Writing of the Formless: Jose Lezama Lima and the End of Time

Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors

Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and abroad.

At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism. Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of romanticism.

In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of romanticism, team-taught a course called Literature Z that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter the bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read. The series’ conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force.

Writing of the Formless

José Lezama Lima and the End of Time

Jaime Rodríguez Matos

Fordham University Press

New York   2017

This book is made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Copyright © 2017 Fordham University Press

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for María Dolores, Marcos, and Julia

Contents

Introduction

Part I. Times

1. Toward the Absence of Time

The Problem with Teleology in Cuba • Time, the Ungraspable: Of Latin America as Modernity • Badiou: Evental Time • Derrida: Time • From the Mastery of Time to the Formless Time of Infrapolitics

2. Sovereignties, Poetic and Otherwise

Dictations: The Romantic Roots of Foquismo • Dictations: Martí, Vitier, Guevara • Romanticism/Theory • Heidegger, Noise • Sovereignties Otherwise

3. The (Mixed) Times of Revolution

Why Lezama? Why Now? • Christianity, Apocalypse, Revolution • The Times of Revolution

4. Nihilism: Politics as Highest Value

Postfoundationalism as Forgetting of Being • Nihilism Today • Politics or Nihilism • The Time(s) of Politics

Part II. Writing of the Formless

Lezama’s Critique of T. S. Eliot’s Difficulty • Meta-phora and Out-of-Place: Aposiopesis • Aposiopesis and the Postsocialist Exhaustion of Literature • Aristotle’s Physics and Muerte del tiempo • Lezama’s One: Aesthetics, Avatar of Western Metaphysics • Infrapolitical Lezama as Reader of Valéry: Sovereignty and the Placing of the Void • Lezama as Reader of Baudelaire: Ennui as Nonsynthesizable Remainder • Killing the Scribe • Other/Same • The Allegorical Reading: Classical, Baroque, Romantic

Conclusion: Godard, Lezama, and the End of Time(s)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

What is there and not there, what appears and disappears, needs a place of protection out beyond the Pillars of Hercules.

—José Lezama Lima, Confluencias

Introduction

Latin America is a form whose content, looking back into the colonial era and traveling all the way into the present, was always already under determination via a crossing-into and a crossing-out-into an exterior.

—Brett Levinson, Globalizing Paradigms

The dislocation of form and content: I take my epigraph from a piece in which Brett Levinson reviews the state of the Latinamericanist field in recent years. He emphasizes the extent to which scholarship on Latin America has been fundamentally defined by the need to point to or show phenomena that are most essentially characterized by the lack of graspable form, or formlessness, if by form we understand Western schemata meant to determine universally what is and is not thinkable, and more generally, what can and should be and what falls beneath the dignity of Being. In reference to the subaltern, he explains in more detail what is at issue in the dislocation of form and content that the epigraph thematizes. The subaltern space/time is often represented as a grumble, murmur, or shout that, not unlike [the sublime . . .], refuses submission to the Symbolic Order (70). Understood as any discourse that speaks for or in the name of Latin America—in the same sense that Orientalism produced knowledge of the Orient for the West—the paradox of Latinamericanism is that its object is defined as an excessive figure.

The persistence of this paradox is remarkable, for it can be tracked through the various historical turns in academic paradigms. Allow me to illustrate this point by way of a brief description of the shift from the literary and philological methodology that defined the field until the 1990s to the model of cultural, historical, and political interpretation that ensued. If the fiction of Vargas Llosa, Cortázar, Borges, García Márquez, and Lezama Lima, among others, was mediated by the high-aesthetic framework, those authors were nevertheless posited as the transgression of the western frontier of understandability, as the murmur from the other’s mouth itself. As a category of world literature, Latin America’s Boom has been the writing of the formless from its inception. To take but two examples of the same critical move regarding the work of Lezama Lima: in the famous collection Latin America in Its Literature we are told that in the hands of Lezama Lima, the novel loses its ground [se desfonda] . . . and after its very slow fall, it begins to move underneath the formless and nameless cover of a collective beast (Alegría 247).¹ And Emir Rodríguez Monegal, one of the most important voices in the canonization of the Boom as a whole, called Lezama’s Paradiso a moment of complete poetic freedom and attributed this to the fact that, as a book, it was without measure and formless (134; desmesurado e informe). The absolute freedom and the collective beast involved in these two descriptions are an index of the political import of the literature in question.

Were we to take the reemergence of the category of the sublime in the second half of the twentieth century, when it became necessary in order to make sense of the art forms that emerge in that period, we would think that the literary production of the marginal world of societies in development and dependency were by this very condition the vanguard of postmodern art.² Within Latinamericanism, the postmodern debate was also, and in an important sense, the framework through which the question of postcoloniality and subalternism first came to the fore (Beverley, Oviedo, and Aronna). Yet, by the mid-1990s, the question of the postmodern was immensely more complicated. Not only had the facile distinction between center and periphery lost ground as a tool for understanding the reality of capitalism, but also the term postmodernity itself had undergone a shift from a celebratory and transgressive name for things in the world to a periodizing category with which to read contemporary global history. The shift was not only a conceptual one; it was intricately connected with the crisis of Marxism and of the Left in more general terms. To simplify matters, once the monolithic subject of history assumed by the Marxist legacy was untenable, it became imperative to identify lesser-formed and more sublime figures that would take on the work of political transformation. With this, the people, as a sign of minor and heterogeneous identitarian subject positions, came to be opposed to the People, understood as the homogeneous and ideologically conservative answer to the proletariat. Without the worker and without the monolingual and culturally homogeneous image of the national body politic, the political field opened toward a diverse group of subjects that did not necessarily cohere or form a seamless whole. Ernesto Laclau, the Argentine political theorist whose work on hegemony came to be of immense value at this juncture (precisely because it offered a way of making sense of that heterogeneity within the confines of a clearly graspable political agency), would come to give this multiplicity the name of the people (cf. On Populist Reason).

Even as today we see some of the critics who most ardently argued the case of subalternism declaring its end (e.g., Beverley, Latinamericanism), what I would argue is that Levinson’s piece, which dates from 2007, was prescient in detecting the return of the people as the true target of much of what seemed to be the most radical political theory Latinamericanism had produced until that point in its history. For it is this category of the people, now as a heterogeneous and multiple force represented by the nation-state, that makes postsubalternism possible today (cf. Beverley, Latinamericanism 58–59). It is as if the crisis of Marxism, and of the Left on a global scale, led directly to the founding question of a revolutionary modernity that was supposedly a thing of the past: how to represent the people as the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty once the unitary and universal body of the king, which incarnated it, was no longer available for the task? Levinson sums up the issue with remarkable clarity:

The people, in this view, is the historical nineteenth-century marker neither of progress nor of underdevelopment but of the state’s undeviating, thereby ahistorical, essence. . . . [A] subalternist reinvention of the people would . . . seek to articulate the people as historical bloc. . . . the people (and so, too, the nation) is itself internally assured, heterogeneous, multiple. The people-multitude or people-as-many would be the egalitarian imaginary inherent in multicultural heterogeneity [Beverley]. . . . Latin American subaltern studies, we can therefore argue, does not offer a study of actual subalterns because its task is to invent a people who would effect within globalization what the Latin American people of the nineteenth century could not. The oppressed . . . and the people would operate as agents of the most sublime irruption . . . , to wit, revolution. As it turns out, the signifier without signified . . . is the unidentified din of a people-to-come, agents of a soon-to-be-true global revolt. (Globalizing Paradigms 71)

For my own purposes, what I want to underscore is that even if subalternism, along with other forms of Latinamericanism of the same historical moment, can manage to avoid the task of producing a political subject (in the classical sense that orthodox Marxism gave to the term), it nevertheless becomes entangled in the wider problem of how to represent such a heterogeneity: this is a problem that, paradoxically, is not endemic to its field of study. The moment the discourse on/of/from Latin America proposes to think through this notion of the people, the question it broaches is linked to the modern problematic of how to represent something that cannot take on any one particular objective form. However much Latinamericanism rejects or avoids dealing with the absence of its object of knowledge, which cannot for that very reason be located, once this notion of the people comes to the foreground, it is also entangled in a very long and very modern problematic vis-à-vis what Eric Santner has called the excarnated principle of sovereignty in the era of revolutions (92). It becomes impossible to avoid thinking the interrelations between the arts, politics, theology, and philosophy—all of which are regions that much of the same modern tradition that is at stake here, up to and including Latinamericanism, wants to see as autonomous spheres.

It is not uncommon to understand the advent of modern(ist) art in tandem with the political shift from the king to the people as the body that incarnates the principle of sovereignty. The central event in this regard is the French Revolution. The question is how to represent the general will without turning its incarnation into yet another representation of the monarch. In a recent book on precisely these questions, Eric Santner explains: The task was to put forth a body that would . . . incarnate the now empty place of the king . . . [,] to incarnate in some ostensibly new way the excarnated principle of sovereignty (92). Santner is in part recasting the views of T. J. Clark, who in his Farewell to the History of an Idea makes the point that the task in question is formally impossible: the body that had to be represented could not take on the form of an empirical or actually existing object without, at the same time, investing it with an aura that the new principle of sovereignty was meant to interrupt. The impasse had the effect of illuminating the role of representation as a technology of power. From that premise, Santner takes the following leap: "The history of European art from this point on was in some sense dedicated to the task of figuring out abstraction, this eventful opening onto the nonfigurative" (94).

In this reading, the history of abstraction is tied to the need to give form to something that is present only as a void. This emptiness is not only the void that is left with the closure of one mode of politics and the tentative beginnings of a different order. It is also the presentation of the absent foundations of politics as such, the paradoxical appearance of the lack at the heart of historical change, the absent foundation of history as a whole. If there were no such lack, change would be impossible, as it would mean that a particular historical configuration has a point that sutures it to a stable, eternal, and atemporal ontological bedrock. Thus, it is important to note that when Santner makes the point about abstraction, we are not broaching the question of the possibility of an event but the rather more complicated issue of the substitution of one precarious and contingent foundation by another.

This problem is tackled by adopting Clark’s conclusions regarding one of the first major paintings of that moment of transition: Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat (1793). In this work, according to Clark and Santner, the upper half, which is a dark representation of empty or negative space, is assumed by the two critics to stand in for the impossibility of representing the people. This void suddenly has the paradoxical charge of a positive and even oppressive objectivity—it is not the people but the impossibility of its representation, an impossibility that exposes painting to itself as mere technique. The upper half of David’s painting is also, and above all, a representation of painting as a way of achieving effects with color and composition (Santner 93).

Though I have some objections, which I will outline in what follows, I find Santner’s demarche illuminating on a number of points. By opening the question of the body that incarnates the principle of sovereignty to the larger problem of its artistic representability, he is able to establish very useful links across a number of theoretical questions, all of which are intricately linked historically but often treated as separate problems for separate academic disciplines. He shows to what extent the question of the desire to name the unnameable, to represent the unrepresentable—all of which could easily be relegated to a question of romantic or modernist aesthetics—is, in fact, a more complex field of tensions linking politics and aesthetics with the hope of resolving the deadlocks of modernity as a whole. He also points out to what extent psychoanalysis has a bearing on this problem, and precisely as a framework with which to explain the emergence of a regulative formational pressure that is no longer politically exerted from without but is instead at the very heart of the political subject. This is his entry into the debate on biopolitics: that moment when the bodies of the citizens of modern nation-states take on a surplus element, one that . . . introduces into immanence an excess it cannot fully close in upon (98). Biopolitics, for Santner, works in the same way as the upper half of David’s Death of Marat. That dense painterly agitation indicates to what extent every citizen answers to a substance that is his or her own responsibility, not as the supernatural aura surrounding a few crowned heads . . . but rather under a series of new and in some sense more ‘democratic’ names (99). And further: Modernist artists stand under the compulsion to respond to the ever-ramifying biopolitical pressures generated by the displacement of the king—and the practices of picture-making sponsored, in some fashion by the political theology of his representative corporality—by the ‘people’ in the wake of the French Revolution (103).

Whether it is Marx’s fetish character of the commodity, in the technical sense of its theological niceties, the emergence of pure abstraction, or the rise of fiction increasingly concerned with monsters, the undead, and the revenant—what is at issue is the possibility of imagining the invisible and ectoplasmic nature of this substance that inhabits the subject of modernity. And, for Santner, phantasmagoria and biopolitics are two different sides of the same modern event: the moment when the flesh of the sovereign is no longer located in the king but is, paradoxically, both excarnated and made to appear in the (nonexistent and unrepresentable) body of the people (100).

Thus, another important point to make regarding Santner’s argument is that he is interested in producing a new way of reading modernism that is not simply against the grain—which would only be an academic occlusion of what is actually at stake here—but is a way of thinking through the status of the sovereign and its principle in all its historical complexity. This is the reason why Santner points out that Bataille’s writings on formlessness cannot be separated from his concerns regarding a sovereignty that was more sovereign than the sovereignty of the master itself, which is to say a sovereignty that was no longer simply a retelling of the master-slave dialectic as imagined by Hegel (and which Bataille, in turn, saw as the essential pattern at the heart of Marxism). Bataille’s project, centered around the journal Acéphale, can then be read as a further and more radical step in the drama of sovereignty in biopolitical times (104). Lacan’s relationship with Bataille is significant in this regard, for it is the discourse of the analyst itself that comes closest to the debasement that is at issue in Bataille’s informe.³ But that is as far as the link between Bataille and Lacan can go, at least according to Santner.

The disagreement is most evident when it comes to the kind of (non)inscription within the symbolic order that Bataille’s scatological conception of materialism seems to espouse. Against the desire for liberation through an ecstatic passage beyond the symbolic order (107), what Santner is interested in pointing out is that it is the very formless and debased matter of the subject, his or her own flesh, that harbors the symbolic, imaginary, and real aspects of sovereignty today (140). But this is to underscore that (despite the passage through the scatological discourse of the analyst, despite the focus on the formless mass where sovereignty is located) what is at issue in his reading is to delimit this kind of base materialism, which is always on the lookout and ready to decapitate anything that resembles the head of the sovereign. Base materialism, horizontality, entropy, pulse, and the formless as such can never give rise to a renewed and reconfigured engagement with the forms and locations of normative pressure that define the symbolic order of modern societies (138). The implications of this limitation are extreme; for what is thus sacrificed is nothing less than the ability to engage with the actual historicity of modern art in all its manifestations and, perhaps more important, the ability to identify the political theology that is further strengthened in the process, even as it is exactly the theologico-political that the partisans of the formless want to depose.⁴

It is difficult to leave unremarked the ambiguous position in which this leaves Santner. On the one hand, the new sovereign principle is itself formless, ectoplasmic, lacking a concrete body except the body of each and every subject in all the heterogeneity and multiplicity this entails; on the other, this formlessness as such cannot engage in a politically productive manner with the symbolic order of modern societies. The formless as transgression only manages to decapitate the sovereign, and since the sovereign is the head on that body itself, this amounts to something like a suicide. Hence the need to allude to a different stratum of the political, one in which it is not the formless that operates but the symbolic order that takes advantage of that failed transgression/suicide. It is as if formlessness was only for the people, while somewhere, some thing, beyond and above the people, manages to escape the reach of that excessive substance that haunts the plane of immanence. The biopolitical ghostly substance of sovereignty is put forth in tandem with an equally excessive and unfigurable outside that is immune to it. This would no longer be a question of a nontranscendental excess within immanence. Rather, it would entail the reinscription of a dictatorial sovereign as the mark of the symbolic order of modernity itself. What is at issue here, I would like to suggest, is not so much a more complicated image of modernity but a limitation regarding the engagement with the formless—and the question leads straight to the founding moment of psychoanalysis itself. I delve further into this not with the aim of circumscribing my argument to a differend with psychoanalysis (for I find the later elucidation on the sinthome to be of great import for my general take on these issues), but because it will offer a way into the question of antifoundationalism.

In his own considerations on Bataille’s informe, Georges Didi-Huberman, who is oddly absent from Santner’s analysis, has pointed out that the identification of flesh and the formless is at the center of an early Lacan for whom the foundation of things is the flesh one never sees; the flesh inasmuch as it is suffering, is formless, inasmuch as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety—the closest and most intimate is also the furthest and strangest: "You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the most informe" (Lacan 154–55, translation modified). The topic under discussion is Freud’s interpretation of the dream of Irma’s injection, and the emergence of anxiety.⁵ Lacan underscores this foundational quality when he has Freud ask: How well-founded is my therapy of neurosis? (157). The foundation is certainly achieved: the dream is a search for the signification of the dream, a quest for signification as such (160). And the answer finally comes: There is no other word of the dream than the very nature of the symbolic (160). The symbolic appears as the general zone where subjectivity comes to be: As soon as true speech emerges, mediating, it turns them into two very different subjects from what they were prior to speech. This means that they only start being constituted as subjects of speech once speech exists, and there is no before (160).

Yet, there is a before, and Lacan himself points it out. It is not the informe, for it never appears as such in the texts in question, which are too obsessively concerned with the possibility of finding a secure ground for psychoanalysis. What provokes anxiety is rather the form of the formless—it is this form and not the formless itself which first gives something to be interpreted. It is as if the representational void of the formless were more terrifying than the actual images with which it is represented. In its place, the abyss is covered over with images: Irma’s mouth covered in a whitish membrane, the dirty injection of trimethylamine, and so forth.⁶ In Freud’s words, the abyss is still represented, as it is the issue of a woman who opened her mouth properly that proves to be unplumbable—a navel . . . that is [the dream’s] point of contact with the unknown, the point where the dream-wish grows up, like a mushroom out of its mycelium (Freud 143, 564). Freud and Lacan come to the conclusion that this was the foundation, the secure ground for their endeavors; there is a meaning—and it is from here that the enterprise departs. Nevertheless, it is, at the same time, a dream that is haunted by the decay and disintegration of that foundation, by the fact that a decision was made to avoid the groundless as the first sense of psychoanalysis.⁷

What explains everything, according to Lacan, is the injection of trimethylamine:

The dream does not only owe its meaning to Freud’s research on the meaning of dreams. If he can continue to ask himself the question, it is because he asks himself if all of this communicates with Fliess, in whose elucubrations trimethylamine plays a role in connection with the decomposition products of sexual substances. Indeed—I’ve made inquiries—trimethylamine is a decomposition product of sperm, and it gives it its ammoniacal smell when it’s left to decompose in the air. The dream, which culminated a first time . . . with the horrific image I mentioned [Irma’s open mouth], culminates a second time at the end with a formula [the chemical composition of trimethylamine] . . . on the wall, beyond what we cannot but identify as speech. (158)

Irma is injected not with semen but with that which in semen causes it to decompose when exposed to air. The decay at the heart of the foundation is already inscribed in the very element that represents the symbolic order for Lacan (the chemical formula for trimethylamine). Thus, the symbolic is marked from its first psychoanalytical instance as a contingent and impermanent ground. The fact that this scene was displaced by Santner (in his book it appears in a previous chapter and not in his engagement with the formless as a cypher for the people after the French Revolution) should give an indication of the complexity behind the decision to see the unrepresentability of the people, the principle of sovereignty, in the representation of negative space in David’s painting. For there also, what is at stake is a way of avoiding the radical antifoundationalism that the Revolution exposes and displaces as soon as it comes to power. In both cases, in the foundation of psychoanalysis and in the events that follow the revolutionary sequence, what we see is the need to abstain from taking the abyss as the first evidence of a new configuration of thought. The consequences are significant.

In covering over the void in order to establish the new contingent foundation, the already decomposing foundation, that element that Santner claims exceeds the immanence of the revolutionary field (whether psychoanalytical or revolutionary) begins to look less like the interiorization of the sovereign principle as biopolitics and more like the command to care for an order that emerges in full awareness of its finitude: newly born, it is already decaying. The issue is not so much the shift of the sovereign principle from one body to another but, rather, the breaking down of sovereignty itself. And this breakdown is such that its effects are retroactive: what is exposed is that sovereignty was always a decrepit and decaying mass even prior to the revolution—sovereignty itself was always fundamentally formless. What is made impossible with this always already formless sovereign principle was supposed to be the movement upward, away from the muddy earth and into the atemporal realm of the eternal: such was the story that modernity told itself about the mythical emergence of sovereignty.⁸ And the people, however heterogeneous and multiple, is one more image in the arsenal of images meant to cover over that gap in the foundation. Compared to the abyss, even the formless collective beast (like Irma’s mouth) will prove less horrifying. Bataille’s formless is a way of pointing out that there is the possibility, perhaps, of a politicity that sees in that movement toward the suprapolitical realm of the Idea the negation of politics as such—the possibility, that is, of a politicity of the infra, a sovereignty minimally different from the sovereign master-slave, one that is subjected to no-thing and that subjects no one to care for its senile and decrepit image of eternal glory.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of recent writings on the idea of the formless, or the informe, is the predictably academic gesture of beginning with a definition. The procedure is a familiar one: the critic cites Bataille’s entry on informe and moves on to a close reading of all its key elements.⁹ Despite all the efforts one can make to emphasize the ironic and antidefinitional character of the text, when read in isolation or without regard for the rest of Bataille’s oeuvre, it proves impossible to marshal that notion as anything but what it was meant to destabilize. The fact itself is proof of the efficacy of forms, of the predisposition to think only in terms of the formal stability that Bataille was questioning. For this reason, I find it more expedient in these introductory pages to begin explaining what I understand by my title not through a direct leap into the most familiar name associated with the formless, but with one of his most careful commentators. A gliding toward the secondary that already should be understood as part of the dislocating operation of the informe. This book takes as a point of departure the following description Jacques Derrida made of the writing of Georges Bataille, perhaps the single most important point of reference when it comes to the informe as an operative concept in contemporary debates on everything from abstract art to sovereignty in the era of biopolitics, moving through the history of psychoanalysis and the reception and critique of Marxism:

This . . . writing will be called writing because it exceeds the logos (of meaning, lordship, presence, etc.). Within this writing—the one sought by Bataille—the same concepts, apparently unchanged in themselves, will be subject to a mutation of meaning, or rather will be struck by (even though they are apparently indifferent) the loss of sense toward which they slide, thereby ruining themselves immeasurably. . . . Bataille’s writing . . . does not tolerate the distinction of form and content. Which makes it writing, and a requisite of sovereignty.