Date: Mon, 07 Apr 1997 22:57:47 -0400
From: "Bayard G. Bell" <bbell01-AT-vader.cc.emory.edu>
Subject: Re: HAB: Re: Derida, Habermas, and the Other


Let me go ahead and transcribe the exchange between de Man and Hertz
that I mentioned in my previous post.

Hertz: I want to pick up on the relation between the transpersonal and
the inhuman.

de Man: Right.

Hertz: Because it seems that -- I'm talking about the moment when you
were talking about poetry -- and <I>Brot</I> -- and <I>pain</I> -- . . .

de Man: Right, uh huh.

Hertz: When you that as an instance, you tend to adduce the kinds of
connotations that words develop over a long time and historical culture,
so that their quotidian feel, for you, is in some relation to the fact
that Hoelderlin wrote a poem, and that Christians do certain things with
bread, and so forth and so on.  Now, all of those instances add up to
what's beyond your control as an individual user of language, but they
don't quite add up to the inhuman.

de Man: No.

Hertz: And it's that movement I want -- there's a mediation in there
someplace.

de Man: Right, well . . .

Hertz: Now suppose you put this in connection with the mathematical
sublime -- imagine that the totality that you are trying to apprehend,
or comprehend, I forget which of those terms is what you can't do and
which one you can do --

de Man: You can apprehend, to a certain point, but after a certain point
you can't comprehend what you comprehend.

Hertz: Imagine a sequence of apprehensions about the meaning of
<I>Brot</I>.  You take in Hoelderlin, you take in a whole series of
other German ones, you take in the Christian connotation and so forth
and so on; similarly, you've got a series of apprehensions about
<I>pain</I>, that does off in its own direction.  It's conceivable that
the moment when the word "inhuman" comes to mind is the moment of the
breakdown of those acts of apprehension.  That's very prosaic.  I mean
it's because there are a whole series of events, in what we ordinarily
call history, that lose connotations, and they get lost, one loses track
of them; and we name some of them, one poem by Hoelderlin, we can't name
others, and so forth and so on.  It seems to me that you want to hold on
to the prosaic nature of the inhuman --

de Man: Right.

Hertz: -- because that's an important word in your own discourse.

de Man: Right.

Hertz: At the same time, the word "inhuman" keeps pulling in the
direction of the mysterious.  You no?  [laughter]  Not for you?  Maybe
it doesn't.  Not in a mode of terror, but just in a mode of the
substantiation and the individuation of something that's <I>the</I>
Inhuman, like <I>the</I> Sublime...

de Man: Yah.

Hertz: It's become a singular noun, convering a series of failed
apprehensions.

de Man: Yah.

Hertz: It's that transition that I'm puzzled by, how you get from what's
really a contigent impossibility -- to reconstruct that connatations of
<I>Brot</I> -- to a major term, like the "Inhuman."

de Man: Well, you're quite right.  I was indulging myself, you know, it
was long, and I was very aware of potential boredom, felt the need for
an anecdote, for some relief, and Benjamin gives the example of
<I>pain</I> and <I>Brot<?I>, and perhaps shouldn't . . . whenever you
give an example you, as you know, lose what you want to say; and
Benjamin, by giving the example of <I>pain</I> and <I>Brot</I> -- which
comes from him -- which I've banalized, for the sake of a cheap laugh. .
. .  Well, as you say, it went from a problem of apprehension,
comprehension -- which is a simple tropological problem -- you come to
the inhuman, which Benjamin mentions in a somewhat different context
>from that of <I>pain</I> and <I>Brot</I> -- I should not have quoted
that -- but that is still very human, what happens there.  The
"inhuman," however, is not some kind of mystery, or some kind of secret:
the inhuman is: linguistic structures, the play of linguistic tensions,
linguistic events that occur, possibilities which are inherent in
language -- independently of any intent or any drive or any wish or any
desire we might have.  So that, more than nature, toward which one can
have, toward which one sets up, a human rapport -- which is
illegitimate, as illegitimate as it turns out to be, in the final run,
the interpersonal rapport, which is illegitimate too, since there is, in
a very radical sense, no thing as the human.  If one speaks of the
inhuman, the fundamental non-human character of language, one also
speaks of the fundamental non-definition of the human as such, since the
word human doesn't correspond to anything like that.  So by extension,
any . . . but let's not go that far -- I'm now ahead of the statement .
. . .  What in language does not pertain to the human, what in language
is unlike nature and is not assimilable, or doesn't resemble, what in
language does not resemble the human in any way, is totally indifferent
in relation to the human, is not therefore mysterious; it is eminently
prosaic, and what happens -- what is precisely interesting, I think --
is that Benjamin's language of pathos, language of historical pathos,
language of the messianic, the pathos of exile and so on and so forth,
really describes the linguistic events which are by no means human.  So
that what he calls the pains of the original become structural
deficeincies which are best analyzed in terms of the inhuman,
dehumanized language of linguistics, rather than into the language of
imagery, or tropes, of pathos, of drama, which he chooses to use in a
very peculiar way.  To the extent that this text is human, all to human
in the appeal it makes to you, and its messianic overtones to name
something which is essentially nonhuman, it displaces our sense of what
is human, both in ourselves and in our relationship to other humans.  In
a very fundamental way, I think.  So that, from the statement that
language is not human, that history is not human, which is made at the
beginning, we are not brought to see something about the human which
goes beyond that in that sense . . . whether it is mysterious, whether
that is inhuman, or whether that is . . . the sacred, or something, one
is impelled to read <I>reine Sprache</I> as that which is the most
sacred, which is the most divine, when in fact in Benjamin it means a
language completely devoid of any kind of meaning function, language
which would be pure signifier, which would be completely devoid of any
semantic function whatsoever, a purely technical linguistic language --
and it would be purely limited to its own linguistic characteristics.
You can call that divine or sacred, if you want, but it is not
mysterious in that sense, I think, though it is paradoxical in the
extreme. . . .

>From _The Resistance to Theory_, pp. 94-97 (question and answer session
following de Man's final Messenger lecture at Cornell University, March
1993.  The lecture was entitled "Conclusions: Walter Benjamin's 'The
Task of the Translator'" and is reprinted with q & a in _Resistance_,
pp. 73-105.)



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