, I would like to thank two influences that pre-date my time
at MSU. Matt McCrady first introduced me to Barton Fink more than a decade
ago, helped me rethink my work on the Coens and, as always, made the
conversation exciting. Thanks, Matt, for your friendship. My spouse of ten years,
Dawn, read all of these pages several times and listened to repetitive
vocalizations of my “readings.” If there were an award for patience and

perseverance, she would certainly be in the running.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER 1

“This Aggression Will Not Standz” Myth, War, and Ethics in Joel and Ethan
Coens’ The Big Lebgwski ....................................................................... 29
CHAPTER 2

Paranoid Nations/Subjects and Their Un-Bordering in Thomas Pynchon’s
Gravity’s Rainbow ................................................................................ 59
CHAPTER 3

Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren ........................................... 95
CHAPTER 4

Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: Who Comes After the Humanist
Subject? ........................................................................................... 126
CONCLUSION ................................................................................... 163
WORKS CITED .................................................................................. 169

vii

INTRODUCTION

“They stood apart and felt very close.”—Samuel R. Delany, W

"Community is calibrated on death as on that of which it is precisely

impossible to make a work."—Jean-Luc Nancy, The lnoperative
Communm

[it the Limit of Sub'lectivig originated in an investigation of literary and filmic
representations of community in recent American novels and films by Thomas
Pynchon, Samuel R. Delany, Steven Spielberg, and the Coen Brothers. Mine
was not an isolated interest as it was very much propelled by the recent
outpouring of texts by Maurice Blanchot (The Unavowgble Commrmo, Giorgio
Agamben (The Coming Communig), Alphonso Lingis (The Commgnitmmjse
Who Have Nothing in Common), Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities),
William Corlett (Commnitv VWthout Unity), Jacques Derrida (On Hospitalig and
Politics_of F riend_s_h_ig, among others), and Jean-Luc Nancy (The lnoperative
Community). The fact that community retains a fascination for those both on the
left and the right is an obvious, if little critiqued, fact. Popular examples are easy
to come by. Consider the following from the commencement address George
Bush delivered at Calvin College in 2005:

The book is called Democracy in Ameflg, and in it this young

Frenchman said that the secret to America's success was our talent for

bringing people together for the common good. De Tocqueville wrote that
tyrants maintained their power by "isolating" their citizens--and that
Americans guaranteed their freedom by their remarkable ability to band
together without any direction from government. The America he
described offered the world something it had never seen before: a working
model of a thriving democracy where opportunity was unbounded, where
virtue was strong, and where citizens took responsibility for their
neighbors.

Tocqueville's account is not just the observations of one man—it is
the story of our founding. It's not just a description of America at a point in
time--it is an agenda for our time. Our Founders rejected both a radical
individualism that makes no room for others, and the dreary collectivism
that crushes the individual. They gave us instead a society where
individual freedom is anchored in communities. And in this hopeful new
century, we have a great goal: to renew this spirit of community and
thereby renew the character and compassion of our country.

To say the least, De Tocqueville’s and Bush’s optimism elides the pervasive
oppression of women, Native Americans, and African-Americans to name just a
few of the most prominent exclusions. Bush is somewhat confusing here in that
while he is certainly emphasizing community, community begins with individuals
who then join together “for the common good.” Tyrants (who are, naturally, the
epitome of rampant individualism) are defeated because people who are already

isolated (as individuals) are able to overcome whatever social control might have

kept them even more separate so that they can march en masse against
oppression and regain their status as individuals once again.1 The anchoring of
freedom in community that Bush speaks of is an anchoring that only comes to
the foreground at a moment of crisis. But then Bush states,
First, we must understand that the character of our citizens is
essential to society. In a free and compassionate society, the public
good depends on private character. That character is formed and
shaped in institutions like family, faith, and the many civil and--
social and civic organizations, from the Boy Scouts to the local
Rotary Clubs. The future success of our nation depends on our
ability to understand the difference between right and wrong and to
have the strength of character to make the right choices.
Government cannot create character, but it can and should respect
and support the institutions that do.
I am puzzled as I trust anyone would be by these sentences. The individual is the
foundation to the “public good” and, yet, Bush then remarks that this “private
character” finds its substance in public institutions. “[Glovernment cannot create
character,” but why exactly these institutions (Boy Scouts and Rotary Clubs and
so on) and not government are able to “shape” character is not clear at all. And,
following Foucault, doesn't the very fact that government “supports” these
institutions demonstrate that government does, in fact, create character? If Bush

intends some sort of Iaissez faire libertarian message, he misses it in the way

 

1 This is confusing logic indeed whose source appears to be the notion that there are degrees of
individuality. The logic of the individual is the logic of the absolute, however. One is in-divis-ible
as an individual. It does not admit degrees, but dwells in the realm of either/or.

that he and his administration rhetorically economize on private character. The
distinction between private and public does not seem very tenable. Apart from
these confusions, it seems clear that it is the smaller unity, the individual as
opposed to the community, or the local community as opposed to the federal
government that is privileged.

I can think of no more influential book than Hillary Rodham Clinton’s I_t
Takes a Village to balance out Bush’s rhetoric. Clinton writes,

Children exist in the world as well as in the family. From the moment they

are born, they depend on a host of other “grown-ups”--grandparents,

neighbors, teachers, ministers, employers, political leaders, and untold

others who touch their lives directly and indirectly [. . . ] each of us plays a

part in every child’s life: It takes a village to raise a child.

I chose that old African proverb to title this book because it offers a

timeless reminder that children will thrive only if their families thrive and if

the whole of society cares enough to provide for them. (11-12)
Clinton wants to begin with community (and society) and argue for the
importance of connection for the health and well-being of children. However, her
argument very quickly implies that community is at risk, that this connection has
been lost in a world which is increasingly “frantic and fragmented” and which, she
says, denies representation. She writes of a “technology [which] connects us to
the impersonal global village it has created” (13-14). Community used to have a
limit, a border denoted by a sign that might state “City Limit.” Today that village is

global and its sign posts are 003, emails, movies, and the Internet (though she

quickly returns to the nation and its “national character” in her first chapter).
However, “alienation and divisiveness” are still possible.

Clinton and Bush’s “theories” about community are not essentially
different. They both depend on a notion of subjectivity about which I have much
to say. As well as one can tell, in Bush’s case, community is formed of
preexisting individuals who then mass together to form a larger communal entity.
In Clinton’s case, community is what creates or at least allows for children to
thrive. Community appears to come first, with individuals aftenNards. Clinton
makes gestures toward a community with no limits, but then smuggles back into
her argument the nation. But what is crucial for me is her insinuation that
community can be lost (“alienation”) and her concern over the increasing difficulty
of representing the global village. Community, in the precise sense in which I
intend it, cannot be lost and reveals itself only in the absence of representation.
Representation, as I argue throughout, bolsters the subject, so that it becomes
clear that, yes, community does posses limits, the limits that exclude and make
possible hermeneutic and literal violence.

By no means do I want to put forward an exhaustive critique of Bush and
Clinton; such critiques already exist. Referencing their work is a productive way,
however, to demonstrate both the continuing allure of community and the degree
to which the thinking of community remains constrained by notions whose
separate traditions go back to John Locke and Thomas Hobbes (Van Den
Abbeele “Introduction” xi). In the case of Locke, the social contract points to

preexisting subjects who then come together to form a community (Bush). In the

case of Hobbes, the community itself exists as a subject on its own, subsuming
the particular individuals who participate in it (Clinton).

Since the subject is so important to this question of being together, it
would be useful to sketch in a preparatory fashion the epistemological problem
that the doctrine of the subject inaugurates. The theory of the subject, as
constructed in modern philosophy, assumes a separation from the object. It is
this separation that then leads to the great epistemological question of how to
transcend the self and know the object world in a manner that is not simply
narcissistic or idealistic in the philosophical sense. Levinas writes that “The
cogito presided over the subject's birth. The cogito was the affirrnation of the
privileged nature of the subject's immanent sphere, of its unique place in
existence” (“Martin Heidegger” 12-14). Knowledge, then, becomes the problem
as the truth of the object ends up being simply a violent construction of the
cogito. In the context then of notions of diversity and community championed by
liberals such as Charles Taylor in his “The Politics of Recognition, ” the problem
becomes one of how to theorize a community or a diversity that does not
separate an immanent “subject” from the “object” and lead to a community that is
defined by narcissistic assimilation. Any politics, ethics, or multiculturalism built
upon the rational subject will always be oppressive.

“Community,” therefore, is not a benign concept to the degree that it is
constructed upon such a notion of the subject. As John Caputo and others have
noted, the term already indicates its potential for violence etymologically (i.e.,

“munitions,” 108-109). In Peter Weir’s Witness, the viewer is easily moved by the

Amish community, the unified masses of men and women raising a barn for one
of their own. But this communal orgasm is not simply benevolent. The joy of
community is inextricably linked to the raising up of walls against alterity. This is
most directly seen in the threatened violence against Rachel, if she should be too
influenced by the outsider, John Book. The joys of unity always mask a project of
discipline and exclusion that begins with the immanent cogito’s assimilation of
the object world. “Communitarianism,” Caputo writes, “assumes some sort of
deep truth in the tradition upon which the individual draws as long as he remains
tapped into its flow; whereas for [poststructuralists] one must watch out for the
ways in which tradition and community become excuses for conservatism, for the
exclusion of the incoming of the other.”

The question, then, that drove the project was how to theorize a community
that would not fall prey to this ready antagonism. How, in short, to imagine a non-
exclusionary community? As I indicate above, I quickly discovered that the
question needed to be posed at a deeper ontological level—the level of the
subject—for a simple reason: Such has been the allure of the Cartesian subject
that no group, community, nation, or polis has ever been able to escape the pull
of the subject. Or, at least this is true for the thinking of community here in the
“West” even if this limitation is not, in fact, true on the level of existence.
Existence is always with others, as Heidegger argued for Dasein.

I seek not to demonstrate a “postmodern subjectivity,” but to show how
certain events and experiences today—that is, in the first hesitant breaths of the

21"” century—unveil our “essential” nature, not as monadic subjects, but as

singularities who are always already in “community,” in the midst of the “with.”
Subjectivity, not just what passes for “postmodern subjectivity,” is communal, in
the specific, non-metaphysical sense in which I define the word below. Following
from this analysis, each chapter additionally addresses ethics, birth, and
posthumanism.

Justly famous, Fredric Jameson’s analysis of the nature and politics of the
postmodern subject has haunted At the Limit of Subjectivity and will serve, for
this reason, as a ready counterpoint to my own argument. In the context of late
capitalism, Jameson describes a subject for whom history is lost. Lacking that
representation which is History, this subject has no ground for political praxis. He
or she is lost, unable to cognitively map the confusing world of late capital. If the
subject is an artist, his or her art has no punch. Obscenity has no meaning
because even it “has become integrated into commodity production generally”
(4). If obscenity can no longer create a critical nodal point in the flux of
postmodernity, a progressive politics has little chance. Briefly, I argue that there
is no subject (in Jameson’s sense), that the “subject” itself is capitalist and any
representation or progressive politics (that follows from this subject) must
therefore also be capitalistic through and through, that what we see as the
“postmodern subject” is—rather than simply nihilistic—driven by an ethical
injunction, that it is less late capital and more a series of horrific events that

allows the “postmodern subject” to be seen as such.

One of the key analyses in Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, concerns Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream. The
painting, he writes, is

a canonical expression of the great modernist thematics of alienation,
anomie, solitude, social fragmentation, and isolation, a virtually
programmatic emblem of what used to be called the age of anxiety. It will
here be read as an embodiment not merely of the expression of that kind
of affect but, even more, as a virtual deconstruction of the very aesthetic
of expression itself, which seems to have dominated much of what we call
high modernism [. . .] The very concept of expression presupposes indeed
some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole
metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the
monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that “emotion” is then
projected out and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate
communication and the outward dramatizations of inward feeling. (11-12)
Munch’s painting emphasizes the distance, or depth, between the homunculus in
the foreground and the background in which, fittingly, a couple’s intimate
communion underlines the isolation of the homunculus—this, at any rate, is
Jameson’s implicit reading. The horror of the painting resides in this separation
from others, from community, and it is this agony that gives rise to the grand
modernist expressionua “desperate communication”-—in art and literature.
Representation then serves, or ought to serve the modern subject as a means of

interrogating this isolation. Expression implies a separation that always already

exists and, as Jameson points out, “a whole metaphysics of the inside and
outside.” And this, he argues, is good. Such depth—the distance implied
between an inside and an outside—allows for a clear sense of self and other, a
well-mapped position vis-a-vis late capitalist business, for instance. Opposed to
this modern situation is the postmodern cultural dominant in which simulacra,
depthlessness rules. I would distinguish the two in the following way: where the
modern subject (and its representations) hint at an interiority, a secret to be
uncovered by dint of diligent hermeneutical analysis, the postmodern subject has
no such depth; the postmodern subject is all surface, entirely of the image, hence
providing no depth, or ground, for political praxis.

In Jameson’s work, his modern subject is already alone and centered before
any attempt at expression. The subject only reaches out for expression because
it is always already agonizing over this lack of relation to others. However, in the
context of postmodernity, Jameson argues for representation as a means of
mending the subject.2 When he argues in his opening chapter for the importance
of cognitive mapping as a means of putting an end to our postmodern spatial
confusion, he is arguing for a map, or representation that will divide up the world,
with all the requisite borders back in place between the self and other. He is, in
effect, reversing the process; instead of an intact monad that casts out

representational nets, representation mends or, as I argue, creates the monad as

 

2 Ironically, contradictorily, Jameson is troubled by the demise of History in which the subject “can
no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history
which was once itself present” (25). If the subject is monadic, it was never able to gaze directly on
the “real world” and his desire to return to this situation is wrong-headed from the start. Jameson
appears willing to acknowledge that representation is already removed from reality (hence,
“putative”), but prefers a world in which this recognition is not thoroughgoing--widespread, this
conception of history will not motivate any political action.

10

well as: the self as style, and the moral or normative ground that would allow
parody, or critique, to be something other than “blank” (16-19).

Representation assimilates difference, recreating the world of the monad in
which the homunculus finds itself incapable of communicating with anyone but
itself. The other that would be communicated with is assimilated ahead of time
irregardless of what he or she brings to the discursive table. There’s a tension,
then, between a modern subject who, apparently, does not want to be a monad,
and yet is, giving voice to this agony in art like The Scream, and Jameson’s
desire to return this “fragmented” subject to alienation. Why would a postmodern
subject—who is clearly no longer alienated from others if we follow Jameson’s
argument—want to return to his or her “previous” alienation? The very catalyst
for expression--isolation--is gone. (Additionally, if this isolation is in fact gone
would this not cast into doubt all grounds or foundations upon which violence is
built, eliminating the need for a progressive politics as such?) All of which
suggests that perhaps the subject and the subject’s isolation begins with
representation and not the other way around—the subject does not begin as a
monad that only then (sparked by the horror of isolation) represents the world.
Jameson’s emphasis on cognitive mappingnagain, a form of representation--only
reinforces this view.

Jameson describes the distinction between the modern and postmodern
“subject” as one between alienation and fragmentation (14). But that does not go
far enough (for me, at any rate) and in doing so, once again, indicates his

reliance on the monad. Fragmentation implies a previously whole monad, while

11

all my work here suggests that there was never a “whole” in the sense of total
subjectival immanence, what Derrida terms self-presence: the well-bordered
exclusionary monad. Rather, this “wholeness,” to use metaphysically suspect
language, can only crudely point to a “ground” of mutual relation to others (more
on this momentarily). It can only indicate that each of us does not and never
exists alone, as some sort of god-like subject.

Traditionally there are two ways of imagining a ground for being, that of an
absolute self-enclosure (the Jamesonian monad) and that of the “between” (that
which exists “between” structures, implying that a structure is never simply
immanent). I argue that the subject and the representation that is concomitant
with the subject is created as a response to the horror of this “between,” that is,
the fact that each human subject is in the worid in the sense that Heidegger
intended. This knowledge of the “between” entails a recognition that the “l” owes
its being to others, an awareness, in short, of the abyssal ground upon which
each of us rests. To revise the above Munch reading, the homunculus is horrified
not by his isolation, but by his connection to others (the bridge between them)
which implies his utter dependence on the world. The hands upraised to the face
and sides of his head, could be thought of as a shield, a representational border
erected against others. While this may seem an implausible reading after
decades of reified assumptions about the meaning of this very famous painting,
the analysis is fair.

Repeatedly, this “between” is played out in terms of borders in the texts and

films under examination here. Borders are simply representations and, as such,

12

the following is relevant to any discussion of the use of myth, or narratives of any
sort. Borders are what allow the subject the illusion of self-creation, eliminating
the between. Behind well-patrolled borders, the subject exists as a monad, a
pinprick atomic self. Weakness, death, alterity, are kept safely at a distance with
the assistance of these borders. What I call “community” occurs at the moment
that these representations are interrupted. As the borders of that self are
breached the self finds its consciousness no longer isolated and contained in that
monadic enclosure, but “spaced-out” and into the other to use Nancy’s terms (Q
29). In Dhalgren, Delany describes this very concretely as the experience of a
bathtub having its stopper removed; the water (interior) escaping down the
plumbing (exterior). In Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, this is connected
directly to consciousness when David speaks of his “brain falling out.” That which
is “interior” is found to be “outside” where the other, according to subjectival logic,
is said to exist, demonstrating the “subject’s” reliance on the world.

During this experience, it is no longer possible to represent a subjectival
inside or outside. And, in the absence of this separation of self and other via
representation, we see what I mean by community or relation.3 The “self” and
“other” are together in a manner that the subject can by its very nature never
recognize (because rational recognition is grounded in categorical separation). A

much better term for this “community” has been conceptualized by Nancy. He

 

3 “Relation” implies finitude; it confronts each of us with a world that can never stabilize, never be
mastered, but reveals the groundless ground of our existence. (There is, of course, another
horror in these texts-~it is the horror of the monad and its appropriative and violent projection.)
Though I will find occasion to use the term, “relation” is not an accurate term for what I am after
as the term already implies a subjectival wholeness—only a subject can be in relation (Nancy “Of
Being-in-Common” 4).

13

calls it “being-with,” following Heidegger (“Love and Community”). Being-with, he
says, implies nearness, but not the sort of nearness that is allied with
assimilation, or ingestion, to an inside. Here proximity is not assimilation. So,
being-with in this sense entails both proximity, but also distance (in the sense,
again, that there is no assimilation of the other). It denotes the “distance of the
impossibility to come together in a common being [i.e., subject].” The opening
epigraph by Delany describes this logic nicely, “They stood apart and felt very
close.” Being-with violates the metaphysical reliance on categories of inside and
outside which serve to simplify existence and strengthen the self. Being-with
indicates the impossibility of controlling the world, keeping difference at bay.
Where a subjectival representation founders, there being-with will be found,
though, in all truth, being-with is always there. It is only highlighted to a greater
degree at such moments.

I disagree with Jameson in regards to the “postmodern subject,” then, in
three basic ways: 1. the “subject” begins not as a monad, but always with others;
being-with is the central trait of the “postmodern” subject; 2. the subject has its
being by erasing the other, the contradiction of its self, through representation; 3.
the subject is grounded in a flight from its essential finitude—its and our reliance

on the world.

*‘k'k

14

While I generally focus on texts of an ostentatiously “postmodern” nature,
there are a number of recent American texts whose content, if not form, may be
read similarly and which may serve as a productive example for what follows.

Weir’s Witness relates what looks like a simple story of an Amish boy, traveling

 

through Philadelphia, who witnesses a murder staged by crooked cops. John
Book (Harrison Ford) plays the self-righteous cop who discovers that the chief of
police Schaeffer (Josef Sommer) is behind the killing and quickly escorts Samuel
Lapp (Lukas Haas) home. Schaeffer eventually locates the family and Book and
stages a showdown at the Lapp family farm. The film is less, to my mind, a police
melodrama than a case study in the ethical interaction of different cultures.

At first glance, Witness privileges the subjectival monad. The Amish

 

community appears as a locus of morality and benevolence against the criminal,
technological, individualistic world of Philadelphia. The final showdown in which
Schaeffer is defeated by a group of unarmed Amish seems to put fonrvard a
simplistic argument about pacifism and good will and how the other reminds
us—as diversity in a liberal register always argues—about other, better ways of
being: that is, the Amish remind us of the idealistic origin of Philadelphia as The
City of Brotherly Love. However, it is quite evident that the central virtues of
Amish life are not enough: humility, plainness, non-violence still lead to
exclusion. These are virtues tied inextricably to structure and, hence, to violence.
In a simple sense, structure is ego, and any real “humility” must be found in what

confounds structure.

15

There are lots of additional problems with this reading. To begin with, there is
no real, essential difference between the individualistic world of Philadelphia and
the communal Amish. Schaeffer says as much when he identifies the Amish with
the police and describes the police as a “cult.” Both patrol borders and ensure
that those on the inside behave and project a certain idea of what it means to be,
say, an Amish Subject. Both are bound by the metaphysics of subjectivity. Both
have in mind a certain representation of what it means to be Amish, or a cop
(involved in certain illegalities), and all their efforts are meant to lead toward a
resolution of reality with that idea. Each projects an image of the One Subject
toward which all their energy is devoted, including such disciplining measures as
shunning, or even murder.

In The Touch of Evil, when Miguel and Susan Vargas kiss on the border of
Mexico and the United States, a car bomb explodes, demonstrating the
impossibility or supposed evil of hybridity, or what Orson Welles’ character will
term the “half-breed.” No mixing is allowed. Hybridity implies the prior existence
of a subjectival monad when my own work suggests a way of thinking identity
and community that is shot through originarily with difference. In fitness, this
impossibility is played out less in terms of “racial” hybridity, than in the mixing of
the individualistic and the communal as in the following scene: having just
returned Samuel home, the wounded Book—played by one of the iconic
individuals of the last few decades (think: Han Solo)-faints and crashes his car
into a giant birdhouse, a representation of communal living. This breaching of

social borders at the moment of Book’s intrusion into Amish country must be

16

quickly healed, reforming the monad and eliminating being-with. Indeed, this sort
of narcissistic attention to the (communal) self is perhaps the most evident theme
in the film.

While this is true for both subjects, the nature of Amish community
accentuates this even more: the Amish are to be set apart from others. As such,
they become a perfect example of an atomic identity which secures its being
through enforced borders, through the control of space, keeping others out of
sight (Eli Lapp, the grandfather, quotes the Bible, “Wherefore come out from
among them and be ye separate”). The most telling evidence of this is Book,
whose name suggests the degree that everyone in this film is bound by identity
as seamless and, hence, exclusionary representation. The simplest evidence for

an interruption of this representation occurs at the very end of Witness as Book is

 

about to leave the Lapps. Eli (Jan Rubes) says to Book “You be careful, John
Book, out among them English.” Eli has come to recognize Book as Amish. The
significance of this speech can only be understood in the context of the
importance of being “separate” from others described above. If Book is now
Amish and not English, Amish identity is delocalized: Amish identity is spaced-
out and into the other. It is both present (in the local farms that define Amish
country) and absent (with Book in Philadelphia), both proximate and distant: it
signifies being-with.

_W_itfl_e;s_ opens with very low shots of waving grass which obscure our view
and it is only gradually that we see the Amish, and understand that what we are

seeing are funeral guests. Samuel’s father has recently died. It is not a stretch

17

here to say that the ground and death are associated with one another: the
ground of our being is death, or finitude. The witnessing of the Amish is identified
with this ground against a panoptical, hence assimilative positioning, represented
by Schaeffer—consider, for instance, the shot of Schaeffer from very high up on
the road as he and his cronies descend to murder Book and the Lapps.

Samuel does witness a killing and while that experience can overwhelm
subjectivity, I want to focus on an earlier scene. Before witnessing the murder,
Samuel wanders around Philadelphia’s 30‘h street train station only to stop before
a large statue of an Angel holding a limp, assumedly dead, man in his arms. In
point of fact, this statue memorializes Pennsylvania railroad workers who died
during World War II (Crowder). It seems to me that the Amish mode of
witnessing, if it can be called such, cannot be separated from that seen here: the
angel presents (witnesses) to us the fact of our mortality, the essential finitude
that subjectivity works to erase.

The final standoff occurs at the Lapp farm with Schaeffer leveling a gun at
Book, the Lapp family, and a gathering of Amish men who have run to the farm
from the surrounding fields. These men are unarmed. But there are many of
them and Eli says, “So, will you kill us all, then?” Book holds Samuel in a manner
similar to the Angel’s embrace of the dead man while repeating Eli’s question
several times. Eli’s implicit point is that there is no end to killing: the subject does
not have the resources to stabilize the world. There is simply too much alterity to
process, to kill. Alterity is always out there, ready to run in at the first sign of

trouble. What Eli implies, and this group of defenseless persons witnesses to, is

18

human finitude—that Schaeffer, like the man the Angel holds, will also die-~and
that, finally, is what compels Schaeffer to surrender.

Schaeffer’s desire for control is not different from that of the excited and
bewildered Samuel on his first trip away from the farm (in fact, Samuel’s

movement out to Philadelphia in the opening of Vthess is paralleled by

 

Schaeffer’s movement to Amish country at the end). Before approaching the
memorial statue, Samuel strolls alone through the train station. At one point, he
walks up to a man whom he recognizes as Amish, only to be disappointed. He
had approached a Hasidic Jew dressed in a similar fashion to himself. It is
fortunate that this encounter occurs in a train station as this is the setting of one
of Nancy’s clearest descriptions of being-with,
the logic of being-with corresponds to nothing other than what we could
call the banal phenomenology of unorganized groups of people.
Passengers in the same train compartment are simply seated next to each
other in an accidental, arbitrary, and completely exterior manner. They are
not linked. But they are also quite together inasmuch as they are travelers
on this train. . . (“Of-Being-in-Common” 7)
The point, very simply, is that Samuel was looking for a reference, a way of
centering his self, ridding the moment of its alterity, but finds this impossible. In
this Jew he finds himself and not himself, a relation and a non-relation, being-
with. What the Amish witness to, in other words, is not merely an ideal. We have
already seen how virtues like humility readily attach to structure in Amish life, so

witnessing cannot simply remain at the level of an ideal. If as l have argued

19

above, the film critiques the violence of ideals (seen most clearly in the threat of
shunning), witnessing needs to be thought in a different manner.

Witnessing confounds subjectivity, if nothing else. In fact, the point seems to
be that the other is incapable of being assimilated: the other is, like death,
resistant to being ontologized. The other, community, presents me with my
finitude, that is, the impossibility of assimilating the world (“So, will you kill us all,
then?”). I don’t mean to argue for witnessing as a simple justification of the Book,
or any legal/moralistic scheme. Rather, witnessing is a presentation to us of that
which interrupts such ego-laden representations.“ The angel (and his dead
burden) that would seem to be limited by the Book (the Law, the Bible, the
community) marks that inevitable point in any narrative where the narrative itself

unravels and gestures to the outside.

***

At the Limit of Subjectivig has two general movements. Each chapter opens
with a general analysis of subjectivity as concomitant with representation and a
critique of the hermeneutic and literal violence of the subjectival will to represent.
After showing the ethical limitations of the conservative (or “progressive” subject),

what each of my chapters does is “map” the impossibility of said subject’s

 

‘ The Pennsylvania Railroad War Memorial was sculpted out of bronze by Walker Hancock
(Crowder). Everything I write here hinges on this angel so that it is worth adding that the angel
reappears in the trophy case in the police office (and elsewhere as well): at the top of one
trophy—for marksmanship—a man is pointing a gun. The gun is pointing directly at an angel
poised on an adjacent trophy. (Behind these two trophies is the photo and newspaper clipping
which allow Samuel to identify the killer’s connection to the police.) This appears as a rather
specific critique of subjectival violence.

20

assimilation of alterity. Each chapter demonstrates that the subject will never be
able to master alterity. Something is always around to shatter the subject’s
narcissistic representation, foregrounding being-with.

It is not, however, multinational capital, as Jameson argues, that leads to the
“fragmentation” of the subject. He argues that this fragmentation is grounded in
an experience of the sublime which he locates not in God, or death (as I do), but
in multinational capitalism’s new technology which has become unrepresentable,
a situation that his cognitive maps are intended to remedy (34). In the context of
his argument about “multinational” business, his argument amounts to a
redrawing of national boundaries. Capital, as I argue in several places, is at the
heart of subjectivity and is figured repeatedly in the violence of borders, personal,
urban, and national. Clearly, lam one that would agree with the argument that if
“we” find it more difficult to act against Capital, surely the agents of Capital are
similarly mired in this postmodern sublime, however defined (see my chapter on
Pynchon and DeLillo for more on this). In any case, I argue explicitly that the
demise of the nation (and its un-bordering) frees us to confront the horror of a
subjectival, capitalist world run amok. In this confrontation is a hesitance, a
pause, an ethical imperative (as opposed to a metaphysical or moral imperative)
that my dissertation hopes to prolong.

Rather than capital, what compels that un-bordering, or “fragmentation” of the
subject, is mourning. There is a profound sense of mourning in these texts: the
mourning of the dead mythmaker, of the casualties of the Shoah, of the Humanist

Project. Death interrupts the rationalizing myths within which we are created as

21

subjects and through which we are simultaneously shielded from alterity, as
these texts and films demonstrate (“Death irremediably exceeds the resources of
a metaphysics of the subject,” Nancy writes in The Inoperative Community, 14).
Postmodernity and its “subject” are defined by this mourning.

Being “at the limit” designates a “subject” who, finally, recognizes his or her
own in-sign-ificance (Nancy M 50-52). This recognition (which can have
nothing to do with the metaphysics of cognition) amounts to an understanding, as
Drucilla Cornell puts it, that there is a “materiality that persists beyond any
attempt to conceptualize it” (original’s emphasis; 1). For Cornell and Derrida,
upon whom she draws, as for Nancy this limit is defined by death. The common
theoretical assumption of reality as “interpretation all the way down” stalls in the
face of the materiality of death.

The (ethical) question is how to theorize and how to hold onto this moment
during which the subject’s representations have foundered. However one
theorizes this experience, it cannot follow the typical metaphysics of the inside
and outside. If the subject creates itself in the very act of representation, as I
argue, and excludes the world in this very gesture, the question would be how to
imagine a singularity which does not follow this logic. Delineating the possibilities
for this singularity is one of the implicit themes of At the Limit of Subjectivity. As I
have said, each of the texts I deal with uses borders implicitly or explicitly as a
figure for the violence of the subject. One of the ways to respond to the ethical
injunction implicit in this violence, is to actively work against the creation of such

borders. This means, perhaps, moving past the well-bordered nation, as such

22

entities clearly bolster monadic individuals on the ground—Walter Sobchak of
The Big Lebowski and Franz Pbkler of Gravy ’s Rainbow both come to mind.

More generally, we must make representations of others and the world more
difficult, though not impossible, as that would lead to a horror equally as bad as
totalitarianism, that is, nihilism. We have a ready example of this in all the texts I
confront. At the diagetic level, each of these texts thematize a confrontation with
death, the interruption of the subject and its representations; within Gravig’s
Rainbow, we see Pokler and his myths breached and being-with. For us
readers, these texts also represent this confrontation with death. Pynchon‘s text
has no border (or a very slight one) and it is this lack of a border that explains not
only the encyclopedic nature of its narrative, but also its impurities. Clearly, the
fact that these texts and films are likewise interrupted, formally communicating
this experience of being-with, allows me to make my larger claim that
postrnodemity is defined by mourning, an experience that is the origin of all this
talk of fragmented subjectivity.

At the Limit of Subjectivity is, then, attentive to those moments in a text or film
where a seemingly coherent narrative is breached, its narratival limits made
permeable. This experience is an ethical response to those entities who would
assimilate the entire world and make it work, make it make sense, to fuel a
hermeneutic or literal conquest. To be just to this opening, I cannot simply make
sense of these texts. There must remain something that my narrative here
cannot put to work in a signifying project. While what I present in this writing

cannot, as Delany’s Dhalgren does so very well, formally present this opening—I

23

am constrained by very real and understandable academic constraints—l attest
to this fact. Each of these films and novels are profoundly, irrevocably aporetic,

despite the many tightly-woven nets I have thrown.

***

The two central ideas of At the l_.imit of Subjectivity are that (1) postmodernity
is defined by mourning, which (2) then in the context of borders opens the
“subject” to being-with in the precise sense that l have described above. This
may be seen as central to each of the following chapters. Related themes,
elaborated in greater detail below, include, being-with: as ethics, community,
birth, and the posthuman.

Schematically, I begin with ethics as relation to the other. As opposed to
morality which has a ground, a system of rules, and, hence, excludes, ethics
entails the interruption of the forgoing. Chapter One simply details that trauma
and mourning which drive the creation of structure, its concomitant violence, and
the possibility of an ethical interruption. Chapter Two focuses on the related
concern of “community” where community exists in the absence of borders,
particularly national borders. As opposed to Chapter One where I simply detailed
an ethical interruption of the project of violence, here I argue for an ethics which,
one could say, has the practical in view: what would an ethics look like that was
not simply interruptive? I argue for an “ontological justice” in which politics (and

other practical concerns) continues but always in view of being-with. While the

24

first two chapters were limited by the experience of the death of the other, the
latter two begin to shift this focus to birth. In the third chapter, death remains, but
the dissertation begins to progressively concern itself more with l’avenir, or what
is to come at the moment of the subject’s interruption (Derrida makes this
distinction in terms of justice, “But for this very reason, it may have an avenir, a
‘to-come,’ which I rigorously distinguish from the future that can always
reproduce the present” “Force of Law” 27). Chapter Three extends the critique of
the nation to the level of the city and asks how writing can allow, in its very form,
a non-subjectival opening. This opening, this subjectival horror, is identified as
the experience of birth. The final reading chapter takes this a bit further by
attacking the very foundation of Humanism. This chapter is futural, yes, in the
sense that it deals with science fiction, but primarily because it asks what comes
after the Humanist subject. A major theme of the final two chapters is
(subjectival) desire. If the dialectic of desire is what fuels structure and the
subject generally, in this final chapter, I ask how this dialectic might be
interrupted from the standpoint of biological science.

In much more specific detail, the chapters look like this:

In Chapter One, I ask what compels the subject to assimilate everything to a
seamless myth? I ask this question of The Big Lebowski, a choice that might
seem strange as Lebowski appears to be a bowling movie about three friends--
the Dude (pacifist), Walter (Vietnam Vet), and Donny (the other). The early
moments of the film, however, clearly indicate an attempt to grapple with the

ethics of war. This opening chapter emphasizes how Walter’s desire for control is

25

linked to death in the form of his fellow soldiers who never received a proper
burial. In response, Walter mourns obsessively, assimilating everything into a
mythic narrative, rebuilding the self, which then grounds the ensuing violence.
Walter is interrupted when he faces the death of another who embodies the
western military myth. Against the work of mourning that would mask finite
natures, heal myths, and elide being-with this chapter emphasizes mourning
without end, an ethics exposing our essential finitude and being-with.

Chapter Two, on Pynchon’s Graviy’s Rainbow, discusses the nation as
paranoid, fascist Subject and how its myth augments the individual subject’s
paranoia. Exposure to the “with” of community occurs at the moment of the
border’s dissolution (an interruption of writing): the (national or individual) “self"
spaces out and into the other. Pynchon’s representation of Germany as un-
bordered is analogous to such a spacing, as Germany’s collapse infects every
nation previously bordering it. The Allies’ race to seize a piece of Germany can
be read as a feverish attempt to return to the metaphysical certainty that is the
nation. While Slothrop, famously, may be the most paranoid figure in all of fiction,
he is not always so. In the German “Zone,” even Slothrop’s paranoia wanes.
National collapse opens a space for individuals to be exposed to community. For
other individuals, the experience of a lover’s death leads to this spacing of
community, though even here it would be risky to separate any particular
exposure to community from the larger international upheaval. Using Don
DeLillo’s Underworld, I extend the first chapter’s argument about community as

mythic interruption to the more active realm of justice.

26

Chapter Three, on Delany’s Dhalgren, involves an ethical critique of concrete
political structures and not simply the writing of the text because the city along
with every subjectival creation is a product of myth. Delany’s novel interrogates
such myths through a representation of Bellona (and thereby, the subject) as
wounded and open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Dhalgren
represents, internally and externally, a “subjectivity” whose assimilative powers
have been ovenivhelmed by the death of the other, exposing it to the “with” of
community. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of thinking about how a
certain form or style of writing might mitigate against the subject’s exclusionary
myths which elide that (communal) relation or birth essential to each of us.
Dhalgren becomes, above all, a “novel” which plays at birth, at never getting
beyond birth, always coming and never arriving at full mythic presence (as what
passes for a novel) and, hence, always remaining with others.

Chapter Four, on Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence, emphasizes how myth
erases birth, the hermeneutic activity or simulation that allows the subject to be
seen as real (as a subject). A._l. appears to be an unadorned retelling of Collodi’s
Pinocchio with an android child, David, standing in for the puppet. As an
invention of Science and the Enlightenment, David operates as a myth, and like
all myth his construction makes sense of the world and operates as a narcissistic
mirror for its creators. The film intriguingly complicates notions of what it means
to be “real” (human), as opposed to simulated (android). Ultimately, I displace the
real/artificial binary by demonstrating that what parades as real identity is also

“simulated” and does not exist on its own, but is created with others. I then argue

27

that humanism completes itself in its representation of David who perfectly
models the image of Man. The end of the humanist project as exemplified in this
representation signals an opening: with its work completed, the humanist subject
is exposed to community, recognizing that identity is always simulated. There is
no static, non-relational, or non-communal identity. In terms of Chapter Two and
the emphasis on national dissolution, the posthuman is that “subject” whose.

borders remain un-bordered, somehow open to others.

28

CHAPTER ONE

“This Aggression Will Not Stand:” Myth. War. and Ethics in M9

Lebowski5

Now this story I'm about to unfold took place back in the early
nineties--just about the time of our conflict with Sad'm and the Eye-
rackies. I only mention it 'cause sometimes there's a man—l won't
say a hee-ro, 'cause what's a hee-ro?--but sometimes there's a
man. . . and I'm talkin' about the Dude here-sometimes there's a
man who, wal, he's the man for his time'n place, he fits right in
there--and that's the Dude, in Los Angeles. . . (Coen screenplay 4;
my emphasis)

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 film, The Big Lebowski, The Stranger’s
opening voiceover poses the following question: In a world controlled by “I’s,”
states intent upon realizing an extreme freedom through violence, how should
the singular person respond? The “eye” is linked to what Donna Haraway
describes as the “cyclopean self-satiated eye of the master subject” (192). As
such it is the lleye of the Cartesian subject for whom sight is always a violent
affair. This juxtaposition of conflict and heroism in the Stranger’s comments then
frames the entire film. The Stranger implies that confronting the “l’s” demands as

a traditional “hero” reproduces an exclusionary and, hence, violent subject.

 

5This chapter is forthcoming in S n revi w t h ndliter cri icism 34.3 (Sept.
2005).

29

Indeed, it is fair to say that the traditional hero exemplifies subjectivity in the way
that narratives coalesce around such archetypes. While The Stranger doesn’t
want to argue that the Dude is a hero, he indicates that the Dude is “heroic” and
somehow a response to the tyranny of the “l.” Yet The Stranger readily admits
that he is “stupefiiedj” by the Dude and his story (Coen screenplay 3). On a
narrative level, this undermines the “story” that The Stranger is preparing to
relate. A hero-less, “stupefying” story is hardly a story at all. All of this is doubly
strange when we consider that The Stranger is played by a famous western
actor, Sam Elliott, whose narrative consequently ought to even more rigorously
fulfill the requirements of traditional narrative structure. Who, we wonder, will
provide coherence and closure to his narrative?

Unlike such Coen productions as Miller’s Crossing, Fargo, and 0 Brother

 

Where Art Thou?, The Big Lebowski does not possess a coherent narrative.
Rather, it could be described as an interrupted narrative insofar as it fails to rule
the differences that mark it. Examples are numerous. I will simply point to the
intrusion of the pornographic and detective genres in what is framed as a
Western film and, moreover, shot through with western stylistic motifs. Lebowski
can then be understood as a traumatized filmic narrative that attests to the
impossibility of absolute immanence, the notion that identity can exist apart from
relation to others. Such narrative incoherence represents a relation—what I term
the spacing of singularity—which interrupts the subject and, crucially, its
violence. I read The Big Lebowski in order to think through the problem of

narratival, or mythic violence and how, ultimately, to interrupt myth in the exterior

30

world of Bush, Hussein, and the Persian Gulf. I argue that mythic
narrative—westerns in particular—operates as a work of mourning, endlessly
assimilating wartime trauma to immanent and violent supra-subjects, such as
nations. Ultimately, my interest is in interrogating the ways in which myth is
interrupted in postmodern film and how myth’s unworking, through what I will call
for the moment an (im)proper mourning, can be seen as an ethical, and yes,
“heroic” response to those violent “Eye-rackies.”

I will begin by elaborating on the issues of violence, war, and heroism
mentioned above as a way of mapping out the thematic terrain within the film
before extending my analysis. If the Dude is indeed a “hero,” his heroism has
something to do with “casualness,” “his rumpled look and relaxed manner" as he
is initially described (Coen screenplay 3) The Stranger wraps up the film with a
reiteration of this casualness, “It’s good knowin’ he’s out there, the Dude, takin’
her easy for all us sinners [read violent “Eye-rackies”]” (140). The best evidence
for reading the Dude’s casualness (i.e. pacifism) as a privileged response to
violence comes in an early scene with Walter. After Walter pulls a gun on a fellow
bowler who steps over the foul line during a game, the Dude responds with one
of his key phrases, “just take it easy.” Walter, a Vietnam vet, counters with,
“That’s your answer to everything, Dude. And let me point out—pacifism is
not—look at our current situation with that camel-fucker in Iraq—pacifism is not
something to hide behind.” Here, we have in miniature the Persian Gulf War: A
border has been crossed, rules have been violated, and violence results. Most

importantly, the question of what constitutes an appropriate response to such

31

violence has also been broached. However, what I want to highlight at this point
is the Persian Gulf War context-acted out here in miniature—and Walter’s
policing of the border. This policing is the work of an immanent subject
preserving a stable world and keeping difference at bay and in the context of the
nafion.

As The Stranger continues his monologue, we watch a tumbleweed roll
through the desert, through the city, and along the ocean shore before an abrupt,
telling, cut to the Dude walking casually through a supermarket. At a cash
register, a television transmits George Bush Sr.’s famous sound bite following
Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, “This is a call for collective action . . . This aggression
will not stand.”6 Bush’s statement sets up the next scene’s violence as yet
another enactment of the Kuwaiti invasion: Pornographer Jackie Treehorn’s
thugs misidentify the Dude, Jeffrey Lebowski, as the “big” Lebowski, a wealthy
conservative whose spouse, Bunny, has reneged on a loan. Before realizing their
mistake, Treehorn’s thugs break into the Dude’s apartment, attack him and
urinate on his rug. In the later dream sequence, the rug becomes a flying carpet
which again draws us toward the Persian Gulf War: the rug (much like Kuwait) is
pissed on. In a curious fashion, the Dude uses the same rhetoric as Bush in
responding to his loss. When confronting the big Lebowski with his soiled rug—a
confrontation that was Walter’s idea to begin with-~he reproduces Bush's rhetoric,
"This will not stand, man," in his defense (Coen 18). He becomes Bush in a small

way.

 

‘3 There are small differences between the screenplay and the actual film. In the published
screenplay Bush says, “This aggression will not stand . . . this will not stand" (Coen 5).

32

Left alone, the Dude, a self-proclaimed pacifist, would not have reacted to
this attack.7 Ironically, he allows veteran Walter to badger him into action. Walter
begins by repeatedly stressing that “this was a valued rug . . . that tied the room”
together (Coen 9-12). Suddenly a rug that operates as a center of fashion is
blown into a geopolitical issue. Walter’s obsession with protecting the center
continues: When Donny interrupts with a question, Walter berates him for having
“no frame of reference.” Momentarily confused by Donny, Walter is at a loss for
words and cannot explain the “point” of his meditation on the “valued rug.”
lnvariably, he returns to his military experience and then to the current Bush
rhetoric, “We’re talking about unchecked aggression here.” And, then a little later,
“I’m talking about drawing a line in the sand, Dude. Across this line you do not . .
Elsewhere Walter says, “there is no reason, no fucking reason, why . . . [the
“big” Lebowski’s] wife should go out and owe money and they pee on your rug.
Am I wrong?” By the end of the conversation, the Dude recapitulates Walter’s
argument with hardly any variation.

In short, violence is motivated by those who are far more articulate than
the Dude. Let’s look at a more extended example. The following conversation
occurs some time after Maude Lebowski first knocks the Dude unconscious in
order to retrieve her rug:

MAU DE

 

7 Ward Churchill writes, “Pacifism, the ideology of nonviolent political action, has become
axiomatic and all but universal among the more progressive elements of contemporary
mainstream North America. With a jargon ranging from a peculiar mishmash of borrowed or
fabricated pseudospiritualism to “Gramscian” notions of prefigurative socialization, pacifism
appears as the common denominator linking otherwise disparate “white dissident” groupings.
Always, it promises that the harsh realities of state power can be transcended via good feelings
and purity of purpose rather than by self-defense and resort to combat (30).

33

. . .All right, Mr. Lebowski, let's get down to cases. My father [the
“big” Lebowski] told me he's agreed to let you have the rug, but it
was a gift from me to my late mother, and so was not his to give.
Now. As for this . . . “kidnapping"
DUDE
Huh?
MAUDE
Yes, I know about it. And I know that you acted as courier. And let
me tell you something: the whole thing stinks to high heaven.
DUDE
Right, but let me explain something about that rug . . .
MAUDE
Do you like sex, Mr. Lebowski?
DUDE
. . . Excuse me?
MAUDE

Sex. The physical act of love. Coitus. Do you like it?

DUDE
I was talking about my rug.
MAUDE
You're not interested in sex?
DUDE

. . . You mean coitus? (Coen screenplay 60-61)

34

Maude, like Walter, confuses her listener and controls conversation. By contrast,
the Dude does not originate language, but exists as a receptacle for others
conversation. In the above scene, the Dude repeats Maude’s use of the word,
“coitus.” Elsewhere we see the Dude reproducing phrases like “in the parlance of
our time,” “special lady,“ or, even, “johnson.” Maude’s foray into sex centers on a
search for a man who would be willing to impregnate her and then leave both her
and the future child alone. It is a predatory conversation in which the Dude is
kept under tight discursive control. Much the same happens between Walter and
Donny when the former castigates the latter for his lack of concentration and
inability to achieve a frame of reference. Since clear, uncluttered narratives are
essential for power to function, Walter finds Donny's inattention (and nonsensical
interruptions) threatening. By contrast, the Dude could be said to be much too
attentive to Walter in conversation.

The film continually opposes aggression to a liberal order of protest,
pacifism, in which, as Ward Churchill describes it, “good feelings and purity of
purpose” are expected to prevail over violence (30). In the case of the Dude’s
pacifism, the painful fact is that his presence does not hinder violence. Instead,
the Dude is complicit with the violence that kills Donny. Vlfith Lyotard, we could
say that this opposition, this "polemos" between Walter and the Dude, works to
hide some “thing that has no relation to the mind,” something that cannot be
thought easily by the subject (44). The Dude is complicit in this violence because
he represents no difference to the homogeneous world of Walter. Walter, in this

case, needs to be understood as an exemplary “rational” subject. By rational, l

35

mean to suggest that Walter’s assimilation of the world is both self-interested and
economic: everything that is different must be made sense of and be “fashioned”
to stabilize the self. Herder once wrote, “What can be fashioned by man?
Everything. Nature, human society, humanity" (qtd. in Nancy LC 3). Reading
Walter as a rational subject may appear a stretch until one recalls the way in
which he pontificates, endlessly intent on demonstrating his knowledge (“I mean
‘Nam was a foot soldier’s war whereas, uh, this thing [the Persian Gulf War]
should be a fucking cakewalk;” Coen 125). In such a solipsistic world any effort to
dissuade a character like Walter from action is an immediate failure as rationality
violently assimilates such disruptions. The Dude falls prey to this fashioning
easily and, in view of his position in “opposition” to Walter, encourages the
latter’s violence. Quite simply, the Dude should never have engaged Walter in
conversation.8

Nancy writes of myth in The lnogerative Community, describing how prior
to the mythic scene humans existed as singularities,9 not linked by anything other
than Mitsein, or being-with. Then a speaker, a poet, stood up and began telling a
story and in this story the group of separate singularities began to recognize
each other and cohere as a community. As the scene of myth, it is also the scene
of a community’s (re)presentation of itself: “Myth is of and from the origin, it

relates back to a mythic foundation, and through this relation it founds itself (a

 

° While, in a way, I argue for more conversational incoherency, Paul Coughlin takes the opposite
point of view when he writes that the Coens “construct dialogue of wonderful inarticulacy, such as
the Dude's (Jeff Bridges) scrambled speeches in The Big Lebowski and Carl's (Steve Buscemi)
consistent malapropism in Fargo, is not merely a joke at the expense of their characters but
rather the critical interrogation of communication breakdown . . . With Fargo and The Big
Lemwski the Coens have extended this philosophy of miscommunication to an ailment of society
in which inarticulacy is an observable symptom” (online, Sense 9f Cinema).

9 Nancy’s term for an “individual” that possesses identity while not being monadic in nature.

36

consciousness, a people, a narrative)” (_(; 43-45). Nancy’s description is
concerned with how subjectivity is created generally, not just in terms of
community. My concern here is less the communal subject than the individual
subject and the national subject. The problem with this “consciousness” is that it
necessitates separation from others who do not share a particular subject’s
values, leading to a process of assimilation in which difference is either
incorporated or, in a more subtle way, incorporated by exclusion to the outside.
The subject may then be described as wholly immanent in that it is, seemingly,
cut off from relation and absolute: everything is assimilated and brought within
the structure. These are abstract notions of violence that then may ground more
concrete methods of violence, war (in the Persian Gulf) being the most obvious
example. Myth, narrative, and consciousness are all linked to this violence.

The conversation between the “poet” Walter and his attentive addressee
operates in such a fashion, forming a coherent narrative through the exclusion of
noise and, therefore, creating a basis for action. As modern communication
theory explains it, dialogue between two “opposing” parties—the pacifist and
Vietnam veteran in this instance—is not oppositional, but the communication of
two “variants of the Same” (Lingis 86). Alphonso Lingis writes that “Discussion is
not strife; it turns confrontation into interchange” (70-72). Their opposition is
merely an illusion. Rather the “rhythm” of their dialogue is mutually opposed to an
“outsider” or “barbarian,” or simply difference. Rational communication occurs
through an “extract[ion]” of background noise and a foregrounding of the

message. In terms of myth, the poet must have “his” listeners for myth to become

37

myth. To listen, in this case, is to also engage in conversation, a conversation
limited by the poet (Nancy [C 44). This is precisely the sort of assimilative
operation seen between Walter and the Dude. By joining Walter in conversation,
the Dude finds himself supporting the rational community. Donny, of course,
throughout much of the film is the excluded barbarian to the Dude and Walter’s
conversation (Lingis 157). Donny’s interruptions are almost always noise. When
Walter and the Dude are discussing V.l. Lenin, Donny assumes John Lennon
and inserts “And the Walrus” repeatedly and nonsensically into the conversation.
And when Donny fails to pay attention to the conversation/harrative—“were you
listening to the Dude’s story?”—Walter never fails to notice (Coen 11). The
phrase “shut the fuck up, Donny” occurs five times in the screenplay, each time
directly following Donny’s attempt to enter the conversation (38, 75). The Dude
never attempts to put a stop to this discursive violence.10

The fight scene with the nihilists exemplifies this exclusion. While Walter
and the Dude’s individual identities as Vietnam vet and pacifist should make
them oppositional entities, they fight off the nihilists together. Donny,
simultaneously, heaves in the background, suggestively untouched by the
nihilists but suffering from a heart attack. Engaging in a “conversation” with the
nihilists amounts to a fatal exclusion. This scene could be read at a meta level as

emblematic of how the pacifist and veteran through conversation oppose

 

1° There are few critical discussions as of this writing on The Biq Lebowski. In addition to being a
good counterpoint to my analysis, one of the best is by Joseph Natoli. See his chapter on LB; in
fitmodern Journeys: Film and Culture 1996-1998 (Albany, NY: State University of New York

Press, 2001). Maria Cristin Lula’s "Memory and Time in The Big Lebowski: How can the political
return?" and Daniela Daniela’s "The Hippie in the Postmodern Landscape: Vinglang and The Big

my are also worth consulting (in A_me[ig ngay: Highways and Labyrinths. Ed. Gigliola
Nocera. Siracusa, Italy: Grafia, 2003. 649-56 and 639-647, respectively).

 

38

“nihilism,” or the noise of the barbarian. When told that the Dude was threatened
by nihilists, Walter responds, “Nihilists! Jesus . . . Say what you like about the
tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos” (Coen 76). For a man
who is so stridently Jewish, his horror of nihilism is very telling. It is not the well
defined immanent subject that horrifies him. It is rather that which cannot be
cognized due to its essentially non-metaphysical nature.

Narratives, as myths or stories, are monadic in nature: their assimilation of
the world creates an inside and an outside within which a self like Walter is
essentially imprisoned (Nancy E 4).11 The subject, Walter in this case, can
assimilate everything but death since “Death irremediably exceeds the resources
of a metaphysics of the subject” (14-15). Death, indeed, is the one thing that
essence cannot be built upon. Death is that upon “which it is precisely impossible
to make a work” (original’s emphasis). It is entirely possible as in the Hegelian
dialectic for death to give rise to immanence (a supra-subject—patriotism, for
instance), but this would be a work of death in which “death” is assimilated. An
example of this sort of work of death occurs in the penultimate scene as Walter is
“officiating” over the scattering of Donny’s ashes:

. . . Donny was a good bowler, and a good man. He was . . . he was
one of us. He was a man who loved the outdoors, and bowling, and
as a surfer explored the beaches of southern California from
Redondo to Calabassos. And he was an avid bowler. And a good

friend. He died—he died as so many of his generation, before his

 

1' In “Of Being-in-Common” Nancy appears to revise his emphasis on relation in The lnoperative
Qmmgnity by arguing that “'relation’ is too exterior for something which does not allow
separation of interiors from exteriors” (4).

39

time. In your wisdom you took him, Lord. As you took so many
bright flowering young men, at Khe San and Lan Doc and Hill 364.
These young men gave their lives. And Donny too. Donny who . . .
who loved bowling . . . (original’s ellipses; Coen screenplay 136)
Even as Donny’s ashes are scattered, his senseless, noisy death is put to
work by Walter as he interpolates Vietnam into the burial service. Derrida, in
Mrs, considers “ashes” to be an apt word for the way that it points to both
presence and absence of, in this case, Donny. As “ashes,” as present and
absent, Walter’s commoditization of Donny in a coffee can and his dumping of
them signifies an extreme control over the very nature of identity, over difi’erance
(Lukacher 1). However, it is a failed attempt as the ashes do not so much scatter
as cling to Walter and the Dude. This is also a particularly instructive speech
because its use of repetition gives the eulogy a sense of coherence and form, as
if it were indeed crafted in the manner of myth. Of course, little of this information
is true. Donny was not a veteran and his heart condition forbade surfing. All of
which shows how the work of mourning and narrative elides difference. Donny
was not “one of us” in the simple way that Walter indicates. We need only recall
Walter’s repetitive exclusion of Donny from conversation. But the phrase
nevertheless demonstrates the essence of myth, that is, the way it operates to
create immanent subjectival identities. In this case, a previously marginalized
individual augments the structure that essentially led to his death. Here, Walter,

is the narrator who brings together that which is dispersed and singular so that

40

consciousness and a national subject can be realized in an essence that links
death, war, God, and patriotism.

Subject—any sort, national, communal, individual-~is a work in the sense
that it operates, but also like a novel or a film, it constitutes a work or oeuvre. In
this way, a subject and its representation are inextricable. A hierarchy results
from such work in which the “work’s” interior or that recognized as “self” is
privileged over that on the outside. Nancy describes this individual or community
as a “common being” with the emphasis on common and not being to signify the
work (via assimilation) and creation of a stable essence. Against this common
being, he proposes being-in-common, pointing to the more verbal or active
nature of identity and a way of being together upon which no exclusion can be
based. His rethinking of community “defines the impossibility, both ontological
and gnosological, of absolute immanence . . . and consequently the impossibility
either of an individuality in the precise sense of the terms, or of a pure collective
totality” (Nancy E 6). Here the individual is no longer monadic, but is open and
spaced out and into the other in a manner akin to the turning inside-out of a glove
(within the monad there is not spacing, only the individual’s pinprick atomic self,
33).

This chapter tracks an experience in which sublation, this mythic work, is
interrupted before the movement outside the subject to the other can return again
and stabilize the subject that is created via myth. Opposed to such a subject
would be one founded on an exposure to finitude and the impossibility of

immanence, or non-relation. There is “knowledge” of this in the sense that it is

41

not a subjectival knowledge, but a “consciousness of the interruption of self-
consciousness”—a knowledge of singularity (19). An attentive look at community
defined in this manner will wait have to wait for chapter two. My interest here is

simply the interruption of myth.

***

One scene both substantiates this reading of Walter and offers a sort of
non-pacifist, or, perhaps, a genuinely (non-metaphysical) pacifist moment which
interrupts the filmic narrative and is akin to this “spacing” that I have just
described. For this, we need to turn to a secondary character, the adolescent
car-thief Larry Sellers who enters the plot by way of an errant social studies test
found in the Dude’s car. As Walter begins interrogating Larry, Walter opens his
briefcase and pulls out the test in a Ziploc bag as if it were Exhibit A in a
courtroom drama. In a commanding voice, Walter asks repeatedly, “Is this your
homework, Larry?” (Coen 93-4). Uncharacteristically dressed in a suit and tie,
Walter is a parody of juridical reason. In response, Larry remains silent, looking
directly at Walter and the Dude with a blank face, a face that could reasonably
convey an extreme moment of grief. Arthur Digby Sellers, his father, lies directly
behind Larry in an iron lung whose pump, if anything, answers these repetitive
questions. Larry’s silence unsettles both Walter and the viewer. In a simple
comedy such as Lebowski pretends to be, this is a very non-comedic moment.

The former self-destructs, storms out of the house, and demolishes a car he

42

assumes to have been purchased by Larry. When the vehicle’s real owner enters
the frame and begins to “kill" the Dude’s car, Larry remains untouched and silent,
watching from a window.

As a Vietnam veteran, Walter’s myth is martial in content and embodied in
Larry’s father, Arthur Digby Sellers, the “original” poet of the mythic narrative that
enfolds Walter. Underlining his importance and Walter's ability to ignore (and
assimilate) the obvious, one of the latter’s first questions is whether Sellers still
writes. Sellers wrote a number of the Branded episodes, a series aired by NBC in
1965 and 1966.12 Branded’s premise was certain to strike a cord in Walter. Jason
McCord (Chuck Connors), the sole survivor of the Battle of Bitter Creek, is
accused of cowardice and dishonorably discharged (West 23). Set in the 1880’s,
each episode opens with a vivid reminder of McCord’s shame and impotence as
his saber is broken in half and his uniform is stripped of decorations. Naturally,
McCord is not guilty and remains silent in order to protect his commanding officer
and hence the larger military structure from disturbance. Branded’s narrative
operates then as an individualistic fantasy on one level—a heroic man cutoff
from all connections—while on another level it bolsters the military and, hence,
the national narrative of conquest (which founds itself on “civilized” principles:
honor, altruism, etc.).13 Such a contradictory logic reduplicates the paradoxical

logic inherent in a “nation of individuals.” The series amounts to an endless

 

‘2 Sellers is not listed as a writer in any of the sources I have consulted.

'3 In his chatty “the making of” book on Lebowski, V\filliam Preston Robertson writes, “I see 1'13
Big Lebowski’s opening, I tell him [Ethan], and indeed the Sam Elliot voice-over that runs
throughout the movie, as an arch statement on America’s great Westward Expansion, with Los
Angeles being the farthest geographic point in that expansion, not to mention the weirdest and
most decadent. And insofar as this is a buddy movie concerning itself with issues of sex and
manhood, I continue, the arch statement is really about the chauvinism of Westward expansion,
and, indeed, the absurdity of the pioneering mystique itself” (44-45).

43

proving ground for courage, both internal (silence about the truth) and external
(actual violence)“ This proving needs to be understood as McCord’s attempt to
recover a semblance of immanence in the eyes of the world, despite his
innocence, both for himself and for the narrative he has chosen to protect and
identify with. This act of assimilation preserves a coherent and honorable
narrative and is precisely the sort of act that Walter would respect.15

This is a crucial moment in my argument. By contrast to the assimilation of
“death” to a patriotic narrative in this scene with Larry we see an exposure to
finitude and an unworking of the mythic narrative. I will discuss this question first
on the level of sound and then image.

In light of the above reading of conversation, Larry’s silence can be seen
as a defiant, non-assimilative act: he will not join in a conversation that would
amount to his assimilation and to the exclusion of the outside, the noise of the
barbarian. A brief silence could be understood, but such a lengthy silence has no
clear narrative motivation whatsoever. As verbally violated “outsider,” it is fitting
that Donny is told to remain in the car as Walter and the Dude head into their
interview with Larry. Larry’s silence can then be read as an answer to Donny’s
violent exclusion. If Larry immerses himself in the assimilative give and take of
rational discourse, Donny will be easily forgotten. Larry’s silence, however, forces
Walter and the Dude to return to Donny, i.e., the noise they would prefer to

ignore.

 

1‘ Many of the episode titles explicitly thematize courage, cowardice, and heroism (Lentz
“Branded”).

'5 This is a good moment to note that Walter’s privileging of the Western myth once again
indicates his similarity with the Dude who, recall, was introduced and praised by Sam Elliott, a
famous cowboy actor, playing The Stranger.

44

Indeed, in a film whose plot is motivated in large part by witty fast-paced
conversation Larry’s prolonged silence amounts to a moment of excess, as
theorized in Kristin Thompson’s “The Concept of Cinematic Excess” (130-131).
Film is constituted by sound and images. When these material components are
not fully assimilated to the narrative, excess is foregrounded. This could be the
chance movement of a fly across a still or something as anachronistic as a watch
in a Biblical epic. In this case, the absence of a flurry of words is excessive
insofar as this moment does not fit with the characteristic narrative style of the
film.16 This is dead air. If film like all narrative is defined by its attempt to create a
homogeneous field, excess indicates that in a film which cannot be assimilated to
a “unifying effect.” Stephen Heath argues, “Just as narrative never exhausts the
image, homogeneity is always an effect of the film and not the filmic system,
which is precisely the production of that homogeneity. Homogeneity is haunted
by the material practice it represses” (original’s emphasis; Thompson 130). In a
homogeneous field defined by obsessive repartee, silence must appear as the
work that takes place prior to all speech: the silence, before speech, is drawn out
in this scene, revealing the “material practice,” the work or writing/filming, that
allows speech/narrative to appear so fully present throughout the rest of the film.
Narrative meaning is immediately undermined at such a moment, allowing the
viewer to see it in its arbitrariness and as a mediated un-natural presentation

(132, 140).

 

‘° Of course, once one component is seen as excessive, it is difficult for other areas of excess to
not also arise. During the interrogation by Walter, the Dude's head bobbing rapidly becomes
excessive.

45

This breakdown in narrative and, hence, in meaning coincides with a more
general hermeneutic stall. Keeping in mind that Lebowski is on one level a
revision of The Big Sleep, Walter and the Dude in this scene are also
simultaneously detectives. Peter Brooks has argued that detective fiction in many
ways is exemplary of the nature of narrative. If plot is defined through the
interplay of fabula (actual events) and sjuzet (the presented events), then the
detective’s job (as with the viewer/reader) is to reconstruct the fabula of a crime
(13). In this particular case, we encounter an opaque moment in the narrative in
which the fabula resists assimilation by its reader detectives. It is true that
hermeneutic gaps remain even at the end of the film, but these are easily
covered over by a return to the proairetic. Here, this opacity cannot be fully
recovered, leaving not only the “detectives” but also the viewer in the dark as to
the actual events: the hermeneutic adventure stalls. More importantly, the very
nature of narrative (as interplay between fabula and sjuzet) is highlighted at this
moment, further de—naturing that which is so commonly accepted as natural.
Walter, erstwhile detective, leaves the house muttering about "language
problems” and “stonewalling.”‘7

Following from this sonic excess, we also encounter visual excess. In a
film which contains a parody of a Busby Berkeley dance sequence, it is difficult
not to reference Laura Mulvey on the issue of visual pleasure. Mulvey writes:

The magic of Hollywood style at its best (and of all the cinema

which fell within its sphere of influence) arose, not exclusively, but

 

'7 In light of my discussion of castration that follows shortly, the case “breaks” only after the Dude
has had sex with Maude. Hermeneutic progress is intimately connected to sexual prowess,
though it should be said that Maude is quite clearly the predator even in this scene.

46

in one important aspect, from its skilled and satisfying manipulation
of visual pleasure. Unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic
into the language of the dominant patriarchal order. In the highly
developed Hollywood cinema it was only through these codes that
the alienated subject, torn in his imaginary memory by a sense of
loss, by the terror of a potential lack in fantasy, came near to finding
a glimpse of satisfaction: through its formal beauty and its play on
his own formative obsessions. (1446)
Mulvey’s interest is in denying visual pleasure which arises either from the power
that the objectivism of voyeurism conveys or from ego identification with
Hollywood’s stars (1448). In classic Busby Berkeley’s dance numbers, erotic
contemplation of the female form was vital. But this pause could not last too long
or endanger the narrative’s coherence and by extension the phallogocentric
order. The Berkeley routine in Lebowski does not pause at all. Instead of a
traditional erotic figure wearing suggestive clothing, we see a figure costumed as
a Valkyrie—armor and all. “Gilda” has been transformed into Maude, the feminist.
Ultimately, the dream/dance sequence blurs into castration anxiety.

However, we do see such an erotic suspension during Larry’s
interrogation, though, once again, with a difference. The camera focuses on the
impassive face of Larry in a way that, if he were a woman, would seem quite
“natural” in view of past Hollywood practices. The fact that Larry is male indicates
that this gaze is not only erotic, but homoerotic. For Walter and the Dude, this

can only highlight the implicit homoeroticism in all buddy movies (Mulvey 1449).

47

Insofar as this scene and Hollywood film in general puts the viewer in the eyes of
the main male characters, we are also confronted with our objectifying voyeurism
(and homoeroticism in some instances). Realism, after all, demands that the
gaze of the camera and the audience be marginalized, not ostentatiously out in
the open (1453). The scene reproduces the situation between viewer and
viewed: the viewer being the active interrogator (Walter, an “Eye-rackie,” if you
will) and the viewed, the mute, passive object (Larry). During this lengthy
narrative stall, it becomes very difficult for the viewer to not become aware of his
or her own complicity in voyeurism. Interestingly, when Walter leaves the house
to wreak havoc on the wrong car, Larry moves to the window, looking out at
Walter and reversing the direction of the gaze: Larry now seems to be in a
position of power.18

The scene is never integrated into the plot, leaving the viewer as self-
conscious as Walter. By destroying the corvette, Walter attempts to mend the
fabric that is his subjectivity and the film's narrative. His actions shake the film
back into the non-reflexive proairetic violence that motivates plot. As he destroys
the car, he screams, “this is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass,”
underlining once more how the question of a “natural” or coherent narrative
connect so closely with immanence and the exclusion of finitude.

While it is true that the elder Sellers is not dead, his presence in an iron
lung certainly suggests that death is near. Sellers cannot exist on his own, but

relies on that which is outside to sustain his life. If individualism is defined by

 

‘8 As if the relation between viewer and viewed could be problematized any more, the immediate
scene prior shows Walter, the Dude, and Donny at a theatre. At the very least, this assists in
foregrounding this relation in our minds.

48

absolute immanence (Derrida’s self-presence), here is a moment in which the
Western myth of the individual founders. Sellers exists only in relation to the
outside. He is, as Derrida might say, both present and absent. As previously
mentioned, death is the one thing that cannot be assimilated by the subject. It,
alone, exposes us to the spacing of identity. Walter’s identification with Sellers
can only “magnify” this exposure (as if exposure could be magnified). If his hero
can die, then Walter’s own mortality must also come under this shadow. Sellers’s
impending death confronts Walter with the finitude of his own obsessions:
patriotism, Vietnam, and religion. Sound and image emphasize this exposure to
finitude and subjectival interruption along with a tightly controlled mise en scene.
Larry’s placement and passivity in front of his father makes it impossible not to
see Sellers lying in the iron lung.

Walter indicates this interruption in a small, but telling manner. Before
Larry has even entered the frame, Walter yells across the room to the supine
Sellers, “I just want to say, sir, that we’re both enormous—on a personal level,
Branded, especially the early episodes, has been a source of, uh, inspir[ation]”
(Coen 93). In the middle of the speech, Walter becomes emotional for an instant
before returning to his business face for the interview with Larry. This is the only
moment in which Walter’s subjectivity is interrupted. In all his previous interaction

with the Dude, the Dude cannot shake Walter’s rational mask.19 However, it is

 

'9 Walter’s misdirected attack of the car also points to the degree to which Walter has been
shaken by his exposure to finitude.

49

only shaken for a moment. And perhaps this is where Walter’s last name
becomes telling: Sobchak—“sobcheck”?20

As he leaves the house, Walter screams “You’re KILLING your FATHER,
Larry!” with a long pause ensuing as he waits for a response from Larry (95).
This makes little narrative sense as Sellers is completely immobile. We can only
suppose that this “KILLING” has much more to do with how the stall in
conversational reciprocity threatens the myth that Sellers represents. We need
only note the breakdown of the filmic narrativeuwhich is coextensive with Walter-
-to see the spacing that is being-in-common. For example, if conversation
operates as myth to create a unitary consciousness, Larry’s radical disinterest
(due to exposure to his father’s illness) in Walter, leaves the substance of this
myth hanging. The breakdown of the narrative means that the narrative borders
have momentarily dissolved and the narrative “self’ (and those selves that it
limits) has spaced out and into the other (much more on this spacing in the next
chapter). However, this interruption ripples throughout the film. Since the film
opens and closes with a famous western actor (The Stranger) it can be seen as
striving toward a traditional cowboy western narrative only to fail because the
origin, writer Sellers, lies gasping in an iron lung, incapable of speaking and
making his narrative cohere. Once again: the death of the other ovenrvhelms the

capabilities of the rational subject as well as the subject’s myths. The Big

 

2° There is a difference between affect and an exposure to finitude; however, in the scene under
question it is clear that these two are related. The issue of manhood and tears comes up directly
in a conversation between the Dude and the Big Lebowski who is not so much in opposition to
Walter as a mirror image of the Iatter’s own obsessive assimilation (“Strong men also cry”) (33).
Walter also describes the nihilists as crybabies. Tears are linked to non-meaning, an exposure to
finitude where meaning is undermined.

50

Lebowski is postmodern in the sense that it shows us not only the death of the
poet, a writer of Westerns and, in a way, of Lebowski, but also the unworking that
results. This spacing allows for all the inversions and impurities of the Lebowski

“narrative” alluded to in the introduction.

***

Where then should we locate the origin of Walter’s inability to remain in
this non-subjectival space of being-in-common? The poet may be dying, but the
myth lingers. How and to what extent this myth remains operative needs to be
considered. The western myth of monadic individualism crucially contains
Sellers, the “original” mythmaker. It also includes The Stranger, the Dude,
Walter, and Branded’s McCord who can all be considered his work to some
extent. Such a list, however, leaves out a more famous Texan, President George
Bush, whose words—“This is a call for collective action [read totalized supra-
subject] . . . this aggression will not stand”—assist in framing the film. A phrase,
as we have seen, that is also reproduced by the Dude. Following September 11,
the younger George Bush was also heard saying, “Terrorism against our nation
will not stand” (Bush). The manner in which the phrase, slightly different, floats
through time, film, and the real world should give us pause. Bush Sr.’s statement
operates as a center that changes location and context while remaining
essentially unchanged in substance. While the Branded myth defines all of these

characters, the Bushes are important because they magnify, extend, and

51

discursively control those who hear and enter into conversation with them. The
repetition of this phrase and its discursive control needs to be understood in light
of the early conversation between the Dude and Walter in which the Dude’s
conversational participation leads him to repeat Walter’s argument word for word.
The same mode of control is working at the larger national level with Bush
displacing Walter.

If nothing else this indicates the discursive power of the techno-political
apparatus which is so inextricably linked to myth. Walter, trapped by Vietnam and
Persian Gulf rhetoric, may be thought of as actualizing Bush’s imperative. He
owes his inability to enter into being-in-common to the discursive-imperative
power of the techno-political establishment which can continue to operate long
after the “origin” (Sellers) has fallen ill. The myth continues as long as its story
has a speaker and a listener and in the absence of the death of the other. Walter
becomes, like the Dude, subject to an imperative that exerts tremendous force to
ensure that he does enter the conversation in the proper manner, or risk being
shunted aside as yet one more “barbarian.”

As Walter repeatedly tries to make sense of events through the lens of the
Vietnam War, it becomes clear that he is an extreme example of one who has
actualized his life around an experience that he cannot leave behind. This
military experience has become such a part of his subjectivity that he is trapped,
unable to leave the paths that he created (Lingis 161). Walter “Sobchak” must
keep his tears/sobs in check because to let them go would be to radically

question his identity. This identity, a creation of the most extreme rationalist

52

enterprise, war, exists at an equivalently extreme level of instrumentality. War, in
view of its ostentatious violence, requires the most extreme form of
depersonalization. Any subjectivity created through a martial experience must be
equally rigid. But for Walter what is frustrating is the fact that the ordered world
he has created for himself—a world that does not threaten him because he (and
Bush) creates it and limits it-is endangered. Endangered as it is, it also threatens
the series of decisions which brought him to his particular identity and, hence, his
identity generally.

While all of the above is true, we have not yet touched on the most
primordial reason. Walter, McCord and Bush share an exposure to death that
was never property mourned. Let’s consider Walter first. Twice we hear Walter
say something to the affect of “Lady, I got buddies who died face down in the
muck so you and I could enjoy this family restaurant!” (Coen 70, 38). In Walter’s
characteristic way, an argument over his strident cursing rapidly becomes an
issue of patriotic freedom. This image of death in the “muck” of Vietnam speaks
to a sense of dishonor and of death that is not properly observed. Derrida writes
that “Nothing could be worse, for the work of mourning, than confusion or doubt:
one has to know who is buried where—and it is necessary (to know—to make
certain)——that, in what remains of him, he remain there. Let him stay there and
move no more!” (original’s emphasis; Spectres 9). Mourning is first of all an
attempt to “ontologize remains, to make them present, in the first place by
identifying the bodily remains and by localizing the dead.” Avital Ronnel writes of

how war generally rejuvenates the nation as it ‘stages the infinity of a finitude that

53

encounters its end” (282). Yet this was (”possibly”) not true for Vietnam where
our soldiers became “abject” and war even became “shameful.”

Walter’s obsessive assimilation makes sense against such a backdrop. In
this scenario not only are there dead soldiers, missing prisoners of war, but also
an entire war that never properly found subjectival closure. That (lost) war
remains for him a wound that requires perpetual care. The strangely poetic
eulogy given at Donny’s funeral is the summit of such ontologizing. Donny’s
death allows Walter to relive his experience in Vietnam, not just by interpolating
Vietnam into the eulogy, but even during the prior conflict with the nihilists,
allowing the full experience of combat, death, and funeral rites to be performed.
This is crucial because it allows him to simulate the Vietnam war and right it.
Since he retains the body and can officiate at the funeral, he is able to put
Donny, the horror of his death, and, most importantly, Vietnam to rest in the
proper way—how else are we to understand the interpolation of Vietnam into the
eulogy?

While a prolonged reading of Branded is perhaps necessary here, the
basic plot of the series appears to operate similarly. Branded’s plot could be read
as the fallout of a lost battle in which a nation’s and a man’s pride was wounded.
McCord becomes a Walter-like character from this perspective, obsessed with
ontologizing the wound in his and the nation’s psyche. In a more psychoanalytic
vein, Ronnell writes of Bush Sr.:

This time, when history repeated itself, it was not a joke but the

production of a haunted man to whose systems of repetition

54

compulsion we were all assigned. There was the matter of
resurrecting Hitler in the Middle East, and a felt need to control
airspace. The Patriot missile system perforated two phantasmic
oppressions: the Germans had never lost air control during World
War II, and George Herbert Walker Bush’s was not the only one of
the three planes on mission to go down [that?] day [sic]. When the
Avenger plunged into the ocean, young Bush, the youngest fighter
pilot in the US. Navy, lost two close friends. Puking from fear and
endless seawater, the youngest pilot started attending a funeral
whose site he would never be able to pinpoint. (270-271)
Bush, haunted, spends the rest of his life trying to seal the rift that this plane
crash created. The Persian Gulf War becomes a way of finding closure, of
winning back the skies for the good moral program represented by the US. and
of putting an end to the weeping, the funeral, that began on the day that he
crashed (272). Like Bush, Walter and McCord are “delivered to a history of denial
and compulsive repetition" intent on “restoring the national phallus to its proper
place” (280, 282).

The horror, in short, is an exposure to finitude in which the “subject”
confronts that which cannot be assimilated, the death of the other (the dead in
Vietnam, World War II, or at Bitter Creek), and, hence, “recognizes” the
impossibility of immanence. All mourning, all assimilation, is an attempt to erase
the “memory” of this exposure. Walter’s encounter with the poet (Sellers) who

spoke and created the myth that formed his identity and aided his acceptance the

55

deaths and killing in Vietnam, before and after the war, undermines him. This
inextricable linkage of man and myth indicates that, at least in this instance, the
death of the other is not enough to expose one to being-in-common. It takes the
death of an other who embodies the myth that the subject has identified with for
exposure to occur. In light of this it is not surprising that Donny does not interrupt
Walter’s assimilation. Instead, he is put to work augmenting subjectivity. It is
intriguing because Donny had no “use” prior to his death. The death of this other,
this excluded barbarian who cannot enter into the myth or the conversation, can
be used however in the work of mourning.

It is such a traumatic exposure to finitude that prompts mourning which is
“not one kind of work among others. It is work itself, work in general” (Derrida
Spectres 97). Mourning needs to be understood as linked to “trauma, to
mourning to the idealizing iterability of exappropriation, thus to the spectral
spiritualization that is at work in any tekhne.” A specter can be thought of as
equivalent with that spacing of being-in-common in which the other interrupts the
subject profoundly. The specter is linked by its very nature to trauma as it is that
which threatens identity at a fundamental level. To encounter the specter,
difi'erance or being-in-common, in the death of the other is truly traumatic and
must be spiritualized, or ontologized, through art (tekhne), which is to say, myth.

I am juxtaposing Derrida and Nancy here because mourning is the
essence of all work, even the work of what Nancy terms “operative” communities.
For both, ethics is a matter of being open to alterity, but how to evade what the

one terms immanence and the other presence? How to be just to the specter? In

56

light of the amount of mourning in The Big Lebowski, the question might be better
posed: How to properly mourn when “proper” can have nothing to do with the
subject? Derrida writes of “A mourning in fact and by right interminable, without
possible normality, without reliable limit, in its reality or in its concept, between
introjection and incorporation” (Specters 97). Such a mourning--to answer the
question broached in the introduction--wou|d be heroic. Only Larry, mute before
his father’s body, represents such a mourning without reserve. More generally,
the specter demanding justice is the experience of war, the dead glossed over by

the triumphant Western narrative “originating” in Branded and its descendants

 

(Walter, The Stranger). Only the death of the other, in particular the death of one
who embodies the mythic narrative allows for an encounter the specter.

Walter was right about one thing. Donny did love bowling. When he
returns from rolling a strike and says to his opponents, “you guys are dead in the
water,” this is not a threat. Donny’s joy in the game and his noise throughout the
film indicates as much. The threat comes shortly enough when Walter pulls a gun
over a question of a foul. I’d like instead to highlight this phrase and ask what it
might entail to be “dead in the water.” Water has been a leitmotif in the Coens'

films at least since Barton Fink, finding its fullest exposure in 0 Brother. In Big

 

Big Lebowski, three key moments are signaled by water: during the crucial scene
with Larry a painting of the ocean is placed directly behind Walter; the opening
shot of the tumbleweed—identified with the Dude—founders in the ocean; and,

the burial scene occurs on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

57

The phrase immediately evokes paralysis—the paralysis of a mythmaker,
both present and absent, in an iron lung perhaps. It is just as clearly linked to
death at sea, in particular the uncertainty of wives waiting for long overdue
sailors who may be “dead in the water” and confronting “death in the water.” For
Bush Sr. this signals the disappearance of his two crewmen when he bailed out
over the ocean. For Walter, this signals those friends who died overseas in the
“muck” of Vietnam without eulogy and without burial. For McCord, this signals the
death and dishonor of Bitter Creek. For those on the “mainland”, it becomes a
matter of perpetual uncertainty, of an “interminable” mourning which finds no
end. Proper mourning, the mourning linked with immanent subjects, requires
presence and identification whereas dead/death in the water points to the
impossibility of such ontologizing. The dead at sea remain unburied and
obscenely on view, both present and absent: we are interrupted by such a
“presence” and faced with the impossibility of our immanence, with being-in-
common. If we take seriously this use of “dead in the water,” its repetition marks
our responsibility to the specter, the dead, who claim our attention because they

cannot be entombed and put work by the subject.

58

CHAPTER TWO

Paranoid NationsISubjects and Their Un-Bordering in Pynchon’s Graviy’s

Rainbow

Pynchon has been described as the paranoid writer, a characterization, I
would suggest, that owes much more to our metaphysical disposition than
anything else. And, while little has been written of the communal Pynchon, it is
this characterization that remains to be fully thought. Naturally, such a description
seems much more apt in the aftermath of Vineland, though even in such early
works as The Crving_of Lot 49 and “Entropy,” the communal aspects of
Pynchon’s oeuvre can be glimpsed. There have, however, been only a handful of
treatments of this theme, the most incisive being those by John Farrell and
Robert R. Hill. In the context of 11g Crving of l__9t 49, Farrell argues that
Pynchon’s critical romance should be understood as the “imaginary resolution of
a real historical problem [a la Jameson’s Political Unconsciousl, postmodernism
as the emptying out of the content of ethical thinking” (140-143). Romance ought
to stage the battle between good and evil, a dichotomy grounded “in our world,”
renewing the self. However, due to the “complete instrumentalization of the
profane world,” for Oedipa “community and culture are imaginable only as the
domain of another” (original’s emphasis).

Community does not exist as an impenetrable monad in Hill’s work on

Vineland. While Hill is particularly persuasive in his arguments as to how

59

 

Pynchon’s text critiques various traditional notions of community—organic,
revolutionary, and so on—he is less so when it comes to delineating what he
calls, following Nancy, an inoperative community. Hill describes community as

“an originary human ‘limit which—he quotes Nancy—“is revealed as ‘the tracing
of the borders upon which or along which singular beings are exposed’” (208).
Hill connects this discussion of the limit to the Pynchonian interface, that
“common frontier or margin across which systems interact and communicate.”
Nancy’s work is very important in what follows and while there is much I like in
Hilll’s argument, I feel his essay elides a crucial element in Nancy’s argument:
death, or finitude.

The following reading of Gravity’s Rainbow will attempt to complement
Hill’s work by extending his critique of traditional communities and demonstrating
how Pynchon’s notion of community is grounded in an exposure to death, to an
experience (sparked by the debordement of the nation) that overwhelms the
rational subject’s myths and borders, leading to the “spacing” of the self
previously referred to. In chapter one, I was interested in the issue of ethics, of
how a certain type of subjectival mourning is violent, and the imperative of
hanging on to those moments when myth (the concomitant creation of mourning)
is interrupted. Here, with the assistance of Don DeLillo’s Undenivorld, I will extend
this argument to the realm of community, asking how community and ethics as
justice are related. Throughout, I explore how the nation-state and its borders

obstruct community (and justice) and how, in its collapse, community and justice

become possible.

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Community, in my opinion, is already the wrong word. The problem is that
communio, as John Caputo points out, “is a word for a military formation and a
kissing cousin of the word ‘munitions’; to have a communio is to be fortified on all
sides, to build a ‘common’ (com) ’defense’ (munis), as when a wall is put up
around the city to keep the stranger or the foreigner out” (original’s emphasis;
107-108). One doesn’t have to read far into Gravig’s Rainbow to glimpse a
similar anxiety, if not horror, over the strictures of community: Slothrop “stands
outside all the communal rooms and spaces [. . .] He can feel his isolation. They
want him inside there but he can’t join them. Something prevents him: once
inside, it would be like taking some kind of blood oath. They would never release
him. There are no guarantees he might not be asked to do something . . .
something so . . . ” (67).

Historically, community has been understood as constituted in two ways--
community as organic body or community as social contract. The organic or
Hobbesean community is that community which necessitates a head, a single
leader, a subject, whose identity “subsumes” all the others. The Lockean version
assumes a community of pre-constituted subjects who then agree, contractually,
to live as a community (Van Den Abbeele xi). In either case, community is limited
by the subject whose logic of immanence and self-creation remove it from the
world, from others, as the world is very quickly shut out behind the communal
walls, making the community to all intents and purposes a supra-subject,
dedicated, above all, to producing its own homogeneous essence. However

defined, community is always limited by the logic of the One which is decidedly

61

not “communal.” The effects of this wall-building are well known. Most horrifically,
we glimpse it in fascism, but no less insidious are the liberal and conservative
ideologies purporting to be “multicultural” or “compassionate” or “tolerant.” In
what follows I use “community” only for strategic reasons.
The pynchonian subject is the paranoid subject. If paranoia is defined as
an obsessive “making sense” of reality in order to assure a stable self against the
threat of the “They,” paranoia can be said to be a basic trait of the rational
subject.21 Patrick O’Donnell describes the paranoid state as follows,
Paranoia manifests itself as a mechanism that rearranges chaos
into order, the contingent into the determined. As such, it is a
means of (re)writing history. Doubly confronted with ‘the
disappearance of external standards of public conduct when the
social itself becomes the transparent field of cynical power’ and ‘the
dissolution of the internal foundations of identity . . . when the self is
transformed into an empty screen of an exhausted, but
hypertechnical, culture’ [. . . ]the paranoid subject resurrects these
standards and foundations by taking advantage of the very fluidity
of relations and contingency of events that mark the postmodern.
(original’s emphasis; 12-13)

In large part this is true of what we see in Graviy’s Rainbow. Here is a typical

paranoid moment on the part of Slothrop, Pynchon’s “main” character: “He has

become obsessed with the idea of a rocket with his name written on it—they’re

 

2‘ It is probably fair to say that what we call “paranoia” is a more extreme version of what is found
in each subject; see Roberts (123) for a brief discussion.

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really set on getting him (‘They’ embracing possibilities far far beyond Nazi
Germany)” (25). Slothrop is particularly obsessed with rockets because he
“couldn't adjust to them. No way. For the first time, he was surprised to find that
he was really scared” (21). Pynchon’s text makes clear that paranoia and its
representations follow from an inability to confront death. He writes, “I can’t even
give up the hope that it will be different someday—that They’ll come out, and
forget death, and lose their technology’s elaborate terror and stop using every
other form of life without mercy to keep what haunts men down to a tolerable
level—and be like you instead, simply here, simply alive” (my emphasis; 23).

In response to the horror of chaos (death, or the unpredictability of the
rocket), the subject is created. Subjectivity is the attempt to substantiate an
individual as un-changing noun against a world of sheer difference. In terms of
signification, what is at stake is the relation between the sensible and intelligible
(Nancy M 22-23). Paranoia and its representations are ways of ensuring
that “thought is [not] empty” and “reality is [not] chaos.” Taken to its extreme,
signification or representation is “closure” itself, as opposed to an opening to the
other insofar as the desire that fuels representation wants to perfectly resolve
thought and reality. Strictly speaking, then, the subject, or individual, is in-
divisible. The ultimate logic of the individual creates a monad, cut off from others
(Nancy E 3).22 In a traditional sense, yes, the subject has community, but it is
always a community limited by its representations; it is a being-together that can

only go so far before it too falls into this indivisible subjectival logic. At the risk of

 

22 As Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy insist in their “The Nazi Myth,” fascism is not mere emotion, or
irrationality, but possesses a particular brand of logic that is not entirely foreign to the traditional
subject (294).

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over-simplification one could see this representation as simply a question of
mapping, a matter of drawing a line between the “self’ and the “other,” creating
an inside and an outside. This line represents and in that way gives birth to the
illusion of a stable self, or community.

We see this reliance on representation in Pynchon’s use of “Hansel and
Gretel,” one of the many tales collected and put to work politically by the patriot-
minded Grimm Brothers. We should not be surprised then that the tale provides
representational closure for Katje, Gottfried, and Blicero, nor that the latter
describes their threesome as a “Little State” (99).

How seriously is she playing? In a conquered country, one’s
own occupied country, it’s better, she believes, to enter into some
formal rationalized version of what, outside, proceeds without form
or decent limit day and night, the summary executions. The
roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame . . . though it is
never discussed among them openly, it would seem Katje,
Gottfried, and Captain Blicero have agreed that this Northern and
ancient form, one they all know and are comfortable with—the
strayed children, the wood-wife in the edible house, the captivity,
the fattening, the Oven—shall be their preserving routine, their
shelter, against what outside none of them can bear—the War, the
absolute rule of chance, their own pitiable contingency here, in its

midst. . . . (my emphasis; 96)

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“Hansel and Gretel” clearly operates as a means of assimilating the
horror, or alterity, of the “outside.” It is a tale, or “form,” we are told, that they “all
know and are comfortable with.” Ironically, considering the sado-masochistic
nature of their relationship, to exist without a representation is an affront to
decency. Representation creates a consciousness for them, binding them to one
another, simultaneously creating/excluding the outside through the creation of a
“limit” (Nancy 19 43-45). It also provides the template through which reality can
be organized and tamed as they each perform the roles of Hansel, Gretel, and
witch. “Myth,” as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy write, “is a fiction, in the strong,
active sense of 'fashioning,’ or as Plato says, of ‘plastic art:’ it is therefore a
fictioning whose role is to propose, if not to impose, models, or types” (original's
emphasis; 297). Myth, however, should not be thought of as mythological, so
much as a “power,” an active myth-making which brings “together the
fundamental forces and directions of an individual or of a people” (305). Along
with reminding us of Katje’s parallel role working for the F inn—the “good guys”--
Richard Crownshaw also points to the way in which narrative provides a “sense
of historical continuity from 1914 to 1945 [which] mystif[ies] the unacceptable
economic determinants of the war, and the even more unacceptable genocidal
cost or byproduct of reproducing capital” (202). Narrative, in short, is the
foremost technology for keeping death at bay.

Community becomes solipsistic, insofar as its members have their selves
mirrored back to them. Without representation to tame the world, nothing could

be rationally recognized and reality would appear, instead, as sheer difference.

65

Representing the world, then, entails dispelling difference and humanizing the
world in terms of the self. Evidence of this narcissism is easy to locate. Katje, for
instance, describes looking at Gottfried as the experience of looking in a mirror
(95). Certainly, Blicero is obsessive about conforming reality to his idea of the
fairy tale. Blicero forces Gottfried (Hansel) into the cage to fatten for the oven
while Katje stands in as the maidservant (Gretel). Obsessing after this
representation creates an immanent community, a group seemingly cut off from
relation to others.

There are many ways in which alterity—another word for relation in what
follows--is figured in Gravig’s Rainbow. I want to emphasize the importance of
space in particular. Referring to the openness of the Argentinean pampas,
Squalidozzi explains to Slothrop that “We cannot abide that openness: it is a
terror to us” (original’s emphasis; 264). Vlfithout fences, or borders to represent
(assimilate, limit) the pampas, they were “inexhaustible” or impossible to
“imagine.” The “outside” of Katje, Gottfried, and Blicero’s Litte State needs to be
understood as that “outside” which exists in the absence of representational
limits. Borders, repetitively, are the major metaphor for containing this spatiality
that horrifies the rational subject; in the block quote above (and throughout
Pynchon’s text), the emphasis on an inside and an outside already implies the
limiting of space. Such a spatial limiting is essential to the degree that it is
understood that the “German problem” is essentially one of identity (Lacoue-

Labarthe 296). The collapse of Christianity—a collapse heralded by a famous

66

Gerrnan’s pronouncement of the death of God—left Germans with few models to
imitate:

Within the history of a Europe dogged by imitation [of
classical state models], the drama of Germany was not simply its
division [prior to unification in 1871, Germany was a federation of
states], to the extent, as is well known, that a German language
could barely be said to exist, and that, in 1750, no “representative”
work of art . . . had as yet come to light in that language. The drama
of Germany was also that it suffered imitation twice removed, and
saw itself obliged to imitate the imitation of antiquity that France did
not cease to export for a least two centuries. (original’s emphasis;
299)

What the above nicely demonstrates is the interrelatedness of myth (“work of
art”), identity, and national borders (“division”). Similar to schizophrenia—a term
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy invoke—the 16 German states are “spaced-out,”
disallowing that pinprick space or center that is the monadic subject. With
Blicero’s insistence that Katje and Gottfried conform to myth, the “Little State”
reproduces that precise wedding of art and politics—“the production of the
political as work of arr—that is the essence of fascism (original’s emphasis;

303).23

 

23 Denis Crowley has written incisively about the “relation between the aesthetic and the political”
and of how Pynchon problematizes their relation. Crowley also emphasizes the Katje, Gottfried,
Blicero trinity and a reading of the oven (186) that resonates, to some degree, with my own,
though Crowley is not ultimately interested in the community that results in the disarray of the
political and aesthetic as I am.

67

Clearly, then, this interdependent connection between representation and
subjectivity can be seen at several levels in the novel: in the individual subject,
the community or nation as supra-subjects, and, I should add, in the very writing
of Gravity’s Rainbow. On this last point, I’m reminded of Derrida’s remark that “If
we are to approach a text, it must have an edge” (“Living On” 257). By which I
take him to mean that even with a novel, there must be borders that would seem
to limit meaning, that is, space. The key point thus far to grasp—and it is hardly
an original observation in Pynchon studies—is that representation forms a
system of oppositions, taming the space between self and other and thereby

creating the self and other, which then allows literal violence to occur.

***

As several commentators have noted, Heidegger, who argued that Dasein
(his word for a subject) was inseparable from the world, from being-with
(Mitsein), still began his analysis with Dasein, and never actually provided a
phenomenological analysis of being-with (Nancy “Love and Community”). In
other words, the thinker who paved the way for Derridean poststructuralism,
began with structure, not the “with” that would have been the logical starting
point. The “with,” naturally enough, is unrepresentable and is perhaps best seen
in the demise of that which can be seen, structure, or myth. I will attempt to do
justice to this “with” in the following (though, like Heidegger I, too, have begun

with structure for purposes of clarity).

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Fortunately, Nancy’s work provides an effective paradigm for the
discussion of community (as being-with) and myth in Gravity’s Rainbow. We all
know what it means to “be in or out, to be and to identify with something or to be
totally exterior to it, to be homogeneous or heterogeneous,” Nancy says in an
interview. The “with” is more complicated. It indicates “proximity and distance [. .
.] precisely the distance of the impossibility to come together” as a subject, by
which he means, non-relational, wholly immanent and self-created in the manner
of traditional communal thinking discussed above (“Love and Community”). As
we saw in the previous chapter, representation is the glue that brings what were
separate, singular persons together to form a larger communal subject and, in
the process, eliminates being-with. It is this movement from being-with to identity
and consciousness had through narrative that we glimpse in Pynchon’s restaging
of “Hansel and Gretel.” Community is a work in the sense that it works: borders
are patrolled. But also like a novel or a film, it constitutes itself as a work or
oeuvre. In this way, community and its representation are inextricable. Only
through perpetual work, “myth-making,” can any community retain the illusion of
immanence and elide the fact of being-with.

Pynchon’s novel is strangely lacking—considering the subject
matter—personal confrontations with death. We see death, but death assimilated
into a work, or representation, in order to bolster a patriotic project. There are in
fact few encounters with the dead or dying in which death retains what Bataille
describes as its “peculiar grandeur” (Nancy LC; 16). Pokler’s story—both the

longest episode and the one at the center, page-wise, of the novel—provides

69

such a moment, however (Weisenburger 194). Pokler is a plastics engineer who
is subtly blackmailed by Blicero (i.e., Weissmann) to keep him working on the
German V2 project and, ultimately, available to perform one final modification on
the rocket-oven (the S-Gerat) within which Gottfried is launched. On the outside
is Leni, Pekler’s spouse, and Ilse, his daughter, held in Dora, the local slave labor
camp. In part, Pokler’s guilt is assuaged by a yearly visit with Ilse—though it may
not in fact be her--at a run-down amusement park. When his job is finished, he
visits Dora and its ovens to locate his family. It is during Pokler’s visit to Dora that
we may glimpse being-with.

[. . .] He was not prepared. He did not know. Had the data, yes, but

did not know, with senses or heart. . . .

The odors of shit, death, sweat, sickness, mildew, piss, the
breathing of Dora, wrapped him as he crept in staring at the naked
corpses being carried out now that America was so close, to be
stacked in front of the crematoriums, the men’s penises hanging,
their toes clustering white and round as pearls . . . each face so
perfect, so individual [. . .] All his vacuums, his labyrinths, had been
the other side of this. While he lived, and drew marks on papers,
this invisible kingdom had kept on, in the darkness outside . . . all
this time . . . . Pokler vomited. He cried some. The walls did not
dissolve—no prison wall ever did, not from tears, nor at this finding
on every pallet, in every cell, that the faces are ones he knows after

all, and holds dear as himself, and cannot, then, let them return to

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that silence. . . . But what can he ever do about it? How can he
ever keep them? Impotence, mirror-rotation of sorrow, works him
terribly as runaway heartbeating, and with hardly any chances left
him for good rage, or for turning. . . . (my emphasis 433).

In this oft-cited passage, Pynchon describes subjectivity as essentially monadic,

creating an inside and outside (“outside, other side of this,” the “silence”) which
stabilizes identity.“ Representation—Pokler’s “marks on paper”——-is what keeps
difference (“shit, death, sweat. . . “) at a distance. The logic of representation is
also the logic of the conventional community: representations build borders or
walls, an inside and an outside, that stabilize identity.

While at the same time thematizing this connection between identity,
signification and violence, Pynchon suggests that, at this moment, the self finds
itself ex-posed to the outside. If identity is created through the patrolling of a
border between the inside and outside, here we find that opposition radically
interrupted. Instead of residing within the illusion of the pinprick monad, the self
finds itself spaced-out and into the other. Robert McLaughlin and Kathryn Hume
imply that P6kler “recognize[s]” his guilt (168, 181, respectively) and only then
goes to Dora (McLaughlin only). But Pokler’s work is finished. Everyone has left.
It is only in the midst of this evacuation that he enters Dora and faces the

extreme alterity which is death that he “recognizes” his connection (when

cognition owes nothing to the rational subject). In the absence of the border

 

2‘ I’m thinking of Richard Crownshaw's “Gravity’s Rainbow: Pynchon’s Holocaust Allegory,”
George Levine's “Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon's F iction,” and Robert
McLaughlin's “Franz Pbkler's Anti-Story.” Joseph Tabbi’s “The VIfind at Zwolfl<inder2 Technology
and Personal Identity in Gravity} Rainbgw” does not consider this particular passage, but does
provide a fine reading of this same chapter which bears on the issue of community.

71

which separates the inside from the outside, that which was within is now on the
“outside” (Nancy Q 18). P6kler sees himself in them, or rather, in light of the
interruption of assimilation, sees his own finitude in them and wants to keep them
as they are, unassimilated, unrepresented, with him. The reference to “each face
so perfect, so individual” is less a recognition of individuality as metaphysically
understood, than a recognition of singularity. Rather than seeing in the other a
mirror image of the self, Pbkler sees them as they are. The subject’s hermeneutic
violence is interrupted, leaving only the “with” of community.

There are two communities. The community of myth, or fascism, is
ultimately a dream of absolute immanence. lt obliterates all relation to others as it
creates its fundamental work: its self. There is also that community which is
founded and exposed through the death of the other. This community grounded
in an exposure to the nothing of death cannot project a politics, or a subject.
Faced with that which cannot be rationalized, the “god-like” subject is
overwhelmed, breached, finding itself in relation to others, a relation that the logic
of the absolutizing subject works unceasingly to negate. Community is founded
on the impossibility of immanence, which is to say, it is founded on the
impossibility of the self-present logic of the subject (Nancy |_C_ 6). Before this
exposure to that which cannot be thought, the dead other, all projects, myths,
and identities are interrupted, leaving only the “with.”

Pynchon’s text deals minimally with the Holocaust, at least at on
ostentatious level. Jonathan Wilson, of the Mm &view, writes, “But even

Pynchon, who is quite happy to create two-dimensional ‘cartoon’ Germans

72

working on their devilish rocketry, significantly, given his obsession with
apocalypse, lays off the Holocaust.” I would argue, however, that the exposure to
the dead other here, this moment of community, is the “center” of the entire
novel, and I mean this apart from the fact that that particular episode lies at the
literal center of Gravity’s Rainbow. Pokler’s confrontation with Dora is an
exposure seen from the novel’s very first page:
The Evacuation still proceeds, but it’s all theatre. There are no
lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old
as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let
the light of day through. But it’s night. He’s afraid of the way the
glass will fall—soon—it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal
palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light,
only great invisible crashing. (3)
In the context of the Shoah, this explosion of the crystal palace25 begs to be
understood as an analogue of the pogrom begun on November 9, 1938:
Krystal/nacht, or Night of Broken Glass. During that night of nation-wide
vandalism and violence spearheaded by the Nazis, synagogues, cemeteries,
businesses, and homes were damaged, glass covering the ground like crystal.
Twenty-thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps and
another hundred were killed (Carr 72-73). Apart from Krystal/nacht, these early

pages speak to the exposure described above which is the breaching of that

 

“5 London's Crystal Palace, that architectural achievement intended to “celebrate the military,
economic and industrial superiority of Great Britain and its colonies,” burned to the ground in
November of 1936 (Harrison). The literal fact of such a place and its connection with the above
ideals further substantiates my reading.

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border between the inside and outside. This breaching is seen in two ways. The
absence of light undermines that most basic opposition between light and dark
along with our vision which more than any other sense is attuned to borders. But
more directly, the shattering of that crystal wall signifies the great horror of
rational categories, hermeneutic borders, with which we make sense of reality
being eliminated. Naturally, the fact that these borders are crystal implies their
constant state of imperrnanence. A little further down we read, “the walls break
down, the roofs get fewer and so do the chances for light.” This paradoxical
statement only makes sense if we understand that the breached border (wall or
root, in this case) represents the foundering of the light/dark binary.

In other words, this is an “Evacuation,” not of some intact group of
subjects leaving a war-tom city, but of a “subject” emptied-out and exposed to
the other: evacuated. Immanenoe, or “intimacy,” if ever there was such a thing,
cannot be regained. Nancy describes this as the experience of the self
confronted with “an exteriority that is impossible to recapture” (LC 18). And, while
this early page emphasizes the subjectival horror of this experience more than
the passage with P6kler, the same ethical content can be seen here, “Is this the
way out? Faces turn to the windows, but no one dares ask, not out loud. Rain
comes down. No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive knotting
into—“ (original’s emphasis). It is this “knotting into” (in the face of death) that
provides the ethical and communal ground of Pynchon's text. The breached
community of the “Now Everybody—“ that “ends” our reading of Pynchon’s

massive novel appears even on the “first” page. Pynchon's text, of course, also

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formally reinforces this communal “knot” in an astonishing way. O’Donnell
describes the text of Gravity’s Rainbow as an “assemblage of material and
imaginative debris which does not offer some single source of power or
explanation for its fragmented state” (Passionate Doubts 76). He sees this
“knotting into” as indicative of “culture as an ungrounded, unending process of
fragmentation and sedimentation.” Faced with the almost impenetrable, almost
borderless mass of Gravig’s Rainbow, the “novel’s” medium communicates its
message by interrupting its readers’ subjectivity, by putting into question their
skills as hermeneutic scholars. How effective this is, as compared to death
(which it means to represent), is hard to say, however.

Death does not lead to an interruption of assimilation for Slothrop early in
Gravity’s Rainbow, despite the fact that he is confronting “ruins” which probably
expose him to a number of dead bodies. Perhaps the language that Pynchon
uses to describe the moment provides a hint as to why this is so: words like
“vanity” and “sermon,” or the description of “Slothrop’s Progress: London the
secular city instructs him: turn any comer and he can find himself in a parable”
(25). The allusion to Pilgrim’s Progress and the other words indicate at best a
liberal orientation to death, that is, an orientation that is always already
assimilating death for a project. Even in his conversation with Squalidozzi,
Slothrop insists on “progress,” the alleged need to fence things because “you
can’t have open range for ever, you can’t stand in the way of progress” (264).
Only when he is in the Zone does this assimilative context begin to fall away,

though it is gestured toward immediately following his conversation with

75

Squalidozzi, “Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being. No more. No
more” (266). One page after the key Dora passage, Slothrop "perceives that he is
losing his mind” (434). Pynchon writes, “If there is something
comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there is still also anti-
paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can
bear for long.” The city and Slothrop feel “roofless, vulnerable, uncentered.”
Contextually, it is difficult not to see Pynchon’s representation of anti-paranoia as
equivalent with Pekler’s experience at Dora: Anti-paranoia, simply, is an
exposure to finitude, that is, the impossibility of immanence. It is common to see
the distinction between paranoia and anti-paranoia as an opposition in which
“everything is connected, or nothing is connected; reality either radiates from a
Center, or it is centerless; history is either wholly determined from without, or it is
wholly meaningless,” to quote Scott Sanders (151). But, I hasten to add, anti-
paranoia does not disconnect everything. Rather, it unveils the essential
insubstantiality of the subject and the subject’s representations and allows, by
contrast, a communication, a connection, a “knotting into” between those who
had been deluded by the myth of subjectivity.

“How,” Pbkler asks, “can he ever keep them” from returning to the

“silence” of the “outside” created by myth?26 This is perhaps the key question a

 

2° This question on a formal literary level is broached most extensively in my chapter on Samuel
R. Delany’s Dhalgren. “The full significance of Pynchon’s fiction,” Levine writes, “is in its styles, in
its language, since the language is called upon to sustain the uncertainty it is structured to deny,
to imply what cannot be articulated in language. Pynchon denies resolution into myth by
wandering among all the available myths, from those of the Greeks to those of modern science,
technology, film, comic books, radio. Verbal and mythic virtuosity is not, in Pynchon, show-off
obscuring of what might be made clear, but, in a way, what the books are about” (114). And in his
early review of Q3, Levine writes, “By making us wallow in our fantasies, our products, our bad

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community founded on exposure confronts. Though we are always “there” in this
community, we may not always “recognize” it. How can we “stay” within this
community that in its very “essence” is such that it forbids the rational, fascist
representation of the “other” in its very spacing? In Pdkler’s case, the work of
assimilation has been interrupted, but this interruption, as with the workings of
affect (“cried”) is not enough to make the “walls . . . dissolve” permanently.

And, yet, to return to “Hansel and Gretel:” Katje after leaving Blicero is
shown paralyzed by the opening of kitchen oven. It is an oven, we are told, that
“will never close” (94). This oven points to the oven at the center of the Grimms'
tale. But it also represents myth itself, the crematoriums connected with
concentration camps such as Dora-Mittelbau, and the S-Gerat that houses
Gottfried. Katje realizes, in short, that the representational borders that define
herself and what had been her community have been permanently ruptured: the
oven door “will never close.” This statement appears in a section in which once
again a mirror, a symbol of the monadic community, appears: “she has posed
before mirrors too often today, knows her hair and make-up are perfect” (94).
The cameraman, there to represent her, is happy with how she presents herself
and yet Katje knows that she “is corruption and ashes, she belongs in a way
none of them can guess cruelly to the Oven.” She is changed, no less than
Pokler, by a confrontation with death that is framed by the ovens of Nazi
concentration camps. Representation, however styled, will never provide (the

illusion of) closure in the way it had prior to her time with Blicero and Gottfried.

 

jokes, that we use to help redeem us from our numbness, he severs our connection with any of
the mythologies which have contributed to our dehumanizatlon” (187).

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After the long passage cited above, P6kler goes to the darkest, smelliest
corner of Dora. He locates a “random” woman, holds her hands, and places his
wedding band on one of her fingers, “if she lived, the ring would be good for a
few meals, or a blanket, or a night indoors, or a ride home” (433). The ring, this
most potent representation of immanent marital communion, is randomly offered
up. With its round, un-breached shaft the ring also represents the subject’s need
for borders, the desire for total self-presence that excludes all relation, creating a
self, community, or nation that is pure in the manner in which 28 carat gold is
pure. Desire does not fuel his gift, nor recognition--very possibly he cannot see
her-nor economics. Pokler has “recognized” the impossibility of being a god-like
subject with the subject’s seamless borders, and it has opened him, however
briefly, to another way of thinking about community and identity. P6kler has
expressed a love for this woman that has nothing to do with predilection, but
simply love as a presentation of his own insubstantiality (Nancy “Love and
Community”).

However, Pokler’s question remains even on the last page of Graviy’s
Rainbow. Pynchon’s exemplary oven is the V2 rocket within which Gottfried is
ultimately shut only to be launched into American airspace. For Blicero and
Gottfried this amounts to a transcendence over death in the specific terms I
discuss above. The rocket needs to be understood as a subjectival invasion of
the other, not a breaching of borders, but an extension of the subject’s borders.
While death, or “Gravity” will keep this invasion from succeeding,.the rocket

engine does “promise” the “victim, in bondage to falling” the possibility of

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“Escape” (758-760). Launched, Gottfried’s thoughts turn to his and Blicero’s love.
Bound in this ring of steel, he likens their relationship to “illustrations for children,
in last thin pages fluttering closed.” At Brennschluss Gottfried begins to lose his
ability to distinguish between friend and enemy. He loses his ability to represent.
The rocket is falling, escape is impossible, and death remains to be faced.

In the cinema, ground zero, the light has gone out. The film or a bulb has
broken and the audience is left: “in the darkening and awful expanse of screen
something has kept on, a film we have not learned to see . . . it is now a closeup
of the face, a face we all know—“ Film becomes on this final page yet another
representation, not unlike ”Hansel and Gretel,” or Gottfried’s “illustrations.”27 Its
absence—the dead bulb--Ieaves the audience breached, un-bordered, sitting
together in the dark. Each of them is strung-out between the possibility of
becoming, again, a communal subject (assuming that the projector and, hence,
representation can be resuscitated), or remaining where they are: related to one
another if only by the fact that they sit in the same building and yet unrelated in
the absence of a narratival project (which Pynchon figures as death in the guise
of the V2). Each of them confronts a face, and, as with Pokler, a face “we all
know.” This is not a singular face, but a face, an identity, which is singular plural
that we know with a knowledge that is prior to all subjectivism. In the absence of
..|..

those representations which provide the illusion that the can subsist on its own

in the absence of the plural, here we see a confrontation with identity that is both

 

27 As Richard Poirier points out in an early review of the novel, the tale of Pokler and his family is
framed by film: Pdkler’s daughter was a byproduct of his lust following his viewing of a porn film;

his daughter’s six annual visits are likened to a series of disparate film frames which Pekler then

builds into a single “moving image” (175). The question, once again, is how to interrupt this filmic
narrative and sustain this interruption.

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'.28

singular and plura This, knowledge, however, we are not prepared for, it is

something “we have not learned to see . . . “

***

There is a tension, then, between the oven that “will never close” and the
final resigned acknowledgment that there is a “film we have not learned to see.”
How we might learn to “see” this film, or remain in the “with,” is the concern of
this final section. I’d like to extend this thinking of community as spacing to the
level of the nation, arguing, in light of globalization and the decreasing
importance of the nation, for a rebirth of community. What we have seen at a
minute level also occurs at the level of the nation state. Pynchon makes this
connection explicit when he writes about that “last image” before the bulb burst,
how “It may have been a human figure, dreaming of an early evening in each
great capital luminous enough to tell him he will never die” (760). The subjectival
yearning for immortality is tied to the state. War, in a certain way, is the
exemplary mode of the assimilation of difference by a subject (nation). When
Germany falls precisely the same sort of interruption of myth occurs insofar as a
nation’s borders can be thought of as a representation, defining an inside and an
outside.29 The problem for the nations surrounding Germany is that this un-

bordering cannot be controlled. Any nation that borders Germany is just as much

 

’8 Here, I allude to Nancy’s text, Being Singular Plural (Stanford, 2000).

29 This motif of the border as representation and its interruptions appears throughout At the Limit.
The first chapter, for example, is very much concerned with borders in the sense that The Big
Lebgwskj is a (strange) microcosmic reiteration of the invasion of Kuwait and the possibilities of
living, however fleetingly, without borders or myth.

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exposed because its borders and identity are put in question. This interruption is
like a virus that cannot be contained moving from Germany to France to Spain
and so on. The zone, the borderless Germany following its defeat, is an
inexhaustible space, rather like a screen upon which no film is projected, in which
death is not tamed, hence the allies desperate attempts to limit it, and resuscitate
it as representation. Pynchon's text privileges the un-bordering of the nation
state, a condition that we appear to be approaching in this era of globalization.

A simple recognition of this problem of ethics and representations leads
only to a sort of liberalism that never, really, leaves the self behind. Against this
shallow liberalism, and I believe with the main thrust of Pynchon’s work, we
should consider Alphonso Lingis’s advice and “put ourselves [. . .] in a situation at
the farthest limits from kinship,” in a foreign nation, or among a strange people
(157). Only through such a purposive risking may that purpose find itself
overwhelmed, the self exposed once again to community. I would only add that
we must go further than a foreign nation. If Pynchon teaches us anything it is that
the subject as nation bolsters the multitude of individual subjects which take it for
a ground. The furthest we can go would be to a space where the nation, that
great subjectivizing entity, does not project itself onto individual subjects like
Pokler. The dissolution of Germany’s borders affects the individual subjects who

had previously existed “within” said nation.30 With the borders gone, other ways

 

3° Though Nancy does not discuss this explicitly his theorization of being-with amounts to a
theorization of a community without borders; this seems congruent with an understanding of
society as unrepresentable (Van Den Abbeele “Lost Horizons” 15; Maurice Blanchot does
thematize the border however in The Unaveweele Qemmunity, 3). For there to be a spacing
(Nancian community) outside of the monadic (national) self, the self must have become “un-
bordered.”

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of existing, of “economizing” present themselves. One of the women Slothrop
meets in the zone, Geli Tripping provides the following description of its
“economy:”

“It’s an arrangement. . . It’s unorganized out here. There
have to be arrangements. You’ll find out.” Indeed, he will—he’ll find
thousands of arrangements, for warmth, love, food, simple
movement along roads, tracks and canals. Even G-5, living its
fantasy of being the only government in Germany now, is just the
arrangement for being victorious, is all. No more or less real than all
these others so private, silent, and lost to History. Slothrop, though
he doesn’t know it yet, is as properly constituted a state as any
other in the Zone these days, Not paranoia. Just how it is.
Temporary alliances, knit and undone. (290-291)

“Temporary alliances, knit and undone”—this is as concise a description of
singularity as could be hoped for. In it, we see exactly that presence and, yet,
that absence that signifies being-with. In “On Literary Communism,” Nancy
describes community as “socially exposed particularity” by contrast to the
“socially imploded generality” of capital (19 74-5). Capital negates particularity by
attempting to make it work for a higher entity. Singularities begin to be defined in
accordance with productive values and to the degree to which they conform to
the machine. Their particularity is lost in a general mechanism. Here, particularity
must be understood in view of an “is” that is not put to work in a higher generality,

or subject.

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There is a certain commonsense logic to the final comment in Gravity’s
Rainbow, that we are not quite ready to see this other way of being, this being-
with in which particularity is not put to work by a supra-subject. As a historical
novel, it takes place in the midst of war (a nationalist enterprise, after all), and in
the midst of a national and international (communist/capitalist) resuscitation.
Here it would be worthwhile to insert some thoughts on Don DeLillo’s
Underworld, which so clearly extends Pynchon’s meditation on assimilative
violence, national identity, economics, and borders. Published in 1997,
Underworld is situated at such a different moment that it is able to extend the
Pynchonian reflection on that which “we have not yet learned to see.”

Where Pynchon dealt with the effects of a nation’s dissolution from what
had been the “within” of that nation, DeLillo’s Undenrvorld provides a glimpse of
the promise of community after the fall of communism and the rigid states it had
created (with the oppositional assistance of US. Capital). What becomes
apparent by the end of Underworld’s 800 pages is that all identity is created by
treating the world around the individual or crowd as garbage, as something that
must be dealt with, cleared away or cognitively mapped so that presence of mind
and identity (of an individual or civilization) can be stabilized (287). Official history
(and its identities) is never very far off from an “underhistory” which “runs on a
parallel historiographic track to that of the official history of the cold war”
(O’Donnell L_ateet 156). What must not happen, and against which all the
subject’s tools and ploys are aimed, is any confrontation with the materiality of

this history. This is no less true of the nation state than it is for the individual.

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With characters like J. Edgar Hoover and Lenny Bruce, DeLillo’s canvas is large.
Nick Shay, one of Underworld’s main characters, works as an executive at a
waste management company. It is his job to not only sort the recyclables in his
home, but to sort others’ trash. He drives a Lexus and is married to Marian.
However, his success is intimately connected with assimilation and a monadic
relation to the rest of the world that logically excludes such personal intimacy. As
a result, Marian has an affair with one of his colleagues, Brian.

This situation sets up the most crucial moment in the novel. Nick and
Brian have traveled to a nuclear testing site in the former USSR. In this
“unmapped region” they will witness what must be the most extreme example of
waste management imaginable. Underground nuclear reactions are set off in
order to destroy dangerous nuclear waste (788-789). Such is the strange setting
for Nick’s confrontation with Brian. The conflict remains well within the limits (i.e.,
a map) of rational assimilation, “The knowledge of what he’s been doing, the
calculated breach of trust—l want to stay awake while he sleeps so I can watch
him and fine-edge my feelings and wait for my moment.” This is a picture of the
rational subject assimilating the other in advance, and preparing for that Hegelian
moment which rightly is “my moment” because in this moment the self is created.
When Nick finally attacks Brian, he feels better—his sense of self is repaired.
DeLillo writes, “ I throw a right [. . .] -a token blow that improves my mood. It is
even better than eating [. . .] I feel good about it. I think we both feel better” (797).
The fight unfolds in the typical Hegelian fashion: Nick is the master and Brian the

slave (see Derrida W&D 254-255).

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More interesting, however, is a scene a few pages later that operates as a
foil to this all-too-common conflict. A business associate and guide, \fictor,
escorts Nick and Brian to a radiation clinic which deals with “disfigurations,
leukemia, thyroid cancers, [and debilitated] immune systems” (800-803). Groups
of “young people” in the clinic are missing nails, teeth, and hair. Nick feels that
the faces of these children have an “enormous power.” He “begins to feel
something drain out of [him]. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist.” Viktor
and Nick watch as a blind boy “fac[es] some [children playing] as if he can really
see them.” These children play follow the leader, but poorly, as they stand only to
fall down. And, finally, this passage:

Something about the juxtaposition deepened the moment,
faces against the landscape, the enormous openness, the breadth
of sheepland and divided sky that contains everything outside us,
unbearably. I watched the [blind] boy in his bundled squat, arms
folded above his knees. All the banned words, the secrets kept in
white-washed vaults, the half-forgotten plots—they’re all out here
now. . .

The text suggests that total assimilation is impossible. Even when we think
we are in control, we are like the sightless boy who only thinks he can see the
world about him. But this thought on its own is not enough. It is easy enough to
remain within a rational subjectivity and make such a remark. What happens
here is that we see a break with this rational assimilation. Instead of the common

situation in which everything is assimilated into the self, here “everything outside

85

us” is “unbearabl[e]” (my emphasis). It cannot be assimilated, leading to this loss
of a sense of self on Nick’s part and to the spacing I address above. This
moment of being-with is triggered by the one thing that Nancy argues cannot be
assimilated: death as signified by these deformed children, the clinic, and by the
fact that these children cannot be so easily destroyed as nuclear waste. By the
end of the scene we understand that Viktor is not a person, but a metaphor for
how the subjectival assimilation must stop eventually, for how death is always
victorious. A character in DeLillo’s next brief novel, The Body Artist, nicely links
the issues of self, economics, death, and ethics for us. Following the sudden
death of her spouse, Lauren thinks:

Why shouldn’t the death of a person you love bring you into
lurid ruin? You don’t know how to loved the one you love until they
disappear abruptly. Then you understand how thinly distanced from
their suffering, how sparing of self you often were, only rarely
unguarded of heart, working your networks of give-and-take. [. . . .]
why should you accommodate his death? Or surrender to it in thin-
lipped tasteful bereavement? Why give him [up if you can walk
along the hall and find a way to place him within reach? (116)

The self and its borders are, as in the case with Nick, economic in nature. The
self preserves (and creates for that matter) itself through these “networks of give-
and-take.” The real difference between Underworld and The Body Artist in view
of this ethics of “lurid ruin” is the context and compulsion behind that moment of

being-with. Lauren actively, as an artist, seeks this lurid ruin. In what can only be

86

thought of as act of hospitality, she willfully lets go of those borders that define
who she is as a subject. Derrida writes that “absolute hospitality requires that I
open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner [. . . ], but to the
absolute other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them
arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either
reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names” (Of Hospitality 25). Here,
the home is the self and to be hospitable is to open the self's house and let the
other come without that movement “into” the home becoming simply one more
assimilative ingestion of the other.
The general decline of the nation-state (and rise of international business)
leads Nick to his moment of exposure. Yet, I think, DeLillo is also making a larger
point. Viktor is not simply a figure for death's victory, he is also a capitalist and, in
a way, the most extreme sort: he is perhaps the first capitalist to suggest using
militaristic means to assimilate the waste, or alterity, of the world. His firm is
trying to market the radical, if strange, idea of detonating underground nuclear
explosions to rid the world of nuclear waste. DeLillo writes,
At a glance he belongs to these wild privatized times, to the
marathon of danced-out plots. The get-rich-quick plot. The plot of
members-only and crush-the-weak. Raw capital spewing out. The
extortion-and-murder plot. But there are ironies and hesitations in
Viktor’s address to the moment. (802)

Viktor, like the torn and maimed children, stands only to fall down. He, putting

fonrvard the most extreme assimilative process imaginable (apart from war), is

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hesitant, sluggish, shot through in other words with difference. Not, however,
shot through in a manner that would allow for a Hegelian sublation, an opposition
that would spur on a capitalist economy and augment the self as we saw
between Nick and Brian. Against a view that would see the demise of the nation
and rise of international capital as detrimental to a progressive politics, DeLiIIo’s
text implies that even the most radical of capitalist operations is ethically affected
by the loss of national borders.

Christian Moraru has pointed out the difficulty in locating an “ethical
subject” in Derrida and in Graviy’s Rainbow that would not end up recapitulating
the subject’s violence (270-271). For him, technology in the novel has so
decentered the subject that grounding morality and the “ethical act of decision”
becomes impossible, “this radical intervention resists partaking in any larger
dialectic that would eventually complete/compensate by an explicit ‘ethics’ the
crisis of subjectivity.”31 By way of a concrete example of this problem, George
Levine argues that Slothrop can only be one way or the other, either an active
paranoid (with its obvious dangers), or anti-paranoid, so totally “unanchored to a
past” that he can no longer love “beyond that instant when it happens” (134).
Certainly, there is ample evidence of this in Pynchon’s final description of
Slothrop who “stands crying, not a thing in his head, just feeling natural. . . . ”

(626).

 

3‘ In his conclusion Moraru writes, “Bringing to the fore the collapse of the ethical subject in the
deadly clasp of ‘vampiric technology,’ Pynchon's novel participates in the contemporary effort to
rethink the site of the ego, the displaced place of its responsibility [. . . ] The ‘ethical model'
Pynchon might eventually suggest is based, as Derrida's, ‘on difference and not identity'” (277).
Pynchon, in other words, presents the loss of the ethical self in the context of technology
wonderfully, but provides no answer to the ethical dilemma this places us in.

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But this either/or emphasis on Slothrop neglects Katje who, unlike the
former, remains in a societal position that is more typical of Pynchon’s readers,
and therefore promises a more accurate sense of how Pynchon’s communal
ethics would play out in the world most of us live in. Arguably, it is this “allegory”
of the holocaust and Nazi transcendence (the oven, Dora, the rocket as oven)
that most clearly provides a way of thinking not only about community but also a
way beyond the above ethical impasse. Yes, the “oven will never close” for Katje,
but that does not entail total paralysis. To assume so implies that there is no
singularity behind the classically defined subject. But Katje acts. She poses for
the cameraman, feels his “pleasure” at her representation, while knowing that
underneath it all, “she belongs in a way none of them can guess cruelly to the
Oven” (94):

But she happens to’ve glanced in just at the instant Osbie
opened the echoing oven. The camera records no change in her
face, but why does she stand now so immobile at the door? as if
the frame were to be stopped and prolonged into just such a
lengthwise moment of gold fresh and tarnished, innocence
microscopically masked [. . . ] Outside, the long rain in silicon and
freezing descent smacks, desolate, slowly corrosive against
mediaeval windows, curtaining like smoke the river's far shore. This
city, in all its bomb-pierced miles: this inexhaustibly knotted victim .

. . (my emphasis; 93)

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I quote this at length because the word “knotted” nicely connects my analysis of
the opening pages of the novel, the “evacuation” and the “progressive knotting
into, ” with the reenactment of Grimm which I see as so central to understanding
the communal and ethical politics of Gravity's Rainbow. The passage also
connects this “knotting” to the exposure, the corrosive elimination of that border,
here windows, which separate the inside and outside. Since I am making an
argument linked to the status of the nation-state, it needs to be recalled that this
questioning of borders implicit in the oven that ‘yvill never close” is just as much a
questioning of the nation: it is the “oven state” after all.

Now, in this context, I want to foreground what happens in the very
opening of this passage. While Katje’s face does not change, there is a long
pause as she stands “immobile.” This immobility is excessive, in the sense
encountered in my reading of Lebowski. Such immobility in the context of what
appears to be a more active filmic experience, highlights the filmic system that
lies behind the image: rather than being fully present, there is a way in which
excess unveils the work behind the oeuvre, that which is absent (Thompson 130-
131). Katje’s presentation of her self, her own personal oeuvre, will never be
quite the same. And this is obvious, at least to Slothrop. She fails miserably at
keeping up her pose in his presence. She, or the representation that she would
normally put forward to the world, is cracked.

In the case of Katje and Viktor activity happens, but it is an activity that
always takes place in view of finitude, in view of breached national

representations, in view of others. So, any activity must always start and stop,

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begin and end, stand and fall, following the model presented by those children
who first exposed Nick to the impossibility of controlling the world. In an
interesting essay on P6kler and autobiography, Robert McLaughlin writes that
“Pokler, however, is so unsure of the shape and meaning of his own story that he
can fill in the gaps only provisionally with his present knowledge” (169). Apart
from the instance I describe above, his hesitancy here is very different from what
I am after. Pokler‘s hesitancy allows him to fall prey to the Rocket. I am
describing a hesitation that would not be easily put to work by any subjectival
structure.

I have moved away from that specific and very focused experience I first
described in P6kler’s exposure at Dora. That experience best demonstrates what
I mean by being-with which is “properly” a projectless (inoperative) state. Here,
we have something else, something I would align with Emmanuel Levinas when
he states that “justice is relation to the other,” a relation which occurs in the
absence of knowledge (86). We are not, in these texts, dealing with the specific
legal question of justice. Rather the aim is to foreground how the demise of the
state has allowed “being-with” to be highlighted and, thus, in the way I am about
to delineate, a sort of ontological justice.

Derrida’s work on the “Force of Law” represents the most contemporary
extension of Levinas’s thought. Derrida begins by making a distinction between
the law and justice. Justice is not, simply, a matter of matching a crime (as laid

out in the law) to a person who has committed said crime. Derrida writes,

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To be just, the decision of a judge, for example, must not
only follow a rule of law, or a general law but must also assume it,
approve it, confirm its value, by a reinstituting act of interpretation,
as if ultimately nothing previously existed of the law, as if the judge
himself invented the law in every case. No exercise of justice as
law can be just unless there is a “fresh judgment” [. . . ] This fresh
judgment can very well—must very well—conform to a preexisting
law, but the reinstituting, reinventive and freely decisive
interpretation, the responsible interpretation of the judge requires
that his “justice” not just consist in conformity, in the conservative
and reproductive activity of judgment. In short, for a decision to be
just and responsible, it must, in its proper moment if there is one,
be both regulated and without regulation: it must conserve the law
and also destroy it or suspend it enough to have to reinvent each

case . . . (original’s emphasis; “Force of Law” 23)

To be just is to apply the law in light of its insubstantiality, which is, like the

“nation-state,” Derrida adds, grounded in interpretive violence—there is no law or

ground that can guide the originary constitution of a body of laws (24). The law,

like the nation, is a representation built upon nothing. In the absence of what

becomes in DeLillo and Pynchon the subjectival structure, the nation-state,

“subjects” are constantly confronted with this lack of substantiality. They are not

paralyzed, but make their representations in view of this abyssal ground.

Community, or being-with, then is integral to this just relation to the world

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because being-with presents to us the abyssal ground of our being. Being-with is,
in fact, a total lack of project: no representation or ego can be founded on being-
with (see Nancy Lg 1-2 and May 35). Yet, we go on and make projects, and this
experience of being-with moderates our representations, making them more
permeable. Here, perhaps, we can glimpse what Derrida was after when he
wrote in his early essay, “Violence and Metaphysics,” of a
community of the question, therefore, within that fragile moment
when the question is not yet determined enough for the hypocrisy
of an answer to have already initiated itself beneath the mask of the
question, and not yet determined enough for its voice to have been
already and fraudulently articulated within the very syntax of the
question. A community of decision, of initiative, of absolute initiality,
but also a threatened community, in which the question has not yet
found the language it has decided to seek, is not yet sure of its own
possibility within the community. (\_N&_D 80)
A community, for Derrida, must walk a fine line between, on the one hand, being
a community of the same which violently excludes the other, or being so open to
the other, so hospitable, that communal identity collapses (Caputo 113). If a
decision is defined by this paradoxical tension between simultaneously rejecting
and confirming the other (question, or law), we see the same paradox here at an
ontological level. In Undenivorld’s final chapter, Nick returns home changed.
Marian and he are more intimate now. He shares more as his old aggressive self

remains influenced by his Russian experience. Nick admits to the “intractability of

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waste”—Viktor’s nuclear explosions must not have been enough--yet he
continues recycling (805). All his activities, all his projects are marked by
difference, the mark of the other, which amounts to a sort of “(post)structural”
humility.

It is little wonder in light of the strident nationalism here in the United
States that the Danish director Lars von Trier chose to set his critically-acclaimed
pm in the hinterland of Colorado.32 The fact that von Trier has never set foot
in the US is, rightly, of little importance because he knows that "America” is an
idea, a representation, a border more than anything else. That, naturally, is the
point of Qggyile. All of the film’s action takes place on a sound stage. There are
no actual buildings. Just as Elm Street boasts no elms, these “buildings” possess
no walls; chalk lines delimit each building. If each one of these buildings may be
thought of as a trope for individual identity, gaggle implies that human identity is
essentially communal—that is, not separate from others, but radically exposed to
one another in the sense I develop above. However, despite evidence to the
contrary, the townspeople act as if they are self-created, all-powerful egos. As
Cartesian subjects, they invent borders where there are none, and,
unsurprisingly, violence soon ensues. The film has much to say about the nature
of justice in this context, but von Trier makes his major point as ostentatiously
and bravely as possible: At what cost can “we” here in the US. continue to deny

our mortality, our status as always with others, un-bordered?

 

32 Please see my brief film review of Degville in which I discuss justice in similar terms: justice as
making a decision in relation to (i.e., without borders) the other. The review was recently

published in the online h r l f lii Fi (April 2005).

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CHAPTER THREE

Playing at Birth: Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren”

A joycean tour de force of a novel, Dhalgren . . . stake[s] a better
claim than anything else in this country in the last quarter-century
(excepting only Gass’s Omensetter’s Luck and Nabokov’s Pele
_F_i_re) to a permanent place as one of the enduring monuments of
our national literature—The Libertarian Review (blurb taken from
the recent Vintage edition.)

This reviewer has missed the point. Or, rather, this reviewer has missed
one point of many in his reduction of Dhalgren to a national monument. To be
fair, this reduction is the essence of the work of a traditional book review and of
much intellectual work. While I do agree that Dhelgren is an “enduring monument
of our national literature,” I question the absence of scare quotes in the review. In
the world of Dhalgren (and some would say, our world) adjectives—like
“permanent” and “enduring”—and nouns—like “monument” and “nation”—can
only be written under erasure. There is another reading of Delany’s novel, a
reading which interrupts any simple reduction to a patriotic monument, work of
art, or tool of ego creation.

Situating Dhalgren, published in 1975, in the context of the 1960’s and
early 1970’s is difficult to resist. Indeed, Delany has admitted that the “ruins and

wrecks” of US. cities provided him with his essential material (Edelman). We

 

33 This chapter is forthcoming in JNT: Journal ef Narrative Thflfl 35.1 (Summer 2005).

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also know from the same interview that Delany originally envisioned the novel as
a series of five novels in which five dissimilar governments would be overthrown
by a “group of people just exercising the wonderful world view of the flower
children.” For African-Americans, the 1960’s and 1970’s were a period of
extreme poverty and racism, as well as a period of great change with so many
migrating from the rural south to the industrial north (Zinn 458-459). During this
period there were peaceful civil right marches, militant Black Panther actions,
anti-war protests, prison riots, and assassinations. Exercising little hyperbole,
Howard Zinn describes blacks as “engaging in wild insurrection in a hundred
northern cities” In the late 1960’s (450). Dhalgren’s Bellona, named after the
Roman goddess of war, feels like a city torn apart by a race riot, if not a coup
d’état. All of which implies that while Delany’s original conception altered
significantly, his critique of extant political structures remains. Readers of
Dhalgren in 1975 would have been incapable of understanding Bellona as
anything other than a near analogue of cities recently torn asunder by urban
riots.

This chapter, then, needs to be understood as involving an ethical critique
of concrete political structures and as not simply concerned with the writing of the
text before us because, as I will argue, the city along with every subjectival
creation is a product of myth. Delany’s text interrogates such monumental myths
through a representation of the city (and thereby, the subject) as wounded and
open to certain ethical possibilities. In its fragmentation Delany’s text represents,

internally and externally, subjectivity at its limit, which is to say, a “subjectivity”

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whose assimilative powers have been overwhelmed exposing it to community in
the way I describe in chapter two. However, I read Dhalgren first as a way of
thinking about how writing can mitigate against the monumentalism of the subject
and the subject’s myths that obsess after non-relation, eliding that birth or
(communal) relation that comes from the outside and others. Dhalgren becomes
above all a “novel” which plays at birth, at never getting beyond birth, always
coming and never arriving at presence, and, hence, always remaining with others
in the sense described at length in my previous chapter on Pynchon and DeLillo.
Bellona defies description. Indeed, this city seems lost even to perception,
“Very few suspect the existence of the city. It is as if not only the media but the
laws of perspective themselves have redesigned knowledge and perception to
pass it by. Rumor says that there is practically no power here. Neither television
cameras nor on-the-spot broadcasts function: that such a catastrophe as this
should be opaque” (14). There is no law, no social structure, little work, and little
sense of time. Much of the population has fled and much of this enormous city
has been burnt to the ground. Often the city seems a labyrinth in which streets
and landmarks move and shift according to no discernible law. Sometimes there
are two moons and sometime only one. Sometimes the sun appears so large that
it looks like it is going nova. No one knows why or how Bellona became this way.
It could have been a meteor, a fire, the “rape” of a white girl by a black man, a
bomb, a riot, an ecological disaster, or something else. Like many things in
Dhalgren, this question is never satisfyingly answered. Bellona is a “vague,

vague city” (382).

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Dhalgren’s complexity cannot be understated. Fortunately, Delany has
provided a set piece, a microcosm, at the center of his massive novel which
provides the reader with a sense of what is at stake in Bellona. Against the horror
of Bellona, one person, Mary Richards, described as both bookish and creative,
continues to work. According to Mr. Richards:

Mary lives in her world of cooking and cleaning and the
children. I come home. And nothing looks . . . I can’t describe it. A
man’s home is supposed to be—well, a place where everything is
real, solid, and he can grab hold. In our home, I just don’t know. I
come in from that terrible world, and I’m in some neverland I just
don't believe in. And the less I believe in it, the more it slips. I think
it’s me, sometimes. Mary’s always been a strange woman; she
hasn’t had it that easy. She tries so hard to be . . . well civilized [. .
.] suddenly you begin to feel she’s changing the world into her own
ideas. (173)
An exemplary rational subject, Mary makes a project out of the world, creating it
in her image (Nancy LC 3). Such is her power that Kid and others conform to her
conversational expectations: “she does more than [keep a ‘nice house’]. She
keeps us too” which is essentially her way of dispelling the confusion of the
Bellonan landscape and reinforcing her identity.

Bellona’s catastrophe is murky. Among the various elements that are

paraded as causes--the storm, a shooting, the rioting--a major focus is the

violent, consensual, and public sex act that occurs between the young white

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June Richards and the older black man George Harrison. This act is widely
publicized in the Bellona Times. Opposed and yet linked to this public act is a
private act, June’s alleged murder of her brother. While helping June move a rug
to a new apartment, Bobby falls down an elevator shaft. This occurs shortly after
he threatens to reveal June’s desire to their mother, a revelation that would
undermine the tenuous state of propriety in the Richards home. To further
substantiate reading this family as a microcosm of Bellona, consider this early
conversation between Kid and Milly on the Bellona catastrophe: “when it
happened [. . .] it was terrible,” she says. Her use of “terrible” reminds Kid of “the
way he remembered a man in a brown suit once say ‘elevator.’ It’s that tone, he
thought, remembering when it had denuded Tak’s speech” (30). When told of
Bobby’s elevator accident, Mr. Richards exhibits a “lack of expression” which can
only re-emphasize how the expressive identity of the solipsistic subject is
undermined by that which it cannot cognize (248). Bobby’s elevator accident
microcosmically grounds this larger catastrophic event and the denuding that is
characteristic of Bellona.

In the midst of the work of myth, such moments of horror, leading to this
inexpressiveness, are smoothed-over. Directly before Bobby’s death, Mrs.
Richards describes how the “shrieking“ on the part of her neighbors made
“mak[ing] a home” impossible (original’s emphasis; 227). The move to another
apartment is meant to remedy the noise problem, but instead, as she feared, “a
space, a gap, a crack [appears] in which some terrible thing might get in and

destroy it, us, my home.” This is made less abstract in a conversation following

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Bobby’s accident in which Mrs. Richards tells how a “huge crack” once appeared
in June’s ceiling and how it took management three months to repair it. She
explains that when such things happen all she can do is continue making a “good
home, where nothing can hurt [her spouse]” (my emphasis; 246). By “nothing,”
we may read any thing that would undermine subjectivity. Briefly, death is that
no-thing that concerns her. It follows that one of the most common refrains in the
novel is Kid’s recognition that he is going to die (372). It is such a recognition,
such a crack or wound in the family being, that Mrs. Richards concerns herself
with; she, however, cannot face this fear, but uses others to obscure it.

When Kid argues for her to change and says, “But if everything outside
has changed—,” she responds, then “I have to be [. . .] stronger inside” (original's
emphasis; 227). This means, as a later conversation indicates, that for her the
“outside” in a sense is not “real” at all (244-245). When, for instance, her spouse
leaves the building for work, he does not go “anywhere” because, she explains,
there is no place to go. The outside is simply beyond her comprehension, or a
projection of a narcissistic self (which amounts to the same thing). Just as she
feared, a “space” does appear and this is the spacing of being-with which resists
her incessant project.

While this will require further nuancing, the important point to gather at this
juncture is that subjectivity is grounded in the control of alterity. Richards controls
and assimilates the world so that it no longer horrifies her. In this imminently
rational process, she creates an inside and an outside, the most basic sort of

representation to map the world. However, as we have seen, the experience of

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death ovenlvhelms the rational subject. As this is an experience that we can have
no knowledge of, the border that separates subjectivity from the outside, alterity,
is violated. Bobby’s fall through space and his bloody return in the arms of Kid
highlights how very real the outside is, undermining Mrs. Richard’s solipsistic
self. The move from the 17th to the 19th floor was supposed to be a controlled,
upward reorientation that would ultimately better preserve the family. It is instead
much more “cost[ly]” than expected, leading to less a controlled movement than
to an absolute spatial hemorrhaging in which the family being is torn and
exposed to all the difference it hopes to elide. Mrs. Richards is grief-stricken
(246).

The metaphor that most succinctly links the Richards, Bellona, and writing
is that of wounding. Bobby’s fall leaves him viscerally exposed to the
outside—not a subjectival outside, but the outside that the subject’s bordering of
the world hopes to tame. The same is true for the larger family being in the
aftermath of his death, as it works to create a tidy separation between the inside
and outside and close the crack in the ceiling, if you will. Mrs. Richards quickly
begins to heal this more immediate wound. By contrast, it is Kid who retrieves the
body, looking just as horrific as Bobby, who cannot easily salve this wound. Like
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, Dhalgren is circular. It ends and begins with the
following: “ [. . .] l have come to/ to wound the autumnal city.” In Jean Mark
Gawron’s path-breaking article, he describes this “come to” as the “coming to” of
consciousness and the repetition of the “to” as a stutter, “a gap between the text

and its subject” (90). While Gawron appears to offer these as two different

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readings, I would merge them and argue that what we see here is a spacing of
consciousness. The “self" remains, during the period of this stutter, exposed, its
identity somehow outside of itself and with others. Certainly the “coming to” of
consciousness and the “wounding” gesture toward the strange logic of exposure:
identity remains, but it is wounded and open to others.

What this analysis reveals is that Bellona is similarly wounded. If the
wound is a stutter, the spacing of consciousness, then Bellona is always already
wounded before Kid arrives. Kid’s subjectivity was exposed before he even set
foot in the city which suggests that it is only Bellona’s exposed condition that
allows him entrance, and, once within, the freedom to be the singular person that
he is, denying any easy assimilation to an urban project. Just as the Richards’
home and work are interrupted and spaced out and into the other, so is the
subjectival being that is Bellona. Bellona is un-worked, profoundly resistant to the
salve that would return it to full health. On the level of writing, Mr. Newboy later
describes Kid’s poetry as “that holy and spectacular wound which bleeds” (258).
All of which suggests that what is at stake in this exposure to the death of the
other is the collapse of myth. If myth can be thought of as the seamless work of
creating a home and a consciousness, Bellona is exposed to the outside in the

absence of a work, a myth, or oeuvre.

***

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Delany’s text adroitly answers the most obvious questions concerning this
interruption of the work of myth: What does this exposure entail on a concrete
level for knowledge, community, economics, and ethics? It is important to note
that while a concrete description of what this exposure entails is necessary as a
bridge to more central questions, it would be dangerous to not discuss each of
these issues together. To discuss the theme of birth without the “being-with” of
community, would be to risk falling into a subjectival reading which clearly is not
my aim.

Exposure to the “being-with” of community occurs when the rational
subject faces the death of an other. Bellona, correspondingly, is described as a
graveyard by Kid (386). This is an apt portrayal insofar as no one is buried or,
assumedly, receives the traditional burial rites and rituals. After being carried out
of the elevator shaft, Bobby is left to rot in an empty apartment. I’m reminded of
George Bataille’s comment that “community” must remain at the.“peculiar
grandeur” of death, or risk falling into subjectivity (Nancy ]_C_3 16). It is such a
being-with of finite and exposed beings that we see in Bellona. Bellona and its
singularities are defined by terror: “When what terrifies is neither noisy, nor
moves quickly, and lasts hours, then we become very different. I don’t know who
she is!” (441). Since death is unknowable and indistinct, it follows that such an
experience has radical hermeneutic implications, extending even as far as Kid’s
inability to “know” his partner, or his own name, which many too quickly confuse

with insanity. Kid describes his state in the following way:

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“Look about. . . being nuts. [. . .] You’re not, and you never
have been. That means what you see, and hear, and feel, and think
. . . you think that is your mind. But the real mind is invisible: you’re
less aware of it, while you think, than you are of your eye while you
see . . . until something goes wrong with it. Then you become
aware of it, with all its dislocated pieces and its rackety functioning,
the same way you become aware of your eye when you get a
cinder in it. Because it hurts. . . Sure it distorts things. But the
strange thing, the thing that you can never explain to anyone,
except another nut, or, if you’re lucky, a doctor who has an unusual
amount of sense—stranger than the hallucinations, or the voices, or
the anxiety—is the way you begin to experience the edges of the
mind itself. . . in a way that other people just can’t.” (original’s

emphasis; 48)

In some ways what we have here is similar to the finite objectivity put forward by

Donna Haraway in “Situated Knowledges” in which she argues against a

disembodied panoptical objectivity and for an embodied objectivity. The godlike

eye, she insists, “distance(s) the knowing subject from everybody and everything

in the interests of unfettered power” (188). She argues for a mortal, situated

knowledge which is ultimately more objective: “only partial perspective promises

objective vision” (190). Such a situated and embodied objectivity is more

responsible because it is there with others rather than abstracted from the world

like an immanent subject created over and against an object.

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The Richards family is implicated in this critique due to their obsession
with moving up in their building to a nineteenth floor apartment with a balcony.
The other god-like eye in Bellona is Roger Calkins, the newspaper editor, whose
mansion overlooks the city. Against this notion of consciousness (“what you see,
and hear, and feel, and think”), Kid points to a way of seeing founded on the
interruption of this panoptical eye and, ultimately, on the death of the other
described above and our consequent finitude. His argument here bears a strong
resemblance to Heidegger’s analysis of the broken tool (73-73; German page
numbers)“ For the latter, the “l” is not absolute, self-birthed, and non-relational,
but essentially with others in a way that cannot be thought (“invisible”) because
thought by its very nature separates the “subject” from its essence. Its essence is
existence if we understand existence as the constant “self’-interpretation that
occurs prior to rational consciousness and inserts us in the world in a profound
referential manner (Dreyfus 12-17). Heidegger describes being-in-the-world in an
imminently practical way, as “a handling, using and taking care of things which
has its own kind of ‘knowledge”’ (67).

It is this being-in-the-world that is pointed to in the reference to the “real
mind is invisible.” Delany is not arguing for a higher mind beyond our own which
would ground our world, so much as using a metaphysically bankrupt vocabulary

to suggest that reality may not have a ground at all; reality may be interpretation

 

3‘ If it were not for the centrality of mourning in the novel and this resemblance to a passage in
Heidegger’s Being and Time, I might have led with the following. Ken James writes, “Delany
argues that the rhetoric of science fiction foregrounds precisely the historical, social, and
technological constitution of human landscapes which conservative rhetoric tends to obscure”
(James xix-xx). Rather than being naturalized or dehistoricized and thereby elided, the objective
world (of space, landscape, culture, and technology) are foregrounded as questions in st.

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all the way down. This “mind,” then, is not normally noticed, or subject to scrutiny.
As Heidegger's famous analysis of the hammer suggests, it is only when
something goes wrong, when the equipment we need for a project fails, that we
see the worldliness of the world. Once broken, the tool’s relation (“reference”) to
its wielder and the world around it is made conspicuous. The state of being
broken forces us to recognize our relation and dependence on the world around
us, which is to say, that we are in the world and not monadic beings. During this
experience, the reductive, assimilative work of rationality stalls, and alterity is
seen as “dislocated” and “rackety.” While the tool’s “wounded” status—in this
case, the cinder in the eye—may cause some discomfort, forcing the “subject” to
be exposed to the world, to anxiety, hurt, and to mortality, this discomfort allows
for a more accurate experience (or “knowledge”) of the world by allowing the
“subject” to “experience the edges of the mind itself.” Delany underlines this a bit
more concretely directly after this speech. Kid, who never wears more than one
shoe, puts his bare foot on the floor and the omniscient narrator remarks, “He
was far more conscious of the texture of the floorboards with the foot that had
been bare” (48). Kid, like his shoes, both present and absent, has a more direct,
bodily understanding of the world.

We’ve already seen to some degree how Mrs. Richards creates a
monadic shell around her family, cutting her off from community. The text
indicates this more directly when her daughter, June, visits her brother at the
scorpion commune. Delany writes, “She circles [. . .] in. Yet she’s so far away! It’s

not even that [. . .] she's a pretty girl, but rather that there are over two dozen

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people living in here and the isolation she demands about her destroys our
concept of human space” (563). June is god-like and “heroic,” if only because of
her persistence in trying to mend her family. She is visiting in order to convince
her brother Eddy to return to the family which she says has “fallen apart . . . it’s
like . . . the plug was pulled out and everything ran out. All of it” (567). June is the
very model of the monad insofar as she is intent on control, on a restricted
economy that is intent on conserving identity, keeping it all inside (Derrida m
251-277). Her greatest worry is precisely what we see once again in this final
quotation: the horror of an inside exposed to the outside.

By contrast, for those who are exposed to one another, “Bellona is terribly
hospitable. You can have your fantasy and [. . .] feel just a bit less like you’re
depriving anyone else of theirs” (373). While Bellona is full of wealth, little real
looting occurs which is “a comment on the limits of the particular mind the city
encourages. Who wants to be as lonely as the acquisition of all those objects
would make them?” Rationality, in its essence, always gathers to its self,
assimilating alterity. Its interruption amounts to a radical dispersal. At a party
thrown In honor of Kid’s recently published book, Kid notes how Calkin’s mansion
“can soak up a lot of people,” before the conversation turns to the city:

“How odd,” Lanya said. “All the limits go, and you can’t
believe there’s really any more to it. We’re used to objects like
icebergs or old wells where you know most of it is under ground or
water. But something like a city at night, with great stretches of it

blotted or obscured, that’s very different—"

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“You guys,” Denny interrupted [. . .] you two can talk about
things that, you know, are just so far beyond me [. . .] when I don’t
understand—even when I do, I just wanna fuckin’ cry, you know?” [.
.]

Lanya nodded. “I do."

Denny breathed out and looked.

They stood apart and felt very close. (615)

Calkins, June, and Mrs. Richards are each examples of the rational subject
gathering in difference, making it work, creating a profit, and forming a
narcissistic shell around the self. This shell amounts to the drawing of borders as
we saw in Pynchon, a delineation of inside and outside, which allows identity to
be seen. In Bellona, the death of the other has turned Bellona’s urban
consciousness, these limits, inside out. The city’s condition exposes most people
to their essential finitude and the impossibility of immanence. With the limits
(borders, edges) of their minds turned inside out, the work of assimilation stalls
and with it the capitalist impulse. Kid, by contrast to Calkins or Richards, does not
depend on clear limits. Calkins is able to assimilate many people (“can soak up a
lot of people”) because he possesses a sense of interiority and an interior always
requires an exterior with the borders in between. Exposed to death, Kid, Lanya,
and Denny as subjects are interrupted and spaced out and into one another: they
can stand spatially distant from one another, yet, due to this rational interruption
(“so far beyond me [rationally]”), find themselves in the most intimate of

sfiuafions.

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This notion of intimacy is a radical revision of that seen in Delany’s book-
length essay, Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love. The essay
concerns itself with the author’s experience living in a New York commune in
1967 and 1968. While Robert Elliot Fox argues that Dhalgren describes the “cold
underside” of his communal experience rather than any “hoped-for state of bliss,”
I would insist that both of these texts are very much concerned with the
possibility of a communal, utopian ethics (106). In Heavenly Breakfast, space
remains a concern. In a commune the quarters are so close, Delany tells us, that
every action on the part of an “I” is immediately felt by others and vice versa: “the
square of the distance intervening between us must be a diminishing factor in
how much information and energy crosses from me to you and back” (103).
Since there Is such an immediate connection between people, it becomes
impossible “to avoid responsibility” or force the other person to work harder than
he or she can bear. All of this is communicated less through rationality
(“telepathy”) than “touch and smell.” While Delany even at this early moment is
skeptical of rationality, he does not emphasize its interruption, so much as the
way that touch and smell appear to overwhelm the rational information that might
bolster an “I.” In Dhalgren, by contrast, he begins with an experience, the death

of the other, that interrupts rationality.

***

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In Bellona, tremendous forces immediately begin to re-work the mythic
fabric whose shredding has exposed the city to being-with. Once again, Mrs.
Richards can serve as an example. After Bobby’s death, she discovers Kid
writing a poem and wonders if it is an elegy for Bobby. Kid denies this and
immediately decides that “Elegy” will be the title (242). Mrs. Richards exudes a
“nervousness” that makes others conform to her wishes (173). In this case, she
uses Kid’s poetry to heal her exposure to Bobby’s death. On the level of the
polis, Calkins stands in for Mrs. Richards. Just as Mrs. Richards tries to use Kid
and his writing as a means of healing the rift created by Bobby’s death, so
Calkins twists reality and makes Kid a mythic hero, filling in or caulking the
breach in Bellona’s psyche (654, 712-713). Kid says, “I’m not a poet. I’m not a
hero. But sometimes I think these people will distort reality in any way to make
me one—but that’s insanity, isn’t it?”

Calkin’s identifies with the city ("my City”) and uses Kid, “the sort of poet
Bellona needs,” as a means to build up a level of “acclaim” for Bellona (658; 740-
742). Calkins publishes Kid’s Brass Orchids without even reading it or meeting
with the poet. Society requires art, well-written or not. Calkins describes his
interest in Kid as a matter of the “mechanics of power.” However, he is just as
interested in Kid as a hero than as a poet. If we ignore, for the moment,
Dhalgren’s surreal and fragmented prose and focus on the actual events of the
narrative, the novel could be understood as a heroic epic, the outfitting of the
hero being one of the most obvious conventions of the heroic myth. The partially

amnesiac narrator enters the city and almost immediately is outfitted with “three

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gifts [. . .] armor, weapon, title” (18, 7). He is armed with an “orchid” which
resembles Edward Scissorhand’s famous blades. For armor, he has a three-yard
long chain of prisms tightly wrapped around his torso. And, lastly, he is dubbed
“the Kid,” “Kidd” or “Kid.” Along with these themes, we have the epic length of
Dhalgren itself, the repeated mention of Kid as “hero,” and the way that the novel
ostentatiously thematizes myth (249). On the most blatant level, the _B_e_llo_ne
Iim_ee continually misrepresents Kid, so that he and the scorpions look more
dangerous, if not heroic. When he follows George into a burning house to rescue
three children, he retains all the credit while George is dropped from the news
story. When he and the scorpions go on a “run” through the city, a series of dull
pranks is blown into a violent rampage.35
This heroic thematization is perhaps nowhere more evident than in an
image that appears to Kid as he engages in a consensual gangbang with fellow
scorpions:
This time, it was an image of myself, holding hands with someone
(Lanya? Risa? Denny?) and running among leafless trees laced
with moonlight while the person behind me kept repeating: ‘ . . .
Grendal, Grendal, Grendal . . .’ which, while I rocked my face in her
hot neck and the stinging in my thighs, chest, and belly went on,

seemed very funny. (Specific and primitive?) I raised my face out of

 

35 Both Gawron and Mary Kay Bray have produced intriguing takes on Delany’s use of myth. Bray
writes, “By means of its ironies, Dhalgren brings readers to a simultaneous awareness both of
traditional American myths and preoccupations and of their failure to be viable, at least for some
[. . .] ironies in Dhalgren emanate from the pattern of quest and initiation suggested above, from a
variety of plays upon the concept of American individualism, and from a thirst for moral absolutes
set against an intensely relative background” (58).

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the moon-bright branches into a room Iathered with the smell of
smoke and scorpions. And grinning, man, like a tiger. (678)
Kid is haunted by a simultaneous call to the closely coupled vocations of hero
and poet. This repetition is either the call to kill the monster Grendel, or to write

the story, a contemporary Beowulf, that would recapitulate the death of

 

Grendel—the monster in this case being a metaphor for the un-working of
Bellona. As his handholding and flight indicate, heroism endangers his relation
with others. This theme of myth’s immanence and exclusion is underlined by the
final reference to “grinning [. . .] like a tiger.” Ostentatiously an allusion to the
violent, tiger-like protagonist of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination (112-
113), it also links up with what may be the most repetitive trope for immanence in
the novel: lions. Statues, or monuments, of lions are strewn throughout the text.
We see them linked to Mrs. Richards, Calkins, and the park commune. In each
instance they are linked to work, to the assimilative actions of the rational
subject.

Matters do not remain so simple. Aftenrvards, Kid realizes that it was not
Gren-dal, but Dhal-gren that he heard. While not stated explicitly, it seems fairly
clear that Bill, the man who interviews Kid for the Bellona Times is, in fact,
William Dhalgren (783). “Kid” does not know his name and wonders whether he,
himself, might be William Dhalgren, whose link with the newspaper--a transmitter
of myth--can only magnify the logocentric implications of the proper name. The
latter would seem to be an immediate means of identifying a person through

language, an identification that would not have to first traverse the outside, a

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relation to the other (Bennington 105). In %, Derrida writes that “the work of
mourning [. . .] is always for/of the proper name," an observation that is
supported very well by Mrs. Richards, among others (86). The proper name as
with any other “proper” thing—property, propriety—can only be what it is through
exclusion of that which is other, exclusion of that which undermines the illusion of
pure immanence. Since death or a recognition of finitude leads to a radical
interruption of subjectivity, subjectivity can be thought of as essentially founded
on a work of mourning in which death is kept at arms length through the polite
observance of funeral rites: myth, in a word. But this is impossible. When Kid
once again remembers his proper name (described later in this piece), he is
already “with” others in the sense I have been describing. The proper name
cannot be removed from what Derrida calls the “system of differences.”

The essential tension in the novel is between whether to be a
hero/poet/proper name, or to be exposed to the being-with of relation. Kid waffles
on this question. At the moment he realizes that he had heard “Dhalgren” and not
“Grendal,” he wipes himself with a copy of the 1%. At this Joycean juncture,
Kid does not recognize the connection between the En_e_s and William Dhalgren,
but the implicit criticism remains (679). At other moments, he is enthralled by the
fantasy of the Author. Consider his ambivalent attraction to Newboy’s books: “A
field, cast by the name of a man, who, without my ever having read a complete
work of his, the hidden machinery of my consciousness at some point decided

was an artist. How comical, sad, exhausting. Why am I a victim of this magic?”

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(763). And yet he wonders whether he will also cast such a spell on those who
have not read him.

What is at stake in this question of having a poet/hero for the city? If we
ignore Delany’s explicit interest in the question of community, Dhalgren could be
read as an 800 page gloss on Michel Foucault’s ”What is an Author?” In Foucault
as well, it is death that provides impetus for the creation of narrative (890).
Narrative substantiates the hero’s death and postpones, in the exemplary case of
Scherezade, the moment at which the poet faces death. The poet, hero, and
narrative are all bound to the movement of what Foucault terms individualization
which he also sees in terms of space. When the author dies, he writes, “we must
locate the space left empty [. . .] follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and
watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (892). It is less this
emphasis on space that interests me, as Nancy has certainly theorized spatiality
in more extensive ways, than the question of how the author-function operates in
Dhalgren.

Clearly, in the “author” we confront the problematic of the proper name,
myth, and heroism. Foucault’s theorization of the author function dovetails with
the above on several interrelated levels: the author acts as a limiting agent,
“marking off the edges of a text” (893); the author is a “principle of thrift [read,
restricted economy] in the proliferation of meaning” (899); and, the author is a
“principle of unity” (895). Just as Kid is controlled by Newboy’s books, so Kid
operates for Bellona. Looking at Newboy’s books, Kid asks, “What is it around

these objects that vibrates so much the objects themselves vanish?” (763). Kid,

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as concrete, singular book, is also lost when the author function controls him
which explains how this “hidden machinery” is also able to look past Kid as a
singular entity and create him as Author. The importance of this appropriation
cannot be underestimated. In a limit-less city, a city without an economy and
without unity, Kid as Author represents a crucial limiting figure. Kid as Author
lends himself to the city as Subject; othenlvise, the city or community of Bellona,

remains unworked, a non-exclusionary being-with.

*‘k‘k

“You have received that holy and spectacular wound which
bleeds . . . well, poetry [...] But have you hunkered down close to it,
sighted through the lips of it the juncture of your own humanity with
that of the race? [. . .] Whether love or rage,” Mr Newboy went on,
not looking up, “or detachment impels the sighting, no matter. If you
don’t do it, all your blood is spilled pointlessly . . .” (258)

We have a sense of what this “holy and spectacular wound” entails
epistemologically, relationally, and economically for singularity (as opposed to
subjectivity). We have also touched on the question of myth and its web of
influence. In this final section, I focus on the question of writing more directly,
asking how Dhalgren mitigates against a mythic, monumental state. We have a
sense of what a city or knowledge might look like in light of the experience of the

wound, but what about a work of art? If consciousness, subjectival or urban, is a

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matter of seamless myths, how can writing remain exposed, un-worked and
thereby retain the ethical, epistemological, economic benefits detailed above?
How can an author write without becoming subject to “Authority" and to the
consequent assimilation of difference?

I have already mentioned the circularity of Dhalgren’s narrative and
alluded to some of the apocalyptic themes that are never fully narrated: the origin
of Bellona’s wounding, and the “plague” alluded to in two section headings (“In
Time of Plagues” and “The Anathemata: a plague joumar’). Dhalgren owes its
horror to its absolute abandonment of these flagrantly important themes. Apart
from one young woman lying sick in a bed, we are left pondering whether the
plague is a real illness or existential, along the lines I have been depicting. In
addition, the ontological nature of Dhalgren is confused on several levels.
Dhalgren appears to be a novel concerned with Kid’s experiences in Bellona in
which a clear division between author and subject is cultivated. Then we begin to
notice that the notebook—already full of notes and observations when given to
Kid early in the text—begins to repeat the opening of the novel. Is Kid writing the
“novel” before us, or has he discovered the author’s discarded notebook and
decided to inscribe his own thoughts alongside the author’s words? The
opposition between author, character, and reader are all radically displaced in
this way.

Along with this stylistic intermingling of self (author) and other (his object,
characters), the novel shifts point of view frequently. Most of the text remains in

third person omniscient while infrequent paragraphs in the first person detail

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Kid’s observation of the world around him. Dhalgren’s most ostentatious feature
is the way in which the text is riven by multiple narratives. This is particularly true
of the final section, the plague journal, in which a third person narrative might
take up the left portion of the page and Kid’s own point of view the remaining
white space. Kid’s interjections often criticize the inaccuracy of the other
passage, implying that he, once again, is the Author and denying any simple
totalization of meaning. The text in this final section appears unfinished; words
are crossed out, or sentences end in midstream. At least two editorial notations
appear here by, it would seem, two different editors. We are given a profound
sense of a project that has not been finished, but simply abandoned.

I want to turn to a lengthy passage in which we find Kid writing. Before
turning to his notebook, Kid has been walking through the city, horrified by the
inexplicable destruction he sees around him in which the “demarcation [again,
limit or border] between lawn and street vanished beneath junk” (77):

He sat down on the curb, opened to the notebook’s first page.

to wound the autumnal city

he read once more. Hastily he turned the page over to the clear

side. He looked down the four streets, looked at the corner houses.

He sucked a breath through closed teeth, clicked the point out and

began to write.

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In the middle of the third line, without taking pen off paper,
he swept back to cross it all out. Then, carefully, he recopied two
words on the next line. The second was “.”I Very carefully now,
word followed word. He crossed out two more lines [. . .]

Between lines, while he punched his pen point, his eye

strayed to the writing beside his:

It is our despair at the textural inadequacies of language that

drives us to heighten the structural ones toward

“Annnl’ out loud. There was not a pretty word in the bunch.
Roughly he turned the notebook back around the paper to avoid
distraction.

Holding the last two lines in his head, he looked about at the
buildings again. (Why not live dangerously?) He wrote the last lines
hurriedly, notating them before they dispersed.

He printed at the top: “Brisbain”

[ . . .] closed the book, puzzled at what he had done.

Then he stood.

Struck with dizziness, he staggered off the curb. He shook
his head and finally managed to get the world under him at the right
angle. The back of his legs were cramped: he'd been in a near-fetal

squat practically half an hour. (original’s emphasis; 78-79)

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Fredric Jameson’s main thesis in Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Caeitalism is “that the latest mutation in space—postmodern hyperspace—has
finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to
locate itself, to organize its surroundings perceptually, and cognitively map its
position in a mappable external world” (44). Needless to say, for Jameson
agency depends on the ability to cognitively map postmodern space whose
confusion he links to “late capitalism.” Bellona’s spatial confusion cannot be
overstated. We must not only recall Kid’s sense that the city changes daily—he
even sees one person swapping road signs—but the essential mystery of what
led to this confusion remains unanswered. The passage moves from a horror of
postmodern urban space to a sense of positioning seen most simply in Kid’s
mapping of self (“I” above) against the other. Soon after writing the poem, Kid’s
dizziness dissipates and with it his horror of the street. He notices that Brisbain
North has given way to Brisbain South, bringing Kid (on the next page) to
Calkin’s mansion. Clearly, this transformation is a product of writing; writing,
urban spatial mapping, and consciousness are knotted together here. All of this
fittingly occurs while Kid is on his way to Calkin’s mansion. In writing this poem
(“Brisbain”), he has already begun to fulfill his role as mythmaker. By contrast to
Jameson, however, it is the capitalist, Calkins, who pushes for this new mapping.
The passage begins with Kid glancing at the opening page of the
notebook which “begins” as Dhalgren does (“to wound the autumnal city”). Kid
“hastily” turns the page. When he glances to the writing adjacent to his own—an

incomplete sentence which details the inadequacy of language (the impossibility

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of myth’s desire to resolve the chasm between idea and reality)-—he screams.
This strange scream (“Annnl”) also occurs in a flashback of his boyhood
derangement. Again, he turns the notebook so he will not be “distract[ed].” We
have already seen how this passage describes the creation of subjectivity as
mythic mapping. Identity, as we have discussed, is a matter of non-relation,
immanence. What we see here is the birth of immanence which is always formed
first through relation to the other (the glance to the writing on the side) only to
then hastily elide that same movement. This is a glance, a relation, that the
resultant subject cannot comprehend because its birth via relation is beyond the
subject: “to the degree that it occurs, birth effaces itself, and brings itself
indefinitely back. Birth is this slipping away of presence through which everything
comes to presence” (Nancy _B_ir;l1 4). In this case, this birth is that of a poem,
“Brisbain,” which appears to have been fully completed while Kid sat in a “near-
fetal squat.” Kid’s forgetfulness, however, reaches beyond the elision of the other
in writing to the point at which his own terror dissipates, demonstrating the
concomitant connection between myth and consciousness. A completed
writing—unlike the fragment mentioned above—protects the subject from the
horror of relation, rebuilding the limits of consciousness along with the limits of
the city street.

When Kid finally remembers his name, a similar situation is played out.
The scorpions and various other Bellonan people dance en masse around a fire.
It is riotous. People are naked, clapping, floundering back and forth, and

stumbling into one another. With the emphasis on a central point, the fire, and

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Kid’s recollection of his name (Michael Henry F I—) and Dhalgren’s, this appears
to be a celebration of immanence. Yet the center in this case is a fire, a figure for
the Bellonan catastrophe, and there is a profound sense of transience in this
passage. Derrida writes of cinders as “at once the best name for the absence of
a truly proper name” (Lukacher 1). The fire, like ashes or cinders, signals both
identity’s presence and its absence—its presence in others, its relation. Paul
Fenster, a civil rights worker and non-dancer, tries to keep Kid and Lanya from
falling but Lanya tells him that “It’s all right if we fall” (779). Protecting the self (or
Calkin’s mansion) is not part of this dance. This is not a restricted economy.
Instead, it is a dance grounded in the movement of Being (in which, it is worth
noting, both conservative (Calkins) and liberal politics (Fenster) are critiqued):

I sat and panted and smiled [...] with contentment over the
absolute fact of his [William Dhalgren’s] revealed identity, till even
that, as all absolutes must, began to dissolve. [...]

“What--?” Denny moved his hand on my leg.

Lanya glanced at me, shifted her shoulder against mine.

But I sat back again, silent, marveling at the dissolve’s
completion, both elated and numbed by the jarring claps that
measured and metronomed each differential in the change—till I
had no more certainty of Bill’s last name than I had of my own. With
only the memory of knowledge, and bewilderment at whatever

mechanic had, for minutes, made that knowledge as certain to me

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as my own existence, I sat, trying to sort that mechanism’s failure,
which had let it slip away. (784)

Their dance celebrates the stutter, the gap or relation to the other, through which
entities begin their presencing. Kid strips and says, ”I want to . . . to dance” (782).
This is not a celebration of destruction either, because that would very quickly fall
into immanence. It is instead the coming and going, the birth that leads to
presence. Kid is both “elated and numbed,” feelings that go in divergent
directions. Opposed to the deadening effect of signification, of the proper name,
of myth, is the freeing movement of existence—the only “knowledge” Kid can
attest to. Kid's interest in “Dhalgren” parallels the reader’s. We also want to have
this mystery unveiled yet, following Kid, it is not the signified that becomes
privileged here, but the architecture of meaning that allows signification to
appear. To privilege this coming is to privilege existence. To ex-ist is to be in
relation, exposed to the outside. Signification, myth, subjectivity are what erase
existence as they resolve the gap between reality and the subject’s idea of what
reality should be, creating the illusion of non-relation to others (Nancy m 22-
23; “Of Being” 1). Existence, then, is irrevocably communal or relational.

Nancy writes that “Death is the absolute signified, the sealing off of sense.
It is the name, but ‘to be born' is the verb” (original’s emphasis; 3 egg). Dhalgren
concerns itself with birth as that which is foregrounded when myth is interrupted.
“Kid” is continually being born: Kid, Kidd, the Kid, Michael Henry Fl-. Not only the
instability of his name, but “Kid” signifies immaturity, if not birth. Each of the

recently quoted passages are concerned with the nature of birth. In the first we

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saw how relation was elided in the process of writing “Brisbain." The second
passage makes clear that birth, here, is not birth as signification, or the work of
mourning, or heroes. Birth in the second passage is approximate with the
sideways look, that relation that is quickly rejected in the writing of “Brisbain.”

What would a work that included this relation look like? It would look
unworked, rather like Dhalgren whose incompleteness, abandonment,
ostentatious erasures, and editorial intrusions force the reader to recognize the
relation to the other that was eliminated during the writing of the poem. Dhalgren
is the gap, or stutter, that which disturbs the easy assimilation of alterity to a tidy
inside. There is no tidy inside here. The work of myth has been exposed, leaving
the reader without a unified sign, hanging, exposed to the outside--but not
without meaning. We are meaning, as Nancy likes to say. Meaning, he writes,
“takes place between us and not between signifier, signified and referent [. . .]
before all produced or disclosed meaning, and before all exchanges of meaning,
our existence presents itself to us as meaning” (original’s emphasis; m 58,
62). Meaning is an “infinite hollowing out of presence” of the subject and the
subject’s myths: the city, the proper name, and so on (64). All that remains is that
we follow Kid’s lead and sit back and enjoy its coming and its going.

Perhaps here we can begin to understand the relentless sex in Dhalgren
and its link to this exposed community (sex requires more than one). Unlike the
traditional heterosexual coupling which the Catholic Church and others have
linked to societal welfare, a threesome is not productive. After the West and its

obsession with signification, it is just such an unproductive coupling that beckons

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to us. This new “subject comes, does nothing but come, and for him, presence in
its entirety is coming: which means, not “having come’ (past participle), but a
coming (the action of a coming, arriving). Presence is what is born, and does not
cease being born” (Nancy film; 2). In this way, Delany represents those strife-
torn American cities of the 1960’s and 1970’s in a profoundly different light. If
Bellona stands in for one of these cities, it does not represent a simple
tragedy—a monument—that a liberal or conservative politics could then be
founded upon. Instead, Delany peels away these exclusionary structures and
represents what cannot be mentally represented: our birth which always takes
place with others, a birth both horrifying and wonderful.

Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the Paris riots of 1968 in a similar
fashion by showing how politics grounds itself in forgetting. Polemos exists
between conservatives and liberals as a way to forget this birth that “has no
relation to the mind” but gives birth to the mind (44). Conservative and liberal
politics are equivalent insofar as each tries to assimilate the “unmanageable”
(birth, death), that which cannot be used as a basis for a conventional
community. He describes the student protestors as lacking a “contract” (a
political agenda), and, as such, dwelling within that childhood, or state of
dependency that the adult mind—obsessed with immanence—cannot bear. Such
a “politics” confronts traditional authorities with their essential relation to others.
Dhalgren, in this way, has much to say about the nature of black, gay and even

feminist politics of the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s.

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Monuments—to return to our introductory theme—are also born. In
Dhalgren’s strange opening pages, Kid meets a woman outside of Bellona,
makes love, asks if she knows his name (she says, “You’ve come from
somewhere. You’re going somewhere” as if that is all the identity one needs),
and then chases her until she transforms into a tree (4, 2). Again, the proper
name, the name that would be a monument, is juxtaposed with birth, the dryadic
transformation. However, it is not until much later that we learn that this
“Eurasian” had built a “life-size lion wedged together out of scrap car-parts and
junked iron” (785). She is a bn'coleur, as opposed to an engineer. An engineer,
like Mr. Richards, is one who would “supposedly be the absolute origin of his own
discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’” (Derrida V_VQ 285).
An engineer would create a lion without seams, non-relational, like the lions
found in Mrs. Richard’s apartment or guarding Calkin’s mansion. A bn'coleur does
not dabble in theology, but takes her concepts from a “heritage which is more or
less coherent or ruined.” Ruined, heterogeneous, abandoned—it is just such a

monument that Dhalgren plays at being.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Steven Spielberg’s AM’ cjel Intelligence: Who Comes After the Humanist

Subject?

In what may be by now a familiar story, Stanley Kubrick anguished over
A.l.: Artificial Intelligence for more than a decade only to die before shooting any
footage. In the mid-19803, Kubrick broached the possibility of having Steven
Spielberg direct the film while he retained credit as producer. However, such an
intriguing collaboration between the minds who created 2001: A Space Odyeeey
and _E._T, was not to be. Instead, we have Spielberg directing while the deceased
Kubrick receives a strange, specter-like, production credit. The film, indeed,
seems torn between Kubrick’s signature coldness and Spielberg’s sweetness
and light, a mélange that most critics have decried. Artificial Intelligence has
been variously described as both plodding and a masterpiece.

AL’S plot is relatively straightforward: Monica and Henry have lost their
son, Martin, to a temporarily incurable illness. David, his android replacement,
eventually finds love and acceptance from Monica before Martin’s return disrupts
the family equilibrium. Martin’s return foregrounds David’s difference, his
artificiality, his non-humanity. He is soon ejected from the house only to wander,
like Pinocchio, searching for the Blue Fairy who can make him real and accepted
by the family. Ultimately this leads him to his maker, a robot manufacturer,

centered in Manhattan where, face to face with the manufacturing line upon

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which he was built, he “suicides,” having given up on the possibility of being
human. Two thousand years later David is discovered by extremely sophisticated
A.l. who are dredging up what remains of human civilization in an extensive
archeological dig. These A.I. are fascinated with David because he is human for
them; he is, after all, the closest thing to humanity that exists. Using their
sophisticated technology, they recreate Monica from some sample DNA and she
and David enjoy one final day alone together before she once again dies.

With the assistance of Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, I
argue for a posthuman “subjectivity” that is markedly different from the notable
theories espoused by Donna Haraway and Scott Bukatman with whom I hope to
contextualize my thesis at strategic points. In what follows I begin by discussing
the relationship between subjectivity and myth, how myth creates consciousness
by assimilating a world of difference—what I will call artificiality. This work of
identity creation is fueled by an illusory lack which creates the desire that orients
and, concomitantly, creates subjectivity. This subjectival project is the essence of
humanism, and the posthuman—my ultimate concern—can only be glimpsed in
the completion of this project which, crucially, operates as a profound
interruption.

More specifically, then, I argue that fl represents the completion of the
mythic humanist project and hence, Subject, in the invention of a completely
human artificial being. My emphasis is not technology or artificiality per se, but
myth where the creation of artificial intelligence is less invention than writing.

Where the immediately prior chapter on Delany’s Dhalgren emphasizes myth that

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is then bound up with human subjects-creating human subjectivity to be exact--
here I focus on the Human as myth. Humanism completes itself by creating an
android (as a representation) which fully mirrors itself. It takes that which is
artificialuwhich I understand as a trope for identity’s essentially relational (i.e.,
being-with) nature—and assimilates it to an exclusionary myth. If humanism
entails the mythic assimilation of artificiality, the posthuman is identified by an
inability to digest the world. Rather than more subjectival identities, I argue that
humanism’s completion is less a closure than an opening, confronting us with a
“subjectivity” that is radically exposed to the outside and to others. Lastly, I show
how this interruption of humanism is triggered and sustained by the biological
sciences.

I have divided the first lengthy section into three parts. Each mini-section
introduces a key issue or concept such as identity, myth, immanence,
real/artificial and slowly elaborates upon previous introductions. I end the section
by a very concrete discussion of what is at stake ethically in being human rather

than artificial.

***

Singularity and Myth

& begins in mourning. Martin, the son of Monica and Henry, is

cryogenically frozen with a condition for which science has yet to find a cure. He

exists as both present and absent, alive and dead, and this is excruciating for

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Monica. Their doctor says to Henry, “She is in the most difficult position of feeling
she should mourn the death of your son. After five years your instincts tell you to
mourn him, too. But medicine assures us that mourning is inappropriate, that
Martin is merely pending, so all her grief goes undigested.” Death endangers
subjectivity to such an extent that all the subject’s abilities are put to work erasing
this experience in what Freud called the work of mourning. Indeed, as the
doctor’s speech indicates, Martin’s state is an indigestion that is already violated
by science and rationality and more immediately by the book Monica is reading
to her frozen son, The Adventurciof Robin Hood. She reads the pages dealing
with the birth of Maid Marian’s son, also named Martin. Robin Hood, in this case,
operates as myth, assimilating the experience of mourning. The themes I wish to
elaborate on are nicely introduced here. Either subjectivity is gathered together
into an absolute with the assistance of myth, or it is torn, exposed to a world of
relation which it cannot fully digest. What this myth of Martin’s birth creates is the
immanent presence of her son, gathering in the alterity—that strange presence
and absence, or inside and outside, of her son-which would otherwise disturb
subjectivity.36 Myth is then essential to the work of mourning and the concomitant
creation of a subject. It is when myth is interrupted or completed, when death is

not ontologized, that another way of being together is glimpsed. The rest of this

 

36 Later, we also see a birthday enacted for Martin which ends with David dragging Martin to the
pool, threatening both Martin and the family representation. For David, who had no birthday and
whose real mother was a “factory,” an artificial womb as Johnson-Johnson notes, the denial of
the mythic ritual surrounding birth denies immanent identity. How can David affirm his name as
he does obsessively—“l am David”--if he has been denied the birth ceremony that notarizes the
name as a mark of immanence? At the end of the film, David gets his birthday party which is
singularly horrific as its amounts to absolute immanence in which the world is totally eradicated.
Nothing remains of that world and Monica is less Monica than a specular image created from
David's memory.

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first section describes the relationship between myth and identity and sketches
its ethical consequences. While this is familiar territory at this point in At the Limit
of Subjectivity, this section will lay the groundwork for my ultimate concern: the
question of the posthuman.

Haraway, a major theorist of the posthuman, describes her cyborg
manifesto as an “ironic political myth” in which dissimilar things are held together
“because both or all are necessary and true” (149-150). For her, the cyborg, part
animal and machine, represents endless contradiction, a dialectic that never
ends in a synthesis, and a denial of the natural which makes her work a
particularly useful foil at this early point of my argument (which concerns itself so
very much with the distinction between natural and artificial). The cyborg is a
liberatory fiction, “mapping our social and bodily reality” in which we are all
hybrids and pleased with the mélange that we have become.

A critique or at least a point of comparison to Haraway would begin by
noting her ostentatious description of her cyborg manifesto as a “myth.” As such,
her myth must follow the above logic. This cyborg as we have seen resists
synthesis. It brings together that which cannot be brought together naturally.
However, Haraway seems to be unaware of the power of rationality, that is, myth,
to naturalize alterity. To some extent this critique simply indicates that she is not
mindful enough of the way in which her words synthesize. The subject, as l have
described above, is essentially written via myth, taking relations (Mitsein) of
difference and appropriating them to a particular consciousness. If this notion of

subjectivity as essentially riven, contradictory seems odd, we need only recall

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Hegel’s definition of the subject as “that which can retain in itself its own
contradiction” (Derrida “Eating Well” 101). The subject and the rational myths that
are concomitant with its creation subsume the other within the self. The subject
works, projects itself, and as long as this mythic project is uninterrupted, nothing
is denatured and difference is continually assimilated. Haraway states early on
that “Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative
apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility” (my emphasis; 149).
Haraway’s myth is much too “active” in this sense to not quickly fall into the
problematic of the subject, which is to say, all the problems that she objects to:

naturalization, exclusion, violence.

David, Being “Real,” and Immanence

We only begin to how some of these issues (of myth, identity, violence,
the natural, i.e. that which is “real”) are coupled in a different manner after David
enters the film. In a situation which duplicates that of Monica and Martin,
Professor Hobby designs David after the likeness of his deceased son, also
named David. David, as an artificial creation, operates similarly to myth in that he
assuages mourning by filling the lack that Martin’s illness has created. David, and
those other Davids that are to follow him, is intended as a child substitute for
couples who cannot have children or whose children are terminally ill. He
operates precisely like Robin Hood does above. As an artificial creation he

serves to heal the world and preserve its sense. He is the result of an attempt to

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create a “mecha” that will precisely model human emotional responses. As
Sheila, a mecha, informs us, “love is first widening my eyes a little bit and
quickening my breathing a little” and so on. Like a human, David will also love
and not just artificially simulate its physiological manifestations. Hobby’s implicit
assumption, of course, is that human, or real, identity is not in any way a matter
of simulation. On the side of the real is immanent identity, a subjectival being
which does not ostentatiously rehearse how to act, but reacts immediately,
wholly out of itself, and with ease to the call for emotion. This is what it means to
be Human; anything else is artificial and the lesser half of the binary.

When David is imprinted by Monica, he is her only child and, hence,
“special,” insofar as he is immediately with Monica. Imprinting becomes an act of
mythmaking in which it is less the words than their enunciation that is essential.
Before imprinting David appears detached, with the family yet not recognizing
Monica as mother--artificial. It is important to understand that the family unit, or
representation, is dispersed in the aftermath of Martin’s illness. Trauma has
exposed the family to the outside, to just such a non-recognition. Directly
following a scene in which David is glancing over a series of family pictures,
Henry is shown explaining the rules according to which David can be imprinted.
As he explains, a bathroom mirror reflects them not once, but in perhaps dozen
perspectives, as if they have their existence, somehow, outside of themselves. If
myth amounts to a representation of family, what we see here is the painful
disjunction of the idea and reality of the family. After David listens to the series of

random words that constitutes imprinting, he responds immediately by referring

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to Monica as Mommy. She asks him who she is. And, again, he says, “Mommy.”
The work of myth is precisely to give back identity and heal the family
representation by making it once again immanent, erasing that deferral to the
outside. In this case, Monica stands in as a poet whose myth gathers the family
and gives them back a sense of themselves as a collective and as origin, a self
opposed to the other.

The most fully realized, if illusory, communion with Monica occurs near the
end of the film when, in essence, the world of difference—human civilization, in
this case-has been eradicated. However, David experiences much the same
until Martin’s recovery forces David to mediate around him before he can reach
Monica. What had stabilized into a traditional family unit, is once again exposed
to the outside. Neither David nor Martin feel fully in the presence of their mother,
prompting Martin to emphasize the real/artificial binary as a way of excluding
David from the family proper and assimilating him to the outside. The ultimate
object of this violence is the return of a world of immanence without the
mediating presence of an other (boy). Of course, such an immanent position is
never anything but an illusion. There is no immanent subject in the “beginning.”
We are with one another in a way that liberal or conservative politics has yet to
grasp. This Mitsein is that which must be elided for the subject to be:

The subject’s identity is related to difference in three ways. It is
opposed to difference in general, insofar as difference creates the
disparity or exteriority of being-outside-the-self, or insofar as it

posits that otherness with respect to which the identical pulls itself

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together from itself and upon itself. But identity, while pulling itself
together, assumes and resorbs within itself the differences that
constitute it: both its difference from the other, whom it posits as
such, and its difference from itself, simultaneously implied and
abolished in the movement of “grasping itself.” In this way, finally,
identity makes difl’erence; it presents itself as preeminently different
from all other identity and from all nonidentity; relating itself to itself,
it relegates the other to a self (or to an absence of the self) that is
different. Being the very movement proper to self-consciousness,
identity—of the Self that identifies itself—therefore makes
difference itself proper. and this property designates or denotes

itself as “man.” (original’s emphasis; Nancy The Birth to Presence

 

9-10)
The other, David for Martin, “is presented as the alter ego or as the other of the
ego, as the other outside the self or as the other within the self’ (Nancy Belg
Singular Plural 77). In light of the film’s many photographs, it becomes a
question, we could say, of who will be included in the family portrait—the mythic
representation of the family. In this struggle between David and Martin the
problem is that the family does not yet constitute a clear picture for itself now that
the former has returned. The struggle is completely over the question of how this
family myth will be delineated and bordered and, ultimately, who will be excluded

to the “outside.” The very work of identity then amounts to the (illusory) creation

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of a monad, a subject or essence, which perpetually elides its existence outside

of itself.

Artificiality and the Violence of the “Real”

What are the stakes of this conflict? Identity, but also realness: inclusion in
the mythic narrative of the family implies humanity while exclusion implies
artificiality. While there is little indication that the imprinted David is considered
artificial by Monica early on, Martin’s return thrusts David into “super toy” status.
David, interestingly, foreshadows this link between myth and exclusion moments
before it takes concrete form. In a series of letters, he writes DEAR MOMMY/I’M
REALLY OUR SON/AND I HATE TEDDY/HE IS NOT REAL and DEAR
MOMMY/I’M YOUR LITTLE/BOY AND SO lS/MARTIN BUT NOT/TEDDY.37
Representation (the letters), realness, and exclusion are all thematized here.
Representation and being “real” are coupled while that which is artificial, Teddy,
is excluded to the outside. One seemingly childish example of the struggle to
delineate this “outside” has David and Martin competing over who can eat the
most spinach. The problem is that David cannot eat, let alone digest food and
very soon his face collapses like something out of Salvador Dali, highlighting his

alterity.

 

37 Much the same happens after a conversation between Monica and Henry with Henry calling
David a toy and Monica a boy. Immediately afterward and in the context of a discussion of death,
Monica gives David his own super toy, a teddy bear, as if to reinforce David's difference from this
“real” toy who looks so very different from humans. Both orga and mecha engage in a similar sort
of “writing.”

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The spinach scene is intriguing because it follows Martin’s malicious
suggestion that Monica read The Agventures of Pinocchio. Monica reads aloud a
segment in which—in the absence of customary fuel—Pinocchio's wood skeleton
is suggested as a means to roast a sheep. The second section she reads
describes Pinocchio working until late at night making shoes which justifies his
transformation into a real boy. We are not given the complete context, but it is
clear that work is linked with representation, the good, humanity, and digestion. It
is worth underlining the fact that the malicious recommendation of Pinocchio
operated in the same manner as myths previously mentioned: It is used as a
weapon to exclude artificiality, David. To remain artificial, that is wooden—clunky,
slow, mediated--is to fall into idleness and evil and risk assimilation (as fuel). In
the Brian Aldiss story upon which AL was based, Teddy, a super toy, states
explicitly that “real things are good” in response to David’s question about how to
tell the difference between mecha and orga. Digestion, as I demonstrated with
Monica’s mourning, is a trope for the assimilative work of immanence. The eating
competition that immediately follows Pinocchio indicates that inclusion and
humanity require work, the rational work of digestion.

Indeed, eating at the table becomes a key metaphor for inclusion in the
(human) family as a later conversation between Monica and David suggests.
When David asks what the family will have for dinner, Monica reminds him that
he doesn’t eat. David responds by saying that, nevertheless, he likes to sit at the
table. How, this conversation implies, can David be included while not being

asked to do the work of immanence? A crucial question. But even if David could

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eat, he could never digest what he ingests (“spinach is for rabbits, people, and
Popeye, not robo-boys”). Digestion is a particularly apt metaphor for immanence
as it is very much a question of spacing: immanent beings take that which is
outside and bring it within, localizing identity. The juxtaposition of Pinocchio and
eating suggests a simple either/or opposition: one either digests difference or
becomes the fuel for such digestion.

After David's Dali-esque ingestion, the next scene has his chest and
stomach cavity peeled back and exposed to the outside. As his thorax is
vacuumed, Cybertronic technicians prohibit David from “recognizing” his
exposure. Instead, they sweep his hand away and tell him not to touch the
“merchandise.” Such a choice of words is appropriate as identity (for the self,
family, and humanism) is a question of what Derrida terms a “restricted
economy” (V_VQ 254-255). Like every subject, a family is concerned with retaining
a stable being through well-defined borders, i.e., keeping the thorax safely
unexposed behind the family skin through an essentially conservative economy.
Derrida writes, “To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer
pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when
one looks directly at it—such is the servile condition of mastery” (original's
emphasis 254). In such an economy, the family never risks itself, but only
confronts death, or a conflict, when there is a definite possibility of self-
augmentation. The family must remain in the black, to use an economic
metaphor. David, therefore, is foreign to the extent that he endangers the

essentially capitalist economy upon which identity is founded and truly risks

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identity. When, for instance, he appears to drown Martin by pulling him into a
pool, he endangers the representational economy, forcing the family to eject him
from the home and assimilate him as other. Just as David is confronted with his
existence outside himself, the “family” is brought face to face with a veritable
hemorrhaging of its being at this moment. The family cannot contain David on its
“inside” and is forced to exclude him from the family proper.

Following Monica’s abandonment of David, the film becomes explicitly
concerned with David’s evolution toward humanity, a goal he achieves when he
mirrors Martin’s violence by erasing all that is other, or artificial. Caught up in
Pinocchip, David travels to Manhattan, searching for the Blue Fairy who can
make him human (a “real boy”) and ensure his inclusion in the family. David finds
Hobby instead but only after a reiteration of the struggle first seen between him
and Martin. He walks into Hobby’s office and confronts another mecha David:

Is this the place they make you real?

This is the place they make you read. [The second David
turns around in a chair with a book in his hand]

Are you real?

lguess.

Are you me?

fniDaWd.

You’re not.

Yes, I am. I’m David.

So am I.

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Hello David. Can you read? Can you sit down and we can
read together? Let’s be friends.

You can’t have her.

I can’t hear you.

She’s mine. And I’m the only one [he picks up a lamp and as
he is hammering the other David’s head, he yells] I’m David! I’m
David! . . . I’m special. I’m unique.

This second David is not real, if humanity entails the erasure of
simulation/artificiality and the formation of a monadic subject. Their basic
difference is that one has been “imprinted”—a handy way of describing how a
series of words works to form consciousness—and the other has not. The
second David can be defenseless and open because he does not possess a
sense of self that myth and imprinting provide. He has nothing to lose by inviting
David to read because he possesses nothing proper, nothing to protect, and no
interior within which to digest the outside. This other David is always already
exposed to the outside. This reading is only plausible only if it is understood that
A_.I. is not concerned with robot technology, but with the nature and limitations of
human identity.

Jeffrey Stern reads the film as less about robots than it is “about what we
owe and do to our children” (569-570). For Stern the film concerns itself with how
normal children are programmed to love their mothers and no amount of
disloyalty or wickedness on the mother’s part will ever disrupt that love. If David

were a robot, he argues, he certainly could be reprogrammed. Instead, Stern

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argues, David’s love and desire for Monica mark him as human immediately.
Instead of doubting the object of his desire, he can only assume that he is at
fault, “lacking some essential perfection.” In a similar vein, after pointing to a
number of filmic associations between humans and robots, Tim Kreider notes,
“this is not a film about robots, but about human beings, showing us that we are
as rigid in our programming and as predictable in our responses as any machine”
(34). Kreider focuses on humanity’s penchant for “self-delusion,” David yearning
for relationships that are never reciprocated. However, it is this “hard-wired
rigidity” that allows David to be human (33). While my argument in what follows
differs from Stern and Kreider, I certainly concur on this issue. As with most
science fiction, this is less a film about the future than a film about the present
whose thinly disguised characters assist us in thinking through contemporary
issues. Using robots to portray humans (or apes and chimpanzees in The Planet
of the Apes and so on) assists in defamiliarizing issues such of identity and
power. David, then, remains a figure for the traditional Cartesian subject,
obsessively assimilating the world to a project of self, while the other David
seems truly other in his disregard for the proper.

Assumedly, there can be no worse horror for the subject than to meet up
with an identical other as this undermines the very definition of the absolute
subject as immanent. While all assimilation protects the subject from exposure to
the outside, this is a particularly intriguing example because this other David’s
resemblance to the “original” David points to the “exteriority of being-outside-the-

self’ (which is no different than being-with) mentioned above. Science fiction, in

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this case, is able to represent in a vivid way how our identity is not self-made, but
comes from the outside, from others. Against W.J.T. Mitchell’s recent argument
in Modernism/modernig, the above indicates, however, how easily a double can
be appropriated as a specular image of the self (482). Exposed to the possibility
of relation, David immediately and effortlessly murders his doppelganger. Shortly
after the other David is decapitated, Hobby enters the frame and affirms that he
is David and a “real boy. At least as real as l have ever made one.” After his
defeat of the other (David), David's world is stabilized. He has eliminated
threatening difference and bolstered his illusion of immanence. In short, David’s
efficacious control of artificiality demonstrates his humanity—that is what being
human amounts to, or, at least, this is what I am arguing. An exposure to a non-

specular other must await a more extreme situation.

*ir'k

Thus far I have shown how representation operates as a means of
creating that which is real (human) and, consequently, the violent exclusion of
that which implies our existence outside of ourselves (artificiality). With this
second portion, I will undermine this opposition between “real” and “artificial” and
. show how identity is created through a hermeneutic movement that places us
inextricably with others. Much of file’s muted horror can be traced to this
displacement. For instance, the horror of the early scenes is bound up in David’s

strange manner. Consider his first appearance at the dinner table. He silently

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stares at Monica and Henry as they eat until he finally picks up an empty glass
and “drinks.” Then he stares squarely at Monica and mimics her eating, once
again with no food. When some pasta fails to make it all the way into Monica's
mouth, a few threads hanging out the right corner, he laughs loudly and
hysterically.

Why is the viewer spooked by this scene? Quite simply, we are horrified
because the scene confronts us with identity’s groundlessness. The traditional
way of thinking about being is bound up in an essentially Cartesian way of
approaching the world in which an immanent subject stands over and against an
objectified world, eliding being-with. As we saw in chapter three, human beings
embody “an understanding of what it means to be” in our reliance on shared
social practices (Dreyfus 12-17). Noting the absence of any real sustained
example of this in Being and Time, Dreyfus describes how Japanese and
American babies behave in distinct ways less because they have been told to act
a certain way, than because of an unthinkable socialization process. He quotes
Pierre Bourdieu on this issue:

A whole group and a whole symbolically structured environment . . .
exerts an anonymous, pervasive pedagogic action. . . .The
essential part of the modus operandi which defines practical
mastery is transmitted in practice, in its practical state, without
attaining the level of discourse. The child imitates not “models” but
other people’s actions. Body hexis speaks directly to the motor

function, in the form of a pattern of postures that is both individual

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and systematic, because linked to a whole system of techniques
involving body and tools, and charged with a host of social
meanings and values: in all societies, children are particularly
attentive to the gestures and postures which, in their eyes, express
everything that goes to make an accomplished adult—a way of
walking, a tilt of the head, facial expression, ways of sitting and of
using implements, always associated with a tone of voice, a style of
speech and (how could it be otherwise?) a certain subjective
experience. (original’s emphasis; 17)
The knowledge that David is not “real” does not balance out the fact that he
appears human. Rather, it is fair to generalize this rule to the film’s viewer and
argue that David is so real that it is impossible not to react to him as someone
who interferes with the inconspicuous social practices that we “know” so well.
The Flesh Fair provides a telling instance of how David is interpreted as real
because he conforms to social practice. This “celebration of life” is defined by its
opposition to all that is artificial. An announcer shouts, “What about us? We are
alive and this is a celebration of life. And this is a commitment to a truly human
future!” About to have David killed, Johnson-Johnson argues that while David is a
product of “artistry” and craftsmanship, he only “perform[s]” or simulates and is
only the most recent of “insults to human dignity.” The crowd saves David, but
less because he looks human than because he acts like one. When David pleads
for his life a member of the crowd shouts that he “looks like a boy” but only after

commenting that mecha “do not plead for their lives.” In conforming to normative

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social practices, David finds empathy. In a perversion of Jesus’s saying,
Johnson-Johnson says, “let he who is without Sim cast the first stone.” In
response, one man in the crowd throws a stone at Johnson-Johnson,
demonstrating how well David fulfills social expectations.

I’m reminded once again of Heidegger’s example of the “handy” tool which
is taken for granted until it is broken (73—74). Once broken its relation
(“reference”) to its wielder and the world is foregrounded. David’s ill-advised
ingestion does land him in a mechalnic] shop, but I want to emphasize
conspicuousness on the level of social etiquette. David’s “eating” can be read in
at least two ways. To return to the motif of digestion, it can be understood as a
metaphor for the impossibility of immanence. While our ingestion scoops up the
exterior world and tidily assimilates it to our insides, it always misses something,
the pasta lolls out of the corner of the mouth, or we look down and nothing
remains on the fork. The digestion of difference is doomed to failure.

Secondly, David’s “eating” foregrounds the socialization process which
might be better described as a hermeneutic process. It highlights the fact that we
are not essence, but existence, creating, interpreting, and practicing our being,
constantly searching for a resolution of reality with the idea we have of that
reality, whether our idea is of the family, or the humanist subject. Nancy makes a
distinction between the architecture of “meaning” and the metaphysical
signification that results from the open architecture of the hermeneutic circle.
Meaning is essentially “open” in that the “subject” constantly anticipates meaning;

meaning therefore cannot be a prior origin or telos, but is rather formed because

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of this lack and through anticipation: “understanding is possible only by an
anticipation of meaning which is or constitutes meaning itself” (Raffoul xii).
Essentially, David's mimicking of “eating” then is a hermeneutic attempt to
inscribe himself in such a way that he closes the gap between his inept social
skills (reality) and a particular idea of table etiquette. Whether this is read as the
actual act of ingestion or, more generally, as an issue of the assimilation of
difference in which success would amount to being part of the family and/or fully
human, the end result would be metaphysical. His actions should be thought of
as a matter of signification, an attempt to resolve the distance between the
sensible and the intelligible which would then amount to the presentation of
“meaning” in, for instance, a family portrait (Nancy ml 22-23).

David’s letters are perhaps the best way to see how the hermeneutic and
representational work together. While one of these letters might indicate the
presence of myth, the entire series with differing configurations—“DEAR
MOMMY/I’M REALLY OUR SON/AND I HATE TEDDY/HE IS NOT REAL or
DEAR MOMMYII’M YOUR LITTLE/BOY AND SO lS/MARTIN BUT
NOT/TEDDY”—demonstrates David’s anguished hermeneutic attempt to resolve
this tension between reality and an idea of the family. He writes several letters
because he is attempting to correctly signify an idea of family that remains
distant. The stakes of this resolution are high. This resolution supports any
number of metaphysical conceptions, God, Man, Nation. And it is upon the

human subject that all of this hinges. This closing of the hermeneutic circle is

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simultaneously the work of the subject and what makes the subject be in the first
place.

All of this also dramatizes how the subject and myth are not immediate
and immanent, but the product of a prior hermeneutic exteriority, or mediation,
which is continually erased as the subject becomes present. This erasure is
directly linked to myth in a few lines by Yeats that crucially connects the Blue
Fairy to Manhattan for David: “Come away oh human child/T o the waters and the
wildNVith a fairy hand in hand/For the world’s more full of weeping/Than you can
understand.” Myth (“fairy”) and realness (“human child”) are here opposed to
weeping and a lack of understanding. Put simply, myth serves to erase the
“recognition” of the impossibility of immanence—more on weeping and this
impossibility later—insofar as myth and subjectivity require an exterior relation
that necessarily denies immanence. Attempting to close the hermeneutic circle
via myth is to simultaneously hide the “advent”—David’s arch-writing—that made
myth possible (gm 23). The rational subject is incapable of examining that
which gave birth to it as its advent is not open to subjectival empiricism. The
Cartesian subject is in no position to examine what allows for his or her
subjectivity.

Parallel to David’s anguished writing is the recovering person of Martin. If
humanity entails immediate presence—erasing the hermeneutic movement--
Martin, early in the film, does not achieve such a state. We witness Martin’s
artificiality in his need to releam how to walk (with leg braces), a parallel to

David’s learning. Martin’s unsteady walking demonstrates that (real) human

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being is also linked to simulation. In a more properly filmic manner, a out early in
the film demonstrates much the same point. Shortly after the mecha woman
describes love, she begins applying cosmetics to her face. There is an immediate
cut to Monica who is engaged in the same act. The act of putting cosmetics on is
associated with the simulation of love and then, crucially, identified with Monica.
Both “organic” and “mechanical” life forms require a resolution of the sensible
and intelligible before a “real” emotion (identity) can be presented. Both mecha
and orga have to engage in an unconscious hermeneutic work before they can
be seen as real. Immanence and identity, once again, only exist as such when
this prior birthing is repressed. Such a moment of signification is what creates
commonsense metaphysical distinctions like that between real and artificial.
However, what I am gesturing for here is another “artificiality,” one that gives birth

to this distinction.

***

In Rouge City, David asks Dr. Know how the Blue Fairy can make a
mecha real. He is told to travel to the “end of the world where the lions weep”
-—Manhattan—and seek out Hobby. In this future world, global warming has
melted the ice caps. The oceans have become bloated and overrun countless
cities, among them Venice, Amsterdam, and New York. Most of Manhattan’s
buildings are covered by water. Lady Liberty, perhaps the humanist icon, barely

lifts her torch above the waves. This is Manhattan, “a mecha restricted zone,”

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where Man resists that which would undermine his identity and reveal his artificial
nature. In the first few moments of the film, a voiceover explains that millions
have starved in this future world and that first world nations have “licensed
pregnancy” (an appropriation of birth that will be key later) and turned to mecha
as a means of ensuring a stable way of life. Recalling for us Pinocchio’s work,
the narrator refers to mecha as an “essential [. . .] economic link in the chain mail
of society” which nicely sums up both the economic nature of identity as well as
its obsessive construction of an inside and an outside.

As the voiceover commences, we see the ocean followed by a fade into a
statue of a man with outstretched hands and a peacock base which conveys a
sense of flight, power, and immortality. It is the business logo of Cybertronics,
David’s manufacturer. As the camera draws back, we realize that we are behind
a rain-swept window looking out at the statue. Perhaps the oldest trope for birth,
water is also a metaphor for that which erodes immanence. It is that which all
myth, statues, and mecha are created to shield humans from, like chain mail, or
the pane of glass shutting out the rain in this opening scene. It is fitting then that
while the Cybertronics statue, window, and rain are still in view, Hobby begins his
speech about how inventing a mecha “has been the dream of man since the birth
of science,” advocating the design of a mecha who will not simulate: David.
Opposed to the rain of difference outside, Hobby is concerned with a mythic birth
of immanent subjects that will fend off the horror of death—his son’s—and the
indefatigable rain (of difference) on the outside. This is, as another series of

statues suggests, an impossibility. On the flight into Manhattan, several identical

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stone lions, traditional symbols of power, are found weeping, gushing water out
of both eyes and mouths. If subjectival identity is a matter of bringing the outside
in, interiorizing difference, here is an inversion of that movement. The leonine,
immanent interior has been exposed to the outside, as the earlier lines by Yeats
suggested. Just as melting icecaps suggest humanity’s inability to manage or
assimilate nature, this vomited water points to the indigestibility of the world.

David meets Hobby only after he has defeated the other David and
confirmed his humanity through his efficacious elimination of difference. At the
moment of David’s greatest mastery, Hobby enters the frame. He affirms that
David is the only David, implying his individuality, only to add, that his son was
“one-of-a-kind” and that David was at least “first-of-a-kind.” This tension between
simultaneously recognizing humanity and undermining it continues when Hobby
tells David that he is “a real boy, at least as real as I've ever made one.” For him,
David is a “success” story, the first mecha to desire and dream. Shattered, David
tells Hobby that his “brain is falling out.” When Hobby leaves to collect David’s
“real mothers and fathers,” the latter wanders around a manufacturing center, his
womb. A dozen Davids stand in a line while others hang from the ceiling on what
appear to be meat hooks. At a particularly crucial moment, David looks through
the eyes of an other David. This face without a cranium is exposed to the world
around it, specifically to the rain and window discussed earlier.

Subjectivity, co-originary with rationality and representation, arises as we
have seen through the assimilation of difference. David’s tortuous and repetitive

attempts to write the family myth are all concerned with exactly such an erasure

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of difference in which the subject recognizes his self in that which is other,
becoming in this way human, and, allegedly, eliminating being-with (Nancy LC
33). While there are numerous suggestions of exposure, the spacing of being-
with is seen most directly when David informs us that his “brain is falling out.”
That which is interior (brain) is somehow lost to the outside (of the cranium) in a
reversal of the movement of assimilation.

David’s murder and meeting with Hobby occurs in the room adjacent to
the aforementioned window. It is through this window that David walks only to fall
to the water below. Understood in light of the window as a shield against
difference, here we have exactly the same sort of spacing of the humanist
subject—insofar as Cybertronics headquarters (and Manhattan by extension)
represents the enclosure of a humanist subjectivity—in which the assimilation of
difference is interrupted. A suggestive shot at the surface of the ocean follows.
The camera begins filming while still placed within what we can only suppose to
be the building that David fell from only to move fonlvard through shattered glass
to the outside and to the rain. The camera recapitulates David’s movement from
the interior to the outside.

This spatial exposure entails David’s “recognition” that he is not the
immanent, real person he seeks to be. He recognizes that he cannot be rid of the
artificiality that plagues him and humans for that matter. With his self interrupted,
David confronts the impossibility of immanence, the fact that identity is born

through relation, an exteriority that cannot be erased:

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A community is the presentation to its members of their
mortal truth (which amounts to saying that there is no community of
immortal beings: one can imagine either a society or a communion
of immortal beings, but not a community). It is the presentation of
the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being:
its death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me
my birth, and along with it the impossibility of my reliving it, as well
as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death. (Nancy |_C_:
15)

If anything is dramatized in these scenes in the Cybertronic laboratory, it is
David’s peering through the other David’s eyes. This being’s status could easily
be read as dead or in the process of birth, both experiences that interrupt the
subject in profound ways. Since Hegel’s Phenomenolpgy, birth “has been used to
speak of what is absolutely in excess of representation” (Nancy Presence 2).
Certainly, all of these davids evoke the infinite birth of difference, insofar as
difference is that which undermines the immanent subject. In this case, it is an
endless stream of others who look exactly like the self and, in that way,
demonstrate the self’s exposure to (or existence on) the outside. David’s peering
through this other’s eyes points to an experience of the other that no solipsistic
subject could hope to attain: an ability to see reality from another’s perspective.
Here, the subject’s borders are undermined and the other's singularity is seen as
such. As the passage above suggests, death immediately links up with birth. To

confront the death of an other is to face one’s existence outside the self—the

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birth that myth and subjectivity work to elide. Insofar as both death and birth
expose the subject to the outside, they equally confront the subject with his or
her birth, or relation to others.

As should be clear by now, my argument is less interested in a
technological “posthuman” (a cyborg, for instance), than in how technology—as a
form of writing in which humanity represents itself—has progressed to a point at
which it confronts humans with something that irrevocably interrupts the
humanist project, though this does not work in a typical manner. Haraway, for
instance, remains confined to a discussion of technology, as does Scott
Bukatman in his theorization of “terminal identity.” The latter describes a world in
which electronic media and technology exist in a space and time beyond human,
bodily, comprehension (106). The human subject can no longer easily be
separated from technology, leading to a new subjectivity that is a “terminal of
multiple networks” (2). The metanarrative’s decline—approximate with what I
above term myth--then is a result of technological advance because the
“[narratival] regulation of the imploded society has passed beyond the spatio—
temporal experience of its citizens” (106-107). For Bukatman, science fiction
demonstrates the “necessity of narrativizing and spatializing the electronic field”
(115). His argument is not far removed from Jameson’s whom he repeatedly
cites (106). Jameson argues for postmodernity as a period in which subjects are
no longer able to locate themselves spatially, calling consequently for a mapping,
a representation, that would situate subjectivity once again and allow the

progressive political struggle to continue (54). lmplicitly, to point out what may be

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obvious, everything I have written above implies that such a mapping (myth) is
ethically suspect as it denies relation to the other.

For Bukatman, space is simply too big to be cognized. Case, for instance,
in Neuromangr may lose his self temporarily in the "vast, geometric, limitless
field” that is cyberspace, but ultimately a sense of Godlike mastery reasserts
itself (119-121). Cyberspace is transformed “into a narrative space, and one
therefore explicitly defined as a site of action and circulation.” Much later in his
text, he cites Bataille whose notion of being “outside of himself” is similar to my
own understanding of spacing: the self, again, finds its self outside what would
have been previously the alleged locus of its identity (280-281; original’s
emphasis). However, this “is certainly not" how most SF represents the
undermining of the subject: “Bataille maintains that ‘it is only at the boundary of
death that laceration, which constitutes the very nature of the immensely free me
[. . .] is revealed with violence,’ but rare is the science fiction text that produces
‘death’ through an explicitly physical (or textual) violence” (original’s emphasis).
SF prefers “denial.”

My own analysis points less to a more confusing world, a world that
cannot be humanized because it is beyond representation, as to a technology
which confront us with our birth, a theme which I will bring to conclusion in the
next section. While technology does land the subject in a different context, it is
difficult for me to see an essential difference between the predicament of the
subject in terms of technological or non-technological alterity. In either case, what

must happen for the subject to be, is the appropriation, in a representation, of

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that which disturbs rationality. From my point of view, this cannot be a “new
subjectivity” if it is essentially grounded in the mastery of alterity, however
contextually defined. One of my central arguments is that this work or fashioning
of the world is what makes subjectivity, Subjectivity, or the human, Human, so

that as long as such active writing or construction continues, so does humanism.

***

Just as David gets his dream in A_.l.'s final scene--the perpetual desire of
the subject: immanent presence—so does humanity. Hobby informs us that it has
been the dream of “man since the birth of science” to create a real being.
David/Pinocchio, as a tool of myth, represents the completion of signification for
both Hobby and the family. Monica has lost a son, prompting the desire for and
creation of David to heal the family representation. However, the original
meaning was not lost in the simple sense that this succinct summary implies.
Martin still lives even if he is cryogenically frozen. And Martin’s eventual return
only necessitates yet one more “absence” as David is vanquished. Hobby, of
course, is confronted with much the same circumstances as his own son’s death
predates his simulacrum’s creation. This parallel justifies telescoping the
obsession with a familial representation onto the much larger stage of humanism.

Contemporary critics of postmodernism argue that philosophy, the world,
is ill (in the absence of its “Martin”) and has lost its hold on absolutes like God,

morality, and Man (Nancy Gravig 21). Paradoxically, it is the very charge that

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meaning has been lost that provides meaning with its vitality—to return to the
dynamic of anticipation and the hermeneutic circle. This illness stands in for a
lack that is less absent than present “at a distance” (28). Such an illusory
absence is crucial as it is what creates the desire which fuels the modern project
whose ultimate object is the presentation of an absolute Subject (34). Meaning
(David/Martin), once returned, then has to move away again to ensure that this
dialectic of lack and desire continues (30, 35).

As we have seen, Hobby’s speech inscribes a teleological history whose
fulfillment, whose “dream” and desire, is embodied in David. His objective is the
resolution of the sensible (David as a tool of representation) and the intelligible
(the idea of Man) in which “each presents the other" (My 22-23). Assuming
the chasm between the sensible and intelligible, signification is the absolute
“resolution” of the two which, at the furthest end, amounts to “the very model of a
structure or system that is closed upon itself,” a definition of the seamless monad
(original's emphasis). In the same way that David's letters were an attempt to
align the sensible (words) with the intelligible (an idea of the family), David
himself operates for the humanist project. As a feat of engineering David
amounts to an absolute representation of the humanist subject. There can be no
greater humanist feat than to make an entity that mirrors the self, desiring,
dreaming, and lacking. By making David (really) human, the world has been fully
represented and science can be at ease because this representation signals the

end of that distant lack and the desire that it creates (49).

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Yet it is a profoundly disturbing success in that it is only the dialectic of
lack and desire that creates the orientation or project that gives identity to the
subject. The closure of the hermeneutic circle is therefore also an opening and
not wholly negative in its implications. First, a bit more on this limit:

In its completed form, this circle is as follows: the subject of
signification recognizes itself as the ultimate signified. This amounts
to saying that the process or structure of signification recognizes
and signifies itself as its own subject. Thus, the meaning of the
subject [. . .] is situated at once in a constant and infinite presence-
at-a-distance and in a perfect ontological identity with the subject
whose meaning it constitutes; the uniformly evasive presence of
meaning constitutes its substantiality. (original’s emphasis; Nancy
M 4344)
At the point of total representation, lack and its corollary, desire, are gone and
with them the subject. What remains as a “subject” “recognizes” that identity is
less immanent than a play between absence (“presence-at-a-distance”) and
presence ("perfect ontological identity”). The subject “recognizes” that its
substance is grounded not in signification, but in the perpetual movement or
architecture of meaning by which signification comes into being. Subjectivity
requires an inexhaustible lack, so that, in a way, the subject is confronted with a
structural paradox: to complete the humanist project is to die. When Hobby tells
David that he is “real” because he is the first mecha to desire and dream, he

explains in the simplest terms that subjectivity is grounded in lack. We are who

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we are because we are constantly projecting our selves toward that illusory lack.
Subjectivity is revealed, in other words, as in-sign-ificant, as lacking a ground as
it moves perpetually from here to there (51). Having become a real boy, his
subjectivity is endangered along with the essential “inertia” that is the project of
subjectivity (and having completed its project in David, the same is true for
humanism). As I have demonstrated, there is no essential difference between
orga and mecha. Both simulate and operate hermeneutically in the world, trying
to resolve the tension between the sensible and intelligible in a representation.
Whereas humans had been able to elide this exposition in seamless
representations, at the end of humanism this cannot be ignored: the recognition
of “insignificance” is the signature trait of our time, according to Nancy.

While I have followed Nancy’s work closely due to its critique of myth and
subjectivity and his conceptualization of being-with, & exceeds Nancy in its
identification of a specific trigger leading to this exposure. Nancy is not clear on
this issue. In The Grevitv of Thought, he argues that metaphysics is not closed,
“rather it is wide open, opened by its very completion and by the power that
makes the logos confront by itself its end and limit” (51). Philosophy remains,
Nancy tells us, when the “signifying will” recognizes its insignificance and is open
to a “new demand for “meaning.” While he refers to an exposure, he is obscure
about exactly how such an exposure occurs (as opposed to his The lnoperative
Communfly’ ). Why is it that now, at this particular moment in history, we are able
to recognize our insignificance while in the past representational completion

simply led to another lack, and a continuation of the dialectic? For Nancy the

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difference manifest today is a “fact.” We see it in the death of God, “in world war, '
extermination, exploitation, hunger, technology, art, literature, philosophy” and,
he writes, “The planetary, and now interplanetary, reality exposes this to us every
day. Every day it exposes to us the fact that we are a little more exposed to the
limit” (44, 52).

A_.l._, by contrast, foregrounds the fact of bioengineering, cloning. With the
film’s emphasis on androids this will seem strange until it is recalled that David is
an identical twin of Hobby’s son—as are all the Davids on the manufacturing
line—and that the Al at the end of the film clone Monica for a brief rendezvous
with David. The dialectic of lack and desire stalls because reproductive science
interrupts the rational subject in exactly the manner previously seen in David’s
traversal of his Cybertronics womb. Biological science has been perfected to
such an extent that it not only confronts us with our birth, but does so incessantly
due to its ever-expanding place in society. Cloning is not a simple extension of
subjectival power. It is also an interruption of subjectivity and thereby a
confrontation with our insubstantiality, our existence outside of ourselves with
others. This is an endless birth because cloning is endless; innumerable davids
can be made of one David and, more importantly, it is endless because the
“subject,” in the face of this birth, is incapable of creating the mental
representations that would reduce this reality to the well-bordered stability of a
family being or a nation state. When, for instance, Hobby informs David that he
will return momentarily with his real mothers and fathers, the immanent notion of

the family self is replaced with a notion of the self constructed via an impersonal

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web of communal activity. David cannot interiorize this “family” or “birth” in a
representation. On a much larger scale, the waters that result from global
warming expose us to birth, confronting humanity generally with its past as
ocean-dwelling single-celled organisms. As these amniotic waters rise and erase
national borders, they confront humanity with its own mortality, the
insubstantiality of its representations.

During David’s final day with Monica they celebrate his birthday—he has
never had one after all—and yet as he pauses to blow out the last candle on his
cake, it is clear that this birth is tinged with death; we know that the clone that is
Monica will die at the end of the day. What was so clearly a subjectival ritual
leading to immanence for Martin is made insignificant here. Yes, there is a
birthday, an act of signification, but it does not achieve a complete closure. & is
concerned with how birth, taking the specific form of the clone, confronts us with
our mortality and, hence, our insignificance. David’s death—a death that would
not happen if A_.L was merely a film about androids who are understood to be
immortal—also indicates the end of the dialectic of lack and desire, signaling the
simultaneous completion and exhaustion of his search for immanence. Yes, the
narrator explains, David is given what he always wanted from Monica, her explicit
statement of love. However, understood in the context of the continuous dialectic
of lack and desire in the film, this should not be enough. The logic of the film
suggests that lack should arise and spur David on to invent another Monica. His

death can only be understood as a permanent interruption of this cycle.

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This could be thought of as entirely a question of sublation. David follows
an essentially Hegelian route to identity. It meaning is defined by the
“intersection” of presence and distance, David has always brought this dialectic
to a tidy synthesis, denying the spacing of the between (of presence and
absence). This new order, signaled by cloning, would interrupt sublation,
foregrounding this spacing of identity. Presence and distance would not be
sublated easily, but would allow the “possibility of another movement whose style
might perhaps be similar to the preceding one, but which, instead of mediating
presence and distance by way of one another, would sweep away the entire
system of this mediation, severing it from its aim and allowing another function or
figure of philosophy to be traced out” (_G_reyi_ty 54). Ethically, this entails an
understanding of identity as less an immanence than a spacing in which what
once was a subject—absolute, monadic, solipsistic—is now exposed to others.
This other order would be defined by spacing, a non-subjectival awareness of
each singularity‘s existence outside of him or her self. Opposed to the synthesis
of presence and absence seen in David’s personal path toward total signification,
this exposure would interrupt simple immanent representations. Instead of
seamless borders of self, the subject’s “interior” would be radically exposed.
While Artificial Intelligence signals the interruption of the Subject, it concomitantly
signals the birth of a new singularity whose existence is defined by “artificiality,”
once this word has been drained of all metaphysical vestiges.

Spielberg’s film ends with a representation of such a singularity. The AI.

at the film’s end, descendents of David and others of his time, clearly do not

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recapitulate the obsession with subjectivity that is seen in humans and David.38
Our first telling image of this other order is glimpsed in their choice of
transportation. Their transport, for lack of another name, is not a seamless
representation of tin and rivets, but a rough-cut rectangle in which the seams are
ostentatious. Nothing appears to hold the sides of this vehicle together but
transparent spacing: its interior is totally exposed to the outside. Having served
its purpose, the ship explodes in dozens of pieces to be, assumedly, stacked to
the side. It is a representation to be used for a short time and abandoned. The
Al. who leave the transport discover David, frozen, immobile and trapped in a
seamless helicopter-like bubble by contrast. Opposed to the Cartesian monad,
these beings embody singularity. Their bodies are porous, exposed to the
outside, which enables them to communicate with one another merely by touch.
Earlier I mentioned how a mirror designated the disjunction of the family
representation by alluding to Monica and Henry’s existence outside of
themselves. After one of the Al. touches David, several other A.l. (who could
pass for clones to my inexperienced eye) touch this first being and we see much
the same “mirrored” reflection. Each of their faces show the same image, a
representation of a person or a reality remembered by David. The interiority that
is so allied with myth and representation is radically undermined and exposed in
these beings. Stern has written that the AI. need David because he represents

the “experience of loss itself” which they as immortal beings cannot experience

 

3“ We can infer that these are Al. and descendents of David because of an earlier comment by
Gigolo Joe, who states that humans hate robots because they will outlast humans when the world
ends. Once again, however, my argument is that Al are figures not for immortal robots, but for
humans exposed to birth.

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(575). However, everything in the film points to a humanity, to a David, who
obsessively ontologizes loss on the road to absolute immanence. With Derrida, I
would instead suggest that David represents a ghost who interrupts the work of
mourning, leading to a more just way of living with others (Spectres XVIII). He
should be thought of as a spectral embodiment of all the horrors experienced and
meted out by a Humanity incapable of living with human finitude—that is, If

artificiality.

 

These A.l. uncover David more than 2,000 years after his manufacturing i

date. He is foreign to them. He is an intruder, demanding and increasingly rude.

Yet they remain hospitable. David's alterity is not assimilated and put to work in

the manner so well modeled by Martin, David, or Hobby's humanism. When the

statue of the Blue Fairy collapses at David’s touch, the AI. recreate and animate

her. Monica is even brought back for 24 hours of illusory communion with David.

This is not the world of abandonment and exposure of the AL, yet they

acquiesce to the fantasies of this young boy. Exposed to the end of humanism, it

is such a hospitality that beckons to us.

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CONCLUSION

A moment arrives when one can no longer feel anything but anger,
an absolute anger, against so many discourses, so many texts that
have no other care than to make a little more sense, to redo or
perfect delicate works of signification. That is why, if I speak here of
birth, I will not try to make it into one more accretion of sense. I will
rather leave it, if this is possible, as the lack of “sense” that it “is.” I
will leave it exposed, abandoned. —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to

Presence

Throughout the forgoing l have been interested in a particular kind of
spacing, a gap between written idea and actual reality-what I have called being-
with to emphasize its borderless and, hence, communal nature. In Christopher
Nolan’s Memento this gap is wonderfully portrayed at the moment its protagonist,
Lenny, discovers that his hotel has taken advantage of his short-term memory
loss and simultaneously rented two rooms to him. Tormented as he is by the
death of his wife, Lenny writes (via erasure) the world, (at)fixing the “truth” of the
world to his own body with multiple tattoos. He wants to localize the world, pen it
down in as precise a manner as possible, resurrect the lion within, and exact
revenge. But the world still escapes. Lenny—Leonard--finds himself spread-out,
gaping open between two rooms. As Lenny kills (over and over again) to heal

this rift, the ethical intent of the film is quite clear. Lenny never stops his violence,

163

but the film itself through its challenging formal experimentation ensures that we
viewer-detectives are left with a puzzle whose pieces will never quite resolve.
Perhaps there is no way to complete the puzzle.

Had I world enough and time, At the Limit of Subjectivig would be a full
two chapters longer. However, I take some comfort in Derrida’s argument that
context is limitless and “never absolutely determinable” (Margins 310). In
“Difference,” he writes that “there is nowhere to begin to trace the sheaf or the
graphics of difference. For what is put into question is precisely the quest for a
rightful beginning, an absolute point of departure, a principal responsibility” (6).
There is never, in this sense, a moment at which one can pause and say,
“Enough.” Any textual or argumentative limit can only be understood as, at best,
strategic and temporary. But this is a dissertation and as such must conform to
certain limit(ation)s which, at the moment, I am inclined to acquiesce to—though
not, I should add, with any expectation that l have created a work as formally
complex and challenging as Memento (that would be asking too much of my
readers!) While the dissertation seems self-contained as you have read it, in its
future existence as a book, I would like to suggest the following two
supplementary chapters.

In a dissertation that is implicitly concerned with diversity (while
overflowing with male writers and film makers), a discussion of being-with in
terms of domesticity and women is most sorely missed. Marilynne Robinson's
remarkable novel, Housekeeping, plays with the metaphor of keeping house as a

way of reflecting on this problem. To keep a mythic house is to keep it well-

164

scrubbed, tidy, to keep the lights on and clearly delineate light from darkness. But
that would be violent—a house whose only purpose is to erase the memory of the
grandfather (and mother) outside, unburied, bones floating about in a derailed
and sunken train. It is the other sort of housekeeping wherein the house falls to
ruin-walls unbordered-and humans are trampled and sullied by nature and the
light is extinguished, that we remain with others. And, it this attempt to,

somehow, stay with others by being unhoused ourselves that would introduce the
question of hospitality to the dissertation.

With the assistance of Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth and Invisible Man, I plan
to show how “race” is inextricably connected to the subject and assimilation and,
in that sense, a world lacking diversity. The main work of this chapter will be in
showing how Ellison’s text argues for the experience of the self outside the self,
being-with, that would allow for a real (as opposed to a false, liberal) diversity to
occur as the assimilation and control of the racial narrative was interrupted. Both
chapters on Robinson and Ellison will allow for a lengthy meditation on religion,
subjectival and otherwise, that will nicely balance Pynchon’s extensive alliance of
Calvinism with the paranoid subject.

A decade ago in her introduction to Charles Taylor’s well-known text on
“The Politics of Recognition” Amy Gutmann described “deconstructionism’s” take
on diversity as “dangerous” and “impractical” (18-20). She says in part,

Radically opposed to essentialism, deconstructionists erect a
different obstacle to liberal democratic education when they deny

the desirability of shared intellectual standards, which scholars and

165

students of diverse cultural backgrounds might use to evaluate our
common education. Although deconstructionists do not deny the
possibility of shared standards, they view common standards as
masks for the will to political power of dominant, hegemonic groups.
This reductionist argument about political standards is often made
on behalf of groups that are underrepresented in the university and
disadvantaged in society, but it is hard to see how it can come to
the aid of anyone. (18)
This is clear evidence that more work needs to be done in the area of
deconstruction and diversity, and my chapter on Pynchon and DeLillo in
particular has certainly responded to such concerns. However, what most excites
me about the Ellison chapter is how being-with and (a more active) Derridean
hospitality operate in unison in Junetgnth. As if answering the typical charge of
poststructuralism amounting to paralysis, Ellison “balances” his representation of
exposure with a radical giving-without-return on the part of his protagonist, an
experience that arguably—by an active ovenlvhelming of the subjectival
center—opens the self to the same sort of spacing of the self into the other which
is identical with the my most operative concept here, being-with. Throughout, my
concern has been with what could be called a “passive” hospitality, since the
attempt to get beyond a subjectival enclosure amounts to being unhoused
(Robinson), letting the other in, but not “in” in the sense of an assimilative
ingestion. Here, the passive cannot be separated from the active: It is impossible

to tell whether it is the experience of the birth of a child, or the danger of

166

Hickman’s hospitality (he, an African-American, is assisting a white woman who
may have been impregnated by his brother who was consequently murdered by
racists). That this experience ovenllrhelms the rational subject and all subjectival
racist schemes is evident. Hickman thinks to himself, “It was a brain-breaker and
a caustic in the naked eye all right, and the longer I sat there the stranger it
seemed” (304). The importance of the Elllison and Robinson chapters lies in the
way they will each foreground dIVersity (being-with) as hospitality and, secondly,
how being-with (which is rightly understood as lacking a project, i.e., a state in
which no work or action or politics in the conventional sense can be done), can
begin to be thought in a more active mariner, while still producing that same
spacing that has been my concern. Unfortunately, these chapters will have to
await a more propitious time.

To a large extent At the Limit of Subjectiviy fulfills the role I intended.
Against any number of theories which have linked postmodern literary or filmic
currents to late capital, or the image, I have sought to demonstrate how an
ovenlvhelming sense of finitude is linked to the experience of death and birth, in
the later chapters. This experience of finitude then affects the fictions which had
hitherto (allegedly) protected (in fact, created) the subject from a world of alterity,
creating the illusion of an immanent absolutist subject. In the aftermath of this
experience of mourning, the Cartesian subject has been opened up to the other
and to what I have called being-with. Additionally, I hope to have begun
sketching out the ethical possibilities of a world defined by being-with which

rather than being limited to paralysis, is characterized by a mournful, non-

167

calculable oscillation between the Seylla of nihilism and Gharybdis of absolutism.
My success in this voyage depends on the degree to which I have resisted the

allure of mythic closure. I leave it for others to judge my success.

168

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