Derrida on the Event, Part II: Derrida the “Yad”

Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of

the ghost.

—Jacques Derrida (1994, p. 10)

For Derrida, the event, if we can call it that, is repetition.

There is always something spectral in Derrida, ghosts are everywhere. More deeply, with his theory of iteration, everything is iteration, repetition, dissemination. A paradox: if there is only repetition, but repetition as alterity such that things are not perfectly preserved, the original utterance can only have a ghostly presence.

There is something incremental, geological about this view of change …

If something is an iteration as repetition, even if it altered, distorted then change is slowed down, it is evolution not revolution, suggesting glacial, geological processes not ruptures and novation.

What anxieties are harboured here? Indeed, one is always left with the feeling of a profound apprehension in Derrida, what RD Laing called “ontological insecurity.”

I have never seen a photo of Derrida with eyes at rest – his eyes seem furtive, darting, almost avoidant. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote a poem that begins:

Of three or four people in a room, one is always at the window

Derrida is the one at the window, always on the lookout.

If in Heidegger,¹ we feel the thinker resigned (I hesitate to say reconciled) to serene solitude, blunting an ancient anguish, in Derrida, we sense something akin to Simone Weil’s uprootedness and together, their concerns create a new category, a new address for being, that is the non-address of non-place.

Real being can have no easy purchase here, only anxious repetitions of the word, fussy annotations of the text, philological dissections, ontological regressions, recapitulations and embellishments, glosses and supplements.

Both Derrida and Weil are propelled into the initiatory logos. For the ethereal Weil, a word that never quite takes flesh (she does not undertake the conversion to Catholicism, does not quite meet Christ in the flesh; she is as uncomfortable dans sa peau—in her skin, as the French say, as Pierre Janet’s “Nadia” or Ludwig Binswanger’s “Ellen West”).

For Derrida, the word can barely make it off the page let alone become flesh.

Like Jewish scholars whose respect for the written word is so great that they do not touch the page but rather use an avatar of the pointer called a yad (Hebrew: די, “hand”), so named because it is literally a small hand with the forefinger extended, to mark their place during a Torah reading, Derrida’s oeuvre can be imagined as a yad—pointing us, always “with patience and trembling, exact fingers” like the lovers that Amichai described in his poem, “Threading,” back to the word and its precise meanings and origins. Derrida the yad: who so loved the word that he could not bring himself to touch it, but only to point and to deconstruct our reading of it.

*

Footnote

In spite of everything, we can bracket Heidegger and Celan together, through Hölderlin if nothing else, for their anxiety about belonging, expressed physically (nature, the land) in Heidegger and Hölderlin and by almost schizophrenic “metaphors that are meant” in Celan (the ashes in the ground, the ashes rising with smoke to the sky). Anthropologist and systems theorist Gregory Bateson describes the peculiar analogical mind of both Catholic—“the communion host is the body”—and schizophrenic logic—he deftly deconstructs the psychotic “word salad” of a patient who starved himself, saying only “Manzanita wood.” Bateson is able to hear the message: “Man’s an eater (if the conditions were right, he) would.”

References

Amichai, Yehuda. “Threading.” In Songs of Jerusalem and Myself (trans. by Harold Schimmel. New York: Harper &  Row, p. 42.

Derrida, Jacques (1994). Specters of Marx (trans. by Peggy Kamuf). New York: Routledge.

*

Excursus: Philosophy & Poetry as Prologue

Every work can be regarded as a prologue (or rather, the broken cast) of a work never penned, and destined to remain so, because later works, which in turn will be the prologues or the moulds for other absent works, represents only sketches or death masks.               —Giorgio Agamben (1993, p. 3)

In his preface to The Pages of Day and Night, Adonis states, “I write in a language that exiles me.” Exile is the mother-country of the Arab poet: “in the beginning was the exile, not the word” (p. xiii).

This explains why the Arab poet embodies a double absence—and absence from himself as well as an absence from the Other. He lives between these two exiles: the internal one and the external one. To paraphrase Sartre, he lives between two hells: the I and the Other.

The I is not I, nor is it the Other.

Absence and exile constitute the only presence.

—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.”

—Adonis, The Pages of Day and Night (p. xiv)

For a whole series of poets and philosophers, from Adonis to Agamben, from Hölderlin to Heidegger, the event is language, the utterance, the possibility of human speech, the reach for meaning perhaps, but above all the utterance. Both Adonis and Agamben express it unambiguously here: poetry is the promise of a beginning, a beginning never ended, iterated in perpetuity (with echoes of Derrida); every work is prologue, a broken cast, a death mask, for other works which are themselves only sketches. This is neither nihilism nor resignation but an affirmation that it is the utterance, not the dialogue (Bakhtin), nor the face-to-face encounter (Levinas), nor the received meaning (Gadamer, Ricouer), nor the construction (Searle) of what is said. Simply the endless (iterable, repeatable—Derrida, again) effort to say it. 

Adonis is firm: “To be means to be something. Meanings are only apprehended through words. I speak; therefore, I am. My existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, i.e., to write, to begin” (p. xv).

We may go further, recalling Primo Levi’s witnessing of the child Hurbinek in Auschwitz. A tremendous effort was expended to undertand his name—Hurbinek,  attributed to the child—and his one word, mastiklo. The stakes are not in what it means, but that it is said at all. This is a message from the concentration camp world, which we can neither understand nor ignore. And which simply demands of us that we listen to it, hear it, acknowledge it silently, lest we shatter all else that may follow …

If you do not witness what cannot be said, you will shatter what can be said.

—al-Niffari, a Sufi mystic (cited by Adonis, Sufism and Surrealism, p. 212)

References

Adonis (2000). The Pages of Day and Night (trans. by Samuel Hazo). Marlboro, VT: Marlboro Press.

Adonis (2005). Sufism and Surrealism (trans. by Judith Cumberbatch). London: Saqi Books.

Agamben, Giorgio (1993). Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience (trans. by Liz Heron). London: Verso.

“Homo Ludens” and the Event

From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

It may surprise my readers that in addressing as sombre and serious a question as trauma, I should refer to Johan Huizinga’s great work, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, described by Martin Buber as “one of the few works informed about the problem of man.”

But it is almost impossible in fact to think about what trauma displaces, interrupts, closes down without considering the possibility that one of the characteristics that we may suspect is opposed to trauma is play. And as a corollary that Event would by definition be “in play” and open to play. Play is at the heart of the Event, as that which resists authority and which opens up discourse through a breaking, even a shattering at times, of rationality, order, logic. In any imaginable “logic of worlds,” to reference Badiou’s last great work, there must also be play …

In his chapter on “play-forms in philosophy,” Huizinga in fact traces play to the Greek sophists but eventually we encounter “at the centre of the circle” also Socrates and Plato. Who can forget the performative, playful, simultaneously mocking and deeply engaged dialogue of Socrates with  Lysias in Platos’s Phaedra? That rich, playful dialogue, the shelves of which have already stocked both Plato’s pharmacy and Derrida’s deconstruction.

From the theory of the riddle, especially the griphos, a joking “question-game” played for “rewards or forfeits” to the “pompous perorations of the sophist” to the Socratic dialogue, Huizinga holds (p. 148) that “the transition is always fluid.”

This is what interests us here—the elaboration of the dialogue as a form of play in the hands of Socrates and his scribe Plato. Describing the sophists, Huizinga says: “The argument goes back and forth like a shuttle and, in its flyings, epistemology takes on the appearance of a noble game.” Huizinga concludes: “It is not only the sophists that play—Socrates and Plato do likewise.” (p. 149)

Plato is supposed to have followed Sophron when composing his dialogues.

Aristotle declares the dialogue a form of mimos, which is an offshoot of comedy. It is not surprising then that Aristotle reckons Socrates and Plato among the jugglers and thaumaturges, along with the sophists (Huizinga, p. 150; Aristotle, Poetica 1147B; H. Reich, Der Mimus, 1903, p. 354).

Huizinga argues that the “dialogue is art-form, a fiction” and that no matter how polished “real conversation” was among the Greeks, “it could never have had the gloss of literary dialogue” (p. 150).

After taking us on a tour of the development of agonistic debates among the schoolmen (or Scholastics) in the Middle Ages with the invention of the University and the public debate as a form of intellectual jousting, with agonistic and playful elements, Huizinga introduces Erasmas, the great humanist who wielded humour, satire and play as deftly as a surgeon’s scalpel. And it is here that Huizinga, speaking through Erasmus, takes us on breathtaking leap from the origins of the dialogue among the sophists and in Socrates, through Aristotle and the Middle Ages, to arrive at this critical insight: that without play, there will not be novelty (what Badiou calls novation in French), there will not be the possibility of the Event …

Erasmus complains in “a letter to his stiff-necked opponent Noel Bédier, of the narrowness of the Schools which only deal with material handed down by their predecessors and, in a controversy, ban any point of view that does not conform to their own particular tenets.”

In my opinion, it is quite unnecessary to act in the Schools as you act when playing cards or dice, where any infringement of the rules spoils the game. In a learned discussion, however, there should be nothing outrageous or risky in putting forward a novel idea.

—Erasmus (cited in Huizinga, p. 156; Erasmi opus epist., ed. Allen, vi, No. 1581, 621 sq.)

Huizinga, Johan (1955). Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Excursus: Psychoanalysis as a Paranoid Theory of Antiphilosophy

From my research notes on “Trauma & Event”

Psychoanalysis has a paranoid substrate in its discourse …

not because it points to specific entities, things or even processes but because it believes that things and events are connected, that they have meaning, that they are discoverable and analyzable, as Freud says. Furthermore, psychoanalysis holds that there is a traumatic origin and core to symptoms. As a result of all this, psychoanalysis believes that anything and everything that happens inside or outside of therapy is “grist for the mill”—meaning discoverable, analyzable and connected.

Psychoanalysis has no theory of contingency.

This has many consequences, both for its capacity to account for daily life and reality and its capacity to account for change in the shape of non-deterministic events.

Psychoanalysis cannot have a theory of the Event:

it is a hermetic universe, filled at best with hermeneutic possibilities

but these interpretations do not—pace catharsis, insight, mentalization and other such processes—actually open possibilities, only give meaning to what is already there, in a deterministic and rather closed way.

This is why psychoanalysis is and must perforce remain a theory of trauma, the closing down of possibilities laid by early processes, Anna Freud’s (1936) “developmental lines,” the drive and its defenses, and the whole infrastructure that this produces.

It is not accidental that Lacan’s reading, rereading and reformulation of Freud is antiphilosophical and that Badiou has been snared in a decades-long entanglement with Lacan.

Lacan is Badiou’s “Tar Baby,” like the Uncle Remus tale … once you get your paws stuck on it, there is no changing the nature of tar, it sticks to anything!

Lacan in fact goes much further than Freud in locating paranoia at the heart of human development, arguing that the ego is structured on a paranoiac basis and that human knowledge operates on a paranoiac principle (see Freedman, 1984, p. 17).

It is not only paranoia which is totalizing and hermeneutic but psychoanalysis itself.

This explains to me Freud’s investment in the Schreber case: the foundations of psychoanalysis were at stake in his making of this case both meaningful (as opposed to random, contingent) and canonical (emblematic, paradigmatic).

This project was bound to fail, above all because it is, in Freud’s own terms, overdetermined.

*

In his essay on Philip K. Dick, Freedman elaborates a theory of paranoia …

“But not only is the paranoiac an interpreter: he or she is one of an especially systematic and ambitious type. In the essay ‘On Narcissism,’ Freud explicitly links paranoia with the formation of speculative systems (XIV: 96), and in the reading of Schreber he notes a profound affinity between paranoia and megalomaniacal delusions of world catastrophe (XII:68-71). The paranoiac is not only someone for whom every detail is meaningful - for whom nothing can be left uninterpreted or taken for granted – but someone who holds a conception of meaning that is both totalizing and hermeneutic. The paranoiac is the most rigorous of metaphysicians. The typical paranoid outlook is thoroughgoing, internally logical, never trivializing, and capable of explaining the multitude of observed phenomena as aspects of a symmetrical and expressive totality. No particular of empirical reality is so contingent or heterogeneous that the paranoiac cannot, by a straightforward process of point-for-point correspondence, interpret its meaning within the framework of his or her own grand system. The totalizing closure of paranoia is, in fact, noted as lucidly by Dick as by Freud: in ‘Shell Game’ (one of Dick’s finest stories and the germ of ‘Clans of the Alphane Moon’ [19641]), the massive frustration of attempting to break down such closure is powerfully recorded, and the basic problem is clearly stated. ‘The paranoid is totally rigid,’ says one of the characters. ‘He logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’ (Dick, 1977, p. 181). (My italics)

Carl Freedman (1984). Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Science Fiction Studies, 11: 15-24.

Philip K. Dick (1977). The Turning Wheel and Other Stories. London: Coronet Books.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Who Killed Ellen West? A Philosophical-Psychiatric Investigation of Ludwig Binswanger’s Case of Existential Analysis

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an 

illness.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)

One cannot understand psychological disturbances from the outside, on the basis of a positivistic determinism, or reconstruct them with a combination of concepts that remain outside the illness as lived and experienced.

—Jean-Paul Sartre, Foreword, Reason and Violence by Ronnie Laing & David Cooper (1964)

 

Who Killed Ellen West?

In 1944-45, Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966), a Swiss psychiatrist, published The Case of Ellen West, the founding case of existential analysis and one of the most famous cases in modern psychiatry. Searching for a meaningful alternative to the reductive models of contemporary psychiatry, I began reading this case and entered a labyrinth where I investigated the founders of clinical psychiatry, questioned phenomenology, discovered a “whodunit” mystery and triggered a crisis of conscience as a psychiatrist.

With his account of the treatment of a “non-Swiss” Jewish woman at Bellevue, the private sanatorium he directed at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, Binswanger proposes an analysis of “the existential Gestalt to which we have given the name Ellen West” (1888-1921). To do this, he consults the patient’s clinical notes as well as her private journal, poems and letters to grasp the “totality of her existence.” Her two psychoanalysts are quoted—one sees hysteria, while another pronounces her a severe obsessional neurotic with manic-depressive oscillations. After two suicide attempts, a series of consultations with the founders of modern psychiatry begins. Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926), architect of today’s psychiatric classification, diagnoses melancholy (a profound depression akin to psychosis) while an unnamed “foreign” psychiatrist, finds simple psychasthenia (obsessive-compulsive disorder). Binswanger has another idea—schizophrenia—confirmed by Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), who named this emblematic condition of psychiatry.

Ellen West’s melancholy and suicide attempts persist, accompanied by serious eating problems. Convinced of her incurable diagnosis, more hopeless than ever, Ellen West demands to be released from hospital. After three days with her family, she appears transformed: she has breakfast, at midday she eats well for the first time in 13 years, in the afternoon she goes for a walk with her husband, reads poems and writes letters; all heaviness is lifted from her. In the evening, she takes poison. The next day, at the age of 33 years, Ellen West is dead.

Writing more than 20 years after her death, when the principals of the case are dead, Binswanger assures us no less than 17 times that her suicide is “authentic.” Who was he trying to convince? Was her death an “authentic suicide” as he insists, an “assisted suicide” (see Akavia, 2008) or a case of “psychic homicide,” a kind of soul murder (see Lester, 1971)? Stripped down, little in Binswanger’s account supports the diagnosis of schizophrenia, then an incurable disease. Against her family’s wishes, Binswanger consults “a foreign psychiatrist” who can now be named, Alfred Hoche (1865-1943), known to support euthanasia for life unworthy of life; all therapy is suspended; and, in spite of her suicidal plans, she is discharged home where her husband provides the poison that kills her.

In spite of the efforts of many great 20^th century thinkers—from her psychiatrists to later psychiatric readings (Mara Selvini Palazzoli, 1982; R.D. Laing, 1982; Salvador Minuchin, 1984) and even philosopher Michel Foucault (1954)—“Ellen West” remains an enigma. The case of “Ellen West” is a mirror of 20^th century psychiatry but the issues and the risks that we find there are still relevant for us (Di Nicola, 2011). And they speak to the debates about the state of psychiatry today.

After 25 years as a practising psychiatrist, this case makes me wonder: What is the mission of psychiatry? Is it to understand (Binswanger’s goal with existential analysis), to classify (Kraepelin’s and Bleuler’s contribution) or to heal (Freud’s contribution through psychoanalysis)? Are these different goals compatible or mutually exclusive? Critics of the case of Ellen West assert that she was misunderstood and mistreated. What lessons does she demand that we learn, at last? Can we let her find a voice to express her suffering, as Minuchin tries to do in his family drama about her?

 

About Me: Vincenzo Di Nicola

I am an academic psychiatrist with interests in the history of psychiatry, phenomenology and philosophy. By chance, I had a relationship with three psychiatrists in this story: Ronnie Laing was my therapist in London, I trained with Mara Selvini Palazzoli in Milan and know Sal Minuchin. All three wrote extensively about families. Selvini Palazzoli and Minuchin are also family therapists and specialists in eating disorders (a key aspect of Ellen West’s predicament). Like my mentors, I specialized in family therapy and eating disorders. Currently, I am doctoral candidate in philosophy in Switzerland, which makes the case more poignant for me. I have presented versions of this research at the Culture and Mental Health Research Seminar at McGill University and Clinical Grand Rounds of Maisonneuve-Rosemont Hospital and will soon present it at the Institute of Mental Health of the University of Montreal. Parts of this research will be integrated into my doctoral thesis and I am working on a book and a documentary film about this case.

Bibliography

Binswanger’s “Case of Ellen West”

Binswanger, Ludwig (1944-45). Der Fall Ellen West. Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychologie, 1944, 53: 255-277, 54: 69-117; 1945, 55: 16-40. (Original in German.)

---- (1958). The case of Ellen West: An anthropological-clinical study (trans. Werner M. Mendel & Joseph Lyons). In: Existence: A New Dimension in Psychiatry and Psychology (Rollo May, Ernest Angel & Henri F. Ellenberger, eds.). New York: Basic Books, pp. 237-364. (Complete translation in English.)

Secondary Literature

Akavia, Naamah (2008). Writing “The case of Ellen West”: Clinical knowledge and historical representation. Science in Context, 21: 119-144.

Berlinck, Manoel Tosta & Magtaz, Ana Cecília (2008). Reflexões sobre O caso de Ellen West: estudo anthropológico, de Binswanger. Revista Latinoamericana de Psicopatologia Fundamental, 11(2): 232-238.

Di Nicola, Vincenzo (2011). The enigma of Ellen West. In: Letters to a Young Therapist: Relational Practices for the Coming Community. New York and Dresden: Atropos Press, pp. 121-125.

Foucault, Michel (1954). Introduction et notes. Le Rêve et l’Existence par Ludwig Binswanger (trans. Jacqueline Verdeaux). Paris: Desclée de Brouweret.

Ghaemi, S. Nassir (2001). Rediscovering existential psychotherapy: The contribution of Ludwig Binswanger. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 55 (1): 51–64.

Laing, Ronald D. (1982). The Voice of Experience: Experience, Science and Psychiatry. New York: Penguin Books.

Lester, David (1971). Ellen West’s suicide as a case of psychic homicide. Psychoanalytic Review, 58: 251-263.

Marceau, Jean-Claude (2002). La question de la corporéité dans le cas Ellen West de L. Binswanger. L’Évolution Psychiatrique, 67(2): 367-378.

Minuchin, Salvador (1984). The triumph of Ellen West: An ecological perspective. In: Kaleidoscope: Images of Violence and Healing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 195-246.

Selvini Palazzoli, Mara (1982). L’anoressia mentale: Dalla terapia individuale alla terapia familiare. Nuova edizione interamenta riveduta. Milano: Feltrinelli Editore.

Vandereycken, Walter (2004). Book review: A. Hirschmüller (ed.), Ellen West. Eine Patientin Ludwig Binswangers zwischen Kreativität und destruktivem Leiden. Heidelberg-Kroning: Asanger, 2003. History of Psychiatry, 15(1): 125-126.

Derrida on the Event, Iterability and Textual Faces—Pre-, Post- and Peri-

“For Derrida … supplementarity is at the always divided ‘origin’ of presence.”

—The Derrida Dictionary by Simon Morgan Wortham (2010, p. 204)

While I was researching Jacques Derrida’s approach to the event and to iterability, I found this quote in The Derrida Dictionary.

In Derrida’s account, iterability combines the Latin iter (‘again’) with the Sanskrit itara (‘other’) (Wortham, 2010, p. 78).

The event as iterability in Derrida’s view is always supplementary: there is an add-on, an extra. Each “irreplaceable event is at once a unique, ‘once-and-for-all’ occurrence and yet manifests or inscribes itself on condition of a possible re-marking.” (Wortham, 2010, p. 78)

Even the single is always repeatable, or rather it is iterable, since every repetition (iter –‘again’) inevitably alters (itara – ‘other’). Thus, the notion of repetition as mere echo or replication is brought into question as a second instance is necessarily an alteration, an other. One thinks of Jorge Luis Borges and the impossibility of identity, in the sense of sameness and of repetition … the writer was not the same as himself (cf. “Borges and I”) and Borges the writer explored this radically in one of his most memorable short stories, “Funes the Memorious,” about an unlucky creature whose memory was so accurate, so impossibly perceptive that nothing was the same as anything, not even itself, as he noted the minutest changes in every instance. So Derrida changes our vocabulary and imagination of identity: not repetition but iteration.

This has critical implications for the notions of representation, performance, memory, identity and history. It also opens interesting vistas about the nature of “cases” …

I will argue in another essay that what creates canonical cases in psychiatry and psychoanalysis is simply their iterability. That is, they become living (I believe texts are forms-of-life) embodiments of the paradox of being authoritative, canonical and yet constantly mutative, open to radical rereadings, constructions, interpretations, deconstructions and delimitations. Freud’s cases are so interesting because they have just enough fixedness to create an image in our minds and more than enough porosity and openness to invite us to reread, even to relive—and then, resist and reframe them.

This addition that comes from our reading, this “supplementarity,” as Derrida describes and deconstructs it, “is at the always divided ‘origin’ of presence.”

*

In Dissemination (1981), Jacques Derrida treats Hegel’s attitude to philosophical prefaces in terms of this logic of the supplement:

Prefaces, along with forewords, introductions, preludes, preliminaries,

preambles, prologues, and prolegomena, have always been written, it

seems, in view of their own self-effacement. Upon reaching the end of 

the pre- (which presents and precedes, or rather forestalls, the 

presentative production, and, in order to put before the reader's eyes 

what is not yet visible, is obliged to speak, predict, and predicate), the route which has been covered must cancel itself out. But this subtraction leaves a mark of erasure, a remainder which is added to the subsequent text and which cannot be completely summed up within it. Such an operation thus appears contradictory, and the same is true of the interest one takes in it.

…

On the one hand—this is logic itself—this residue of writing remains

anterior and exterior to the development of the content it announces.

Preceding what ought to be able to present itself on its own, the preface falls like an empty husk, a piece of formal refuse, a moment of dryness or loquacity, sometimes both at once. From a point of view which can only, ultimately, be that of the science of logic, Hegel thus disqualifies the preface. Philosophical exposition has as its essence the capacity and even the duty to do without a preface. (italics added) (p. 9)

But why is all this explained precisely in prefaces? What is the status of

this third term which cannot simply, as a text, be either inside philosophy or outside it, neither in the markings, nor in the marchings, nor in the margins, of the book? (p. 15)

If a preface doubles back on itself to erase, to efface itself, presaging the event, announcing the philosophical event, what is trauma? What is this catechresis that doubles back on itself to lick its own wounds, reopening them? Trauma is the postface, always looking back, covering its tracks. But while the preface announces, wishing to efface itself like John the Baptist, almost apologetically wishing to diminish its presence, the postface denounces, defaces … it goes back to the text, undermining it to create its own authority, like Saul, become Paul, of Tarsus. Paul undermines the unexamined notion of authority, the “I was there” of the explorer, the anthropologist and the witness to assert a greater authority: “I wrote it down.” Paul who was not there, who was not a follower or witness of the Jewish reformer Yehoshua, assumes and asserts with the authority of the written word. Paul is post-evental, he is the postface to the life of Yehoshua (called Jesus), a traumatic remainder, covering its tracks, making new ones. In Badiou’s terms, Paul becomes faithful to the event which he lives vicariously, but to which he brings great clarity and this, combined with his fidelity (not in the sense of the true, unaltered copy but as Derridean iteration, that is instantiation with alteration), is what imposes his authority.

Unlike the preface that stays outside the text—neither an annotation “in the margins,” nor a footnote “in the markings”—the postface walks back all over the text, leaving tracks with its muddy boots, all over the periface or perimeter of the field of the text.

Paul as postface, trauma as commentary, erases memory. It is not the “flashbulb” memory of some strong incident which illuminates everything around it, but rather a blinding flash which engenders a kind of faith, but not memory. It burns that one image into our minds, making us forget what was around us at the time, if anything, and the lives we lived before, and rewrites the text all around the periface, the perimeter of what used to be our lives. A total rupture that Badiou properly calls an Event (when it opens possibilities) and that our age—the age of trauma—calls trauma (when it closes down possibilities).

For Christians, Paul names the Event (perhaps even more than Yehoshua) which radically alters their lives. For non-believers, in some of their encounters with Christianity, certainly at the margins of Christendom, Paul is not an Event but a trauma. For Jews, this trauma already has a name, an ancient one, given new meaning after the destruction of European Jews—the akedah, the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. For the foreseeable future, the sons will not easily trust their fathers again, a condition, this contemporary condition of the age of trauma, that I call “Isaac Machine.”

But more on that later.

Vincenzo Di Nicola

Montreal – 13 March 2012