editorial: revisions of excess
nathan gorelick and lydia kerr
It might be said that the recent history of Continental philosophy and critical theory is in many respects a history of the remainder, a history of that for which no structure can account but without which no structure would exist, an attempt to think the unthinkable as the unthinkable in its very unthinkability. Martin Heidegger, for example, wrote in Being and Time of the call of Dasein, that constitutive element which is simultaneously essential to human being and yet also seems to emerge from without. This extimate call, Heidegger says, is that which “comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me” (320). Maurice Blanchot constantly returned to the remainder, to the tremor of unintelligible darkness at the core of Reason or of Being itself that he called, in The Space of Literature as elsewhere, “the other night.” Sigmund Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and Jacques Lacan’s later elaboration of desire and the Real instituted thought’s radical invasion into the supposedly sovereign terrain of the Cartesian subject. And Jacques Derrida, in his (paradoxically) canonical text “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” suggested that each of these interventions themselves appear within the history of Western metaphysics in “the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity” (293). While a certain thinking of excess, or at least of the excessive, has in some way always been a concern of philosophical inquiry, this far from exhaustive list of authors and ideas suggests the emergence of what might be called an “excessive sensibility,” an attunement to the idea that that which is constitutively excluded from the system is, by the very fact of that exclusion, intrinsic to the system itself. Thought’s incoherent other—the unknowable, unreasonable, unintelligible outside—is never simply excised once and for all; it returns, again and again, in the form of the symptom, the intuition of the mad, the absent center, the impossible, the Other, the event. Despite every effort at division, dissection, digestion, delimitation there is always a remainder.
This issue of theory@buffalo is dedicated to this new history of the remainder, even as the very concept of history itself might, in fact, betray that about which it attempts to speak. There is, of course, no stable meaning of the term “excess,” no simple definition or set of terms within which to conceptualize that which is only insofar as it is a resistance to conceptualization itself, to objectification, to signification, to categorization or to the kind of narrativity on which any history might be grounded. Thus, to think excess is in many respects to place oneself in the aporetic position of having to think against thought, to refuse the domesticating or annihilating impulses of a metaphysical tradition without which, however, and as Derrida again reminds us, we would have “no language—no syntax and no lexicon” (280), nothing to say, and nowhere to go.
It is from this paradoxical position that Rodolphe Gasché suggests we approach the difficult—perhaps impossible—work of the European thinker whose name is perhaps most readily associated with the idea of excess and toward which our title gestures, Georges Bataille. In the previously untranslated essay which, appropriately, inaugurates this collection, Gasché provides what we might call a manual for reading Bataille. This guide, however, cannot be read as an instruction manual; instead, we are inclined to read Gasché’s piece as a kind of deconstruction manual, which asks some difficult questions: how might we responsibly address Bataille’s early, “unusual and insolent attacks on philosophy”? How would an interpretation without reserve, a reading that, from the start, abdicates the impulse to discover or produce a fixed meaning within the text, elaborate itself? And would such a project—which, as a project, already betrays the unworking toward which it gestures—even be desirable?
These provocations remain, in many respects, unanswered or unanswerable, but they therefore bear witness to the difficulty inherent in any attempt to think that which is beyond thought, but without which thought itself would not be possible. This diverse collection of meditations on the general theme of excess also demonstrates that the resistances with which thought is faced are often incredibly productive of innovative and rigorous modes of theorization, and it is toward an appreciation of this potential that this issue of theory@buffalo is directed.
We are pleased to include in this volume a collection of works dealing with a variety of theorizable objects: literature, film, sculpture, the classroom, and the unconscious all take their place alongside philosophy as both productive and illustrative of multiple modes of excess. Miguel de Beistegui offers an inventive interpretation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, suggesting that the novel unfolds across what might be understood as two disparate, contradictory and intersecting planes—“a plane of organization and a plane of fragmentation”—and that the tensions between these two planes generate ontological implications which are themselves “applicable to—and verifiable in—a number of other fields”. Following Gilles Deleuze’s philosophical confrontation with Proust’s writing, Beistegui suggests that the Recherche testifies to a narrative or conceptual unity that resists or opposes the unity of organicity pervading the novel’s composition; this other unity, a unity of complication, of separation, of fragmentation “is not one of inclusion or encasing, but of juxtaposition”. Communication between disparate fragments of the text is thus dependent not upon communion, integration into a common being or a communal fusion, but rather upon the opposing forces of dissemination and dis-organization.
Allan Stoekl explores something like this other communication through his elaboration of Alphonso Lingis’ travel writings. Against the contemporary, technocratic and hyper-globalized trend toward the minimization of differences—or toward the minimization of the experience of difference—Stoekl argues that Lingis offers a model of travel that requires one to abdicate one’s comfortable subjectivity and invites the self’s movement “beyond, out of the interpretation of depth, out of the self-reflexive gaze of consciousness”. Rather than foreclose the experience of difference, this kind of traveling is an “ek-static communion” or “a communion of self to other without demands, without concern for personal security or advancement”. Whether this new form of communication requires travel to distant and exotic lands remains a question, although Peter Coviello suggests that such experiences might be cultivated within what he calls “secret publics,” provisional communities organized around specific, local, affective and even joyous shared experiences. In his very personal essay—at times hilarious, at times remarkably touching—Coviello offers a revision of excess that ascribes a certain irreducible happiness to the act of rigorous thought. In an admittedly odd pairing of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community and Ralph Waldo Emerson’s skepticism toward consensus, Coviello reminds us that the excessive sensibility need not be entirely occupied with tragedy, anguish, finitude and death, but that delight, laughter, love and joy also have their place within the thought of the impossible.
Of course, sex also holds a place alongside both joy and death within the recent history of excess. With this in mind, Michael J. Shapiro provides a comparative reading of the Wachowski Brother’s film Bound and Billy Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity to explore the politically subversive possibilities of film noir. Shapiro argues that these films disrupt the politics of representation upon which normative configurations of domestic and public space are based, and suggests that they elaborate a kind of erotics of resistance that establishes a counter-hegemonic model of desire, against the cultural authority of heterosexist masculinity.
Elizabeth Rottenberg combines a close reading of Freud’s 1932 letters to Albert Einstein with the development of the concept of “event” in Derrida’s thinking, beginning with “Structure, Sign and Play.” Rottenberg outlines the ethical dilemma Freud faced in his attempt to stave off the destructive outward manifestations of the death drive in order to contextualize Derrida’s figuration of a radical openness to the impossible, or to the beyond of thought. Just as Freud insisted on—and betrayed—a kind of analytic impartiality toward the drives, Derrida gives us to think an openness to the event, which, in order to be called an event, must, as Rottenberg puts it, “surprise, overwhelm, exceed, expose all performative productions and acts of institution”. Event is the name for that which exceeds sovereign mastery, descriptive knowledge, and institutionalized control, yet it is also that which drives these impulses and institutions.
And we have ourselves included a bit of a surprise, although nothing quite on the level of the event, in this volume. theory@buffalo is proud to incorporate, for the first time in the journal’s history, a short work of theoretically-informed fiction, provided here by R. M. Berry. Stylistically reminiscent, perhaps, of the works of Blanchot, Samuel Beckett and Franz Kafka—though with a manifestly innovative voice of its own—this short recit given from the position of a seemingly bodiless voice exceeding the darkness of the box in which it is enclosed, by which it is framed or delimited, resists immediate narrative intelligibility, or even establishes itself within a framework of unintelligibility, within the ambiguous space of sensation, emotion, and solitude. It is fitting that this beautiful text should be followed by Mladen Dolar’s exploration of the relation between “The Voice and the Stone” in western thought, since Dolar’s incredibly expansive commentary traces several of the themes at work in Berry’s piece—the voice, the indeterminacy of the subject, the tension between signification and intention—from Hegel to Beckett and beyond. Dolar’s analysis is itself anchored by the stone, which might be understood as one more possible simulacrum of the remainder toward which these revisions of excess are directed, and upon which they are built.
With this, our issue concludes. Yet it is, of course, impossible to conclude any thought of the outside, or to ascribe any metaphysical certainty to the excessive sensibility that can only ever hope to approximate the object of its concern. Every revision of excess must, by necessity, fall short of its impossible goal if that goal is the conceptual solidification of that which will not be conceptualized; every insurrection against the limitations imposed on thought must remain, in Michel Foucault’s words, no more than “A Preface to Transgression.” However, we hope that these efforts might actualize a revision of these limitations themselves, and might perhaps challenge the predominating conditions of possibility against which thought has always sought to direct itself.
The urgency of such an endeavor is unquestionable. Our world seems increasingly desensitized to its own destructive excesses, and it is thus our hope that this special issue of theory@buffalo will contribute to the critical destabilization of this indifference and its increasingly sedimented set of limitations—limitations against politics, community, sexuality, subjectivity, and thought itself. At the very least, we hope to provoke an attunement to the remainder, in all its forms.
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Works Cited
Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1982.
Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass.
Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.
Foucault, Michel. “A Preface to Transgression.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984,
Vol. II. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: New Press, 1998.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962.