Spins

“Books that teach how to dance–– There are writers, who, by presenting the impossible as possible and speaking of morality and genius as if both were merely a mood, a caprice, produce a feeling of high-spirited freedom, as if one were to get up on tip-toe and simply had to dance for joy.”
 

–––Nietzsche, “From the Souls of Artists and Writers” (139)

Testing

 
Leaping right in I offer the following as a way to find one’s footing in what follows. Despite the epigraph from Human all too Human, this is not a study of Nietzsche. Nietzsche comes up, but the text is not about him. For that matter Elias, Marx, Kierkegaard, de Man, Plato, and Derrida all come up, but the text is not about them. It is about dance and philosophical reflection as they are taken up by these figures. What recommends these figures is that they thematize different but related aspects of the matter at hand, and they do so with different degrees of intensity. In Marx dancing appears, as it were, in passing. In Nietzsche it returns eternally. Both, however, are concerned with the limits and force of philosophical reflection, a concern that achieves a distinctly reflexive urgency in the fashionable latecomers, Derrida and de Man. This said, what follows has no ambition to be either a philosophy of dance or a history of the relation between philosophers and dancers. Instead, this is a text that seeks primarily to raise questions about dance by detailing how dance is staged within philosophical reflection. In effect, it pushes off from the hardly controversial hunch that there is more to dance than we might otherwise think, and that this “more” becomes accessible when tracing, however erratically, the way philosophical reflection (of the sort embodied in Nietzsche’s remarks above) puts dance to work.
 
Specifically, I am proposing to speculate on the way dance figures in the work of philosophical exemplification. That is, the procedure, altogether routine, whereby the labor of abstraction is interrupted in order, through recourse to an example, to concretize a particular thought. This interruption need not be announced––”for example”––indeed, as in the case of Nietzsche’s remarks, it may in effect engulf the labor of abstraction, providing it with an animating figure. But an interruption it remains. Doubtless, one of the reasons Nietzsche is something of a philosophical renegade derives from the way his entire corpus is something of a philosophical interruption––as de Man, following Schlegel, will say, a permanent parabasis. Be that as it may, a striking thing about one of his favorite interruptive devices, dance, is the way it (or its avatars, leaping, jumping, pirouetting, etc.) races back and forth over its semantic status as a figure, an exemplary point of reference (when Kierkegaard appeals to the ballet), and as a designation of the very gesture of exemplification itself. Indeed, in attempting to engage this racing I have turned to my titular motif, “spins”––a term now capable of signifying interpretation, move, and turn.
 
This text then unfurls as a series of passes, spins, over its animating hunch regarding dance. What repeats in each spin is a stratified reflection on how, in effect, dance puts philosophy on edge. That is, first, a reflection on how the gesture of philosophical exemplification is exemplified, even codified, in the example of dance, and second, a reflection on how philosophical discourse appeals to the example of dance to articulate both its relation to its own limits (the problem of reference), and its relation to the (an)other world conjured through its critique of the world to which it refers (the problem of revolution). What emerges is an admittedly eccentric genealogy of the philosophical maneuvering that, if we are to believe Perry Anderson, came to a head in the postmodern, a condition whose emergence was prompted by the belated and thus decisive encounter of Charles Olson (or Black Mountain College) and Jean-François Lyotard. Important here is not the postmodern as such, but the way the concept has come to serve as a way to think the socio-historical break I invoked under the heading of “revolution.” That dance, precisely in the way it is deployed to figure, to refer to the social link and the question of leading––or, stated etymologically, of hegemony–– insistently comes up here is part of what suggests, perhaps even hypnotically, that there is, as I said, more to be said both about and with it.
 

One

 
When in 1968 Norbert Elias republished the dissertation he had written with Karl Mannheim, The Civilizing Process, he added a substantial new introduction to volume one, The History of Manners. As its opening paragraphs clarify, Elias is keen to establish the relevance of a study originally conceived and written in the wake of World War II to a present marked by imperial wars, anti-colonial struggle, and the insurgency of groups later referred to as “the new social movements,” just to pick out some of the more well-recognized challenges to the increasingly problematical relation between capital and civilization. Never shy about appealing to the power of theory, Elias establishes the relevance of his study by teasing out some of its important theoretical innovations. His introduction situates the project at the point at which figural language gestures toward what it would otherwise have trouble getting at:
 

The concept of figuration has been introduced precisely because it expresses what we call “society” more clearly and unambiguously than the existing conceptual tools of sociology, as neither an abstraction of attributes of individuals existing without a society, nor a “system” or “totality” beyond individuals, but the network of interdependencies formed by individuals . . . . What is meant by the concept of the figuration can be conveniently explained by reference to social dances. They are, in fact, the simplest example that could be chosen. One should think of a mazurka, a minuet, a polonaise, a tango, or rock ‘n’ roll. The image of the mobile figurations of interdependent people on a dance floor perhaps makes it easier to imagine states, cities, families, and also capitalist, communist and feudal systems as figurations. By using this concept we can eliminate the antithesis, resting finally on different values and ideals, immanent today in the use of the words “individual” and “society.”
 

(261-62)

Elias goes on to rephrase Yeats’s point in “Among School Children”––that one cannot know the dancer from the dance––and stresses that while dance is nevertheless relatively independent of specific dancers, it cannot be treated as a separable “mental construction.” Imagine something like the eidos of the tango. Indeed, for Elias figuration names both the differently scaled and paced systems of Durkheimean interdependencies that interest him, and the properly social fact that their explanations and the “tools” that enable them belong to these very systems. In effect, sociology has partnered, or paired up, with society.

 
So what is Elias telling us about dance? Insofar as dance exemplifies figuration it is through figuration that one is obliged to sidle up to dance. As the cited passage makes clear, Elias appeals to figuration in order to transgress, that is disclose, a certain disciplinary limit. Specifically, figuration helps one get at an enabling insight of what for several decades has gone by the name of social constructivism, that is, the proposition that the presumed agents or bearers of social relations are themselves the products of those very relations. They are not simply products in the sense that they see themselves this way, but they are––down to the very matter of their being––social constructs. Now, truth be told, Elias does not explicitly advance this sort of vigorous constructivism, but his entire effort to demonstrate how affective thresholds of disgust, shame, and civility are rendered historical through the means by which specific societies identify and regulate such thresholds assumes, if followed to the end of the line, precisely such a view. In this he is clearly a “fellow traveler” of the Frankfurt School, although his relation to Marxism was always more ambivalent than theirs, which was ambivalent enough.
 
Figuration then falls into step with concepts like mediation and articulation. Like them it expressly designates the Moebian interface between the inside and the outside of the agent, and the inside and outside of the structure, or as Elias puts it, the individual and society. The individual is not in society like an animal in a cage (whether iron or not). Instead, the individual is in society the way speaking, at least for Saussure, is in language. Sensing that sociology (at least in the western European tradition) cannot think outside the box, that is, cannot understand the preposition “in” without converting it into a designation of containment and therefore distributing it across the divide between container and contained, Elias feels compelled to introduce figuration. As if to concede but also thereby accentuate the concept’s strangeness, he immediately seeks to exemplify it. Hence the appeal to dance.
 
But before elaborating further what this tells us about dance, consider the gesture of exemplification itself. On the one hand, although figuration might be opaque to sociologists, it is perhaps a little too self-evident (meaningfully opaque?) to students of literature, especially those aware of the traditions and practices traced by Auerbach in his probing meditation, “Figura,” or, to invoke a post-de Manian rhetoric, to those familiar with the concept of figural language. Might this not suggest that the gesture of exemplification is an apotropaic one? Is Elias gesturing toward exemplification not in order to render the strange familiar but to fend off a certain reading, specifically a reading in which the figural would install itself at precisely the point where agency and structure can no longer be either differentiated or confused? To invoke the intellectual high point of the Clinton administration, perhaps the decisive matter is not what “is” means, but what “in” means. On the other hand, setting aside without discarding the apotropaic possibility, the gesture nevertheless assumes the profile of what Austin in How to do Things with Words calls a performative, that is, in reaching across from the theoretical to the quotidian, in referring to a world of readers not already prepared to follow his theoretical lead, Elias makes exemplification act out something like the Moebian interface of figuration, where the meaning of a text is in its readers the way speaking, to invoke an earlier example, is in language. On the one hand and on the other, together they join the figural and the performative, reminding us not only that the apotropaic is trope-like, but that the act of exemplification is also a feint, a dip where the quotidian has already slipped into or out of the philosophical, the text into or out of the reader whose lack of familiarity with figuration is then disclosed as a mirage. As Nietzsche said about those books that make us get up on tip-toe and dance, presenting the impossible as possible, genius becomes capricious, morality a mere tone.
 
This implies, does it not, that Elias’s turn to dance is already part of what he wants us to import into figuration from dance. And vice versa. Dance, insofar as it both exemplifies figuration and exemplification itself, does so because dance taps out the fleeting but impassable frontier between an inside and an outside that in arising everywhere belongs to the endless, though hardly seamless, referential encounter between theory and society, or, if one prefers (although the differences matter), between thought and world. Important here is not the leap from dance as stylized movements to dance as example, for the example, however theoretically rich, is nothing more than steps and movements, but the spin out on the other side of the frontier negotiated by the concept of figuration from among the concepts Deleuze and Guattari, as if in commemoration of their own relation, call friends. “Dancin’ with myself,” indeed.
 
This said, historians of popular dance would certainly not miss the trajectories–– popular/elite, collective/singular––sketched in Elias’s list of examples. But precisely because this list is an example within an example, it points beyond its contents. It thus invites consideration of what Elias actually knows of the dances listed. The following excerpt from “Biographical Interview with Norbert Elias” is suggestive. In discussing Elias’s Nazi-provoked exile in Paris, the interviewer asks:
 

In which quarter of Paris did you live? Probably Montparnasse; I lived in a hotel. It was very nice to go dancing at the Apache, near the Bastille, and to sit at the cafés in Montparnasse. You could eat very well at cheap restaurants, and meet everybody––except French people. But at the same time it was a very difficult time, the only time I ever went hungry because my money had run out.
 

(Reflections 50)

This exchange refers to a context marked by frustration, specifically Elias’s frustration with being excluded from Paris and the French despite his command of the language and his appreciation for French intellectual traditions. It is intriguing that the experience of dance figures here. Intriguing as well that Elias liked to dance at a place called the Apache. The term “apache” actually entered the French language through the exertions of Emile Darsy at Le Figaro when, in the early years of the twentieth century, he introduced “apache” (modeled, it turns out, on a eighteenth-century British appropriation of “Mohawk”) to designate Parisian gangs given to various forms of urban violence and crime. With an ethnographic ignorance to rival that of people rabid about the right to name athletic teams “redskins,” “chiefs,” and the like, the French adopted this instance of rebarbative “primitivism,” and happily used it to name clubs and bars that may or may not have catered to such gangs, but which obviously promised patrons a rowdy, even wild (Darsy picked the term up from American stories of the “wild west” being translated at the time) atmosphere in which so called apache dancing (an especially aggressive, even misogynistic form of gymnastic gyrating) almost certainly took place.

 
In the absence of reliable witnesses it is impossible to know whether Elias was, as we say, dancing on the tables at the Apache. In the end, this is probably only interesting, but not important. What is important is that this example dips the concept of “figuration” into an interesting genealogy, one that becomes clear when in addition to all the other edges evoked and finessed by Elias––foreigner, Jew, intellectual (just to name a few)––one recognizes here Marx’s engagement with Hegel and the secret of fetishism. It is significant that in Capital Volume I Marx has occasion to deploy his famous figure of corporal inversion both in the postface to the second edition (where he is acknowledging and settling the debt with Hegel) and in his analysis of the commodity. In the first, he proposes husking the dialectic from its mystical shell by recognizing that with Hegel “it is standing on its head” (103). In the second, he describes the commodity:
 

but as soon as it [his example is that of a table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.
 

(163-64)

The implication is clear, namely that transcendental idealism is the commodity in philosophical form, or spun in the opposite direction, that the commodity’s grotesque ideas are Hegelian. Equally clear is the assertion––rendered stenographic in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach––that in order to cross from an interpretation to a transformation of the world, a revolution, Marxism must break, and break decisively, with the commodified forms of philosophical discourse. Marxism, however faithful it must be to objects, cannot, in the end, allow itself to be thought by them, a risk actually entertained by Marx when slightly later in Capital I he presents Marxism as the content of what commodities might say about their value if provided an interpreter. He calls this sustained instance of prosopopoeia an example (ein Beispiel).

 
So, to put the matter concisely, is figuration––precisely to the extent that it rediscovers society in the individual and the individual in society––an expression of this vamp toward the philosophical repudiation of the world of the commodity? Or, what is the difference between dancing tables (note Marx’s dependency on the figure of catachresis here) and dancing that might take place on tables? Reading these as two versions of the same question, we are confronted with the truly wild, perhaps on the way to the postmodern, articulation of the co-implication of philosophy and dance. Both Elias and Marx write as though dance figures and figures essentially on the path from reference to revolution. Surely this is not the dance, the writing of the chorus, we thought we knew.
 

Two

 
Those who have wrestled with the angelic corpus of Kierkegaard (including, of course, those texts authored by him as well as those authored by his pseudonymic masks) know that it is a body of material sprawled across the discursive practices of philosophy, theology and poetry, to mention only the most obvious landmarks. Indeed, many of his texts worry precisely over the matter of which law of genre they may be in violation of, a worry, in fact an anxiety, that he passed along to Heidegger when, in 1955, the latter sought to separate thinking out from philosophy in a way pre-dicted by Kierkegaard’s struggle to separate faith from theology. At issue here is an edgy reflection on the question of “what is philosophy?” that finds trenchant expression in, among other places, that most autobiographical of texts, Fear and Trembling. If, as has been argued, the example of dance is likely to haunt any such gesture of delimitation––especially when executed with passion––then one is not surprised to find the figure of the ballet dancer leaping and spinning around in de Silentio’s text.¹ Its most sustained appearance takes place in that section of the text designated, “Preliminary Expectoration”:
 

It is supposed to be the most difficult feat for a ballet dancer to leap into a specific posture in such a way that he never once strains for the posture but in the very leap assumes the posture. Perhaps there is no ballet dancer who can do it––but this knight [the knight of faith] does it. Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are benchwarmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world. It is more or less conspicuous according to their skill, but even the most skillful of these knights cannot hide this wavering. One does not need to see them in the air; one needs only to see them the instant they touch and have touched the earth––and then one recognizes them. But to be able to come down in such a way that instantaneously one seems to stand and to walk, to change the leap into life into walking, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian––only that knight [the knight of faith] can do it, and this is the one and only marvel.
 

(41)

This passage follows an extended stalker’s monologue in which de Silentio describes his pilgrimage to the abode of the knight of faith and his effort once there to discern in the knight evidence of what in the passage is referred to as his sublimity. Restating in narrative form the relation between public and private reasoning as formulated by Kant in “What is Enlightenment?” (in private we can give no sign of our critical and if so desired public repudiation of our professional obligations), de Silentio draws attention to the paradoxical and ultimately absurd character of the knight of faith’s singular relation to the absolute. As he puts it in the very steep climb, “Problema II,”

the paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual––to recall a distinction in dogmatics rather rare these days––determines his relation to the universal [the ethical] by his relation to the absolute [god], not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal.
 

(70)

As if channeling Spinoza’s misnamed pantheism, de Silentio insists that under such circumstances one loves god not by dutifully loving one’s neighbor, but simply by truly loving (although presumably not coveting––even in one’s heart) one’s neighbor. Seeking outward signs of this paradox, of the “optical telegraphy” signaling its movements, de Silentio stalks the knight of faith, not leaving him “for a second,” watching him walk about town, go to work, go to church and so on. Enter the ballet dancer.

 
In the passage cited de Silentio, like Elias, uses the dancer in order to exemplify a crucial distinction, that between the knights (NB: plural) of the infinite and the knight of faith. However, instead of resorting to exemplification in order to leap from the theoretical to the ordinary, de Silentio assumes the reader’s familiarity with, on the one hand, classical ballet, and on the other, with standards of aesthetic execution that only a trained eye would pick up. What the trained eye will pick up is precisely what the stalker does not pick up in the knight of faith who could otherwise pass for a tax collector, namely, the barely perceptible “waver” that separates his ordinary acts from the movement of infinity that, in not yet being doubled, syncopates his being. By contrast, the singular knight of faith is capable of leaping directly and imperceptibly into his positions––first, second, third and so on. Something like a pas de chat, but done in reverse. So let us pose the decisive question again: what must dance, here ballet, be such that it can exemplify, can instantiate this edge between faith and philosophy? Or, as is becoming more obvious, what must philosophical exemplification be if dance must carry it out?
 
A response, if not an answer, can begin by observing that dancing makes two other entrances in Fear and Trembling. The first occurs earlier in “Preliminary Expectorations” where, among other things, de Silentio gets the concept of “the leap” off his chest:
 

It is commonly supposed that what faith produces is no work of art, that it is a coarse and boorish piece of work, only for the more uncouth natures, but it is far from being that. The dialectic of faith is the finest and most extraordinary of all; it has an elevation of which I can certainly form a conception, but no more than that. I can make the mighty trampoline leap whereby I cross over into infinity; my back is like a tightrope dancer’s, twisted in my childhood, and therefore it is easy for me.
 

(36)

As the Hongs note, this is an early invocation of the one thing “everybody” knows about Kierkegaard: the leap. Thus, it is likely significant that here the leap is paired with dance, indeed types of dance, a pairing that carries out the confirmation of the claim that faith is indeed a work of art. Awkward though it sounds, this is the proper way to make this point because if the leap is precisely the way to supplement what is otherwise strictly conceptual (the non-aesthetic), then the leap is the trace of the work of art in de Silentio’s text. It is also an example. As such, its pairing with dance is an adumbration of the later encounter with the knight of faith who can leap into position without wavering. In designating the cross over into infinity, the tightrope dancer also prepares us for the passage, the referential back and forth between thought and world that the knight of faith imperceptibly embodies. But the shadows cast here reach much further ahead than that. In fact, they would appear to reach all the way into the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra where, in section three, we witness, along with Zarathustra, another tightrope performance (the German here, Seiltänzer, makes the link to dancing obvious), indeed one in which a high wire leap (this time by a demonic partner) allegorizes the overcoming of “the last man” by the “over-man,” in effect, the revolution. Although Nietzsche’s awareness of Kierkegaard’s corpus comes, as it were, too late (Walter Kaufmann says 1888), it is clear that both writers find something compelling in figuring fundamental concerns of their thought in this particular way. Indeed it is this figuring of figuring that is so striking, and it is crucial that Nietzsche’s philosophy of the future had to generate a non-Kierkegaardian repudiation of Hegel to get off the ground.

 
The third and final appearance of the dancer takes place in “Problema II” now in verbal form:
 

Anyone who does not perceive this [Abraham’s absolute inability to explain the necessity of sacrificing the long awaited son] can always be sure that he is no knight of faith, but the one who perceives it will not deny that even the most tired of tragic heroes dances along in comparison with the knight of faith, who only creeps along slowly.
 

(77)

Here, a new negation-fraught contrast is introduced between the knight of faith and the tragic hero, a contrast designed to clarify the importance of Abraham’s speed, or lack thereof (one thinks here of Kafka’s waiter). Perhaps because there is no symmetry other than structural between the tragic hero and the knight of the infinite, dancing is apparently set opposite the knight of faith who, faithful to the topical motif of procrastination, creeps along. As if to undercut any balletic association with gracefulness, the knight becomes a figure of subreption, and dancing, insofar as it survives this apparently contradictory trans-valuation, realigns with implacability. Thus the imperceptible waver is rendered not as the instantaneity of the leap between philosophy and the world, but as the glacial, perhaps even tediously minimalist advance of the Abraham-machine. Both intense acceleration and intense retardation cause motion to disappear, the point, I take it, of the evocation of the Eleatics with which Fear and Trembling concludes and, subsequently, the frequent editorial pairing of it with Repetition. At the risk of reducing the dancer to the creep, the passage remains true to the earlier evocation of ballet in highlighting the problem of the appearance of transcendence in immanence, or what I have rephrased as the encounter between the world and its philosophical interpretation. Like Elias and Marx, Kierkegaard sustains recourse to dance as the way to point to the revolution that lies out ahead of referring, even if that revolution is all about a love for god that establishes its worldly and thus secular dominion here and now.

 
Pivoting back then to the example of the example, one turns perhaps inevitably to de Man. In “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s ‘Über das Marionettentheater,'” de Man broaches the matter of the example in the context of a general consideration of the inscription of the aesthetic in literature and education. Arguing that Kleist’s account of the aesthetic is more rigorously faithful to Kant than Schiller’s deployment of the concept in On the Aesthetic Education of Man, de Man locates this “account” in the formal mechanism, literally the form-machine, that manifests itself in the titularly evoked marionettes suspended between the ephebe and the bear of the text. The dancing executed by these puppets solicits the allusion to the correspondence between Körner and Schiller with which the essay opens, correspondence in which dance is held forth as the very image of a society committed to aesthetic education. Elias, in effect, but in reverse. Although passing reference is made to Kierkegaard in the essay, de Man’s own rhetoric suggests a more complicated relation, one that nuances and intensifies how dance and exemplification affect each other.
 
De Man stresses the impossibility the logic of exemplification puts in play by drawing out the paradox of the example. “Is not its [the example’s] particularity, to which it owes the illusion of its intelligibility, necessarily a betrayal of the general truth it is supposed to support and convey?” (Rhetoric 276). Adding that properly literary texts convert this dilemma into their mainsprings, de Man resumes his reading of Kleist by observing that the three narratives that comprise “Über das Marrionettentheater” (those of the ephebe, the puppets, and the bear) are allegories of the “wavering status” (276) of narrative as regards the epistemology of proof. The appeal here to wavering is notable, in fact so notable it suggests that the distinction between proof and narrative is virtually a re-articulation of the distinction between the tragic hero and the knight of faith, with narrative in the position of the tragic hero, that is, of a dancer incapable of imperceptibly striking a pose. As if plowing de Silentio’s entire discussion back under, de Man finds the work of art (whether or not in faith) not in the exemplary grace of the ballet dancer, but in the conspicuous wavering of a text that, though driven by a grammatical machinery, spins relentlessly toward even the most illogical and unpersuasive conclusions. Thus, it is this relentlessness that puts the paradox of exemplification on display, but in the form of the permanently interrupted, almost therefore filmic performance of the text allegorized in the dance moves of the gravity defying puppets.
 
A further twist occurs in “Excuses (Promises),” the essay on Rousseau that closes de Man’s Allegories of Reading. Written almost a decade before his sustained reading of Kleist, this discussion of Über das Marionettentheater comes up in a reading of Rousseau’s excuses. Specifically, de Man appeals to Kleist in order to exemplify what it might mean to talk about an automatic excuse, that is, an excuse that one is driven to offer virtually without reference to the specific circumstances of its solicitation. Anticipating the later reading of Kleist, de Man underscores the “anti-gravity” or dance-like dimension of Rousseau’s text, proposing that the Marion episode of The Confessions is perhaps most fundamentally about the compulsion to confess otherwise known as writing (Allegories 294). His discussion is set within the context of both a general meditation on the rhetorical effect of anacoluthon (the abrupt intrusion of, in de Man’s case, the performative code within a text otherwise dominated by the cognitive [constative] code) and a reading of particular textual passages. As a consequence, anacoluthon––to the extent that it is automatically implied in the breaking off of narrative -appears to designate precisely the sort of interruption represented by a citation or an example. As if to mark and instantly re-mark this, de Man interrupts the presentation of Rousseau’s excuses with the example from Kleist, or to put the matter as succinctly as possible the discussion of Rousseau’s Marion is interrupted, that is, exemplified in the discussion of die Marionette. As this point is not made by the very reader least inclined to miss it, de Man himself, one is invited to assume that the machine-text, the grammar without which no text can exist, is here exemplifying itself in much the same way as it is shown to be at work in Rousseau and later in Kleist. In appealing to Kleist’s meditation on the link between dancing puppets and the automatism of the aesthetic at the very point where the constantive, in fact referential movement of his own text is interrupted by the performative protocols of academic citation (a discursive feature “excused” in the volume’s fitful “Preface” (ix-xi)), de Man deftly pulls at his own, now plainly visible, strings. His text, qua text, starts to dance. It does not, unlike Pinocchio, become a “real boy,” it becomes “de Man.”
 
What urges the association of de Man’s discussion of Kleist with de Silentio is not just the opening gambit regarding autobiography and the traffic between its perfomative and constative dimensions, but the almost immediate appeal de Man makes, once the text-machine is introduced, to the problem of maintaining balance. In commenting on Kleist’s text––after forging the link between commentary and graceful dancing––de Man exposes the pairing therein of mechanism and art, making balance and grace belong more properly to dancing puppets, not to people. Does this not invite us to consider that de Silentio’s Knight is a Kleistian puppet and that the work of art may be more pronounced in faith than he knows? That, in effect, de Silentio has taken de Man’s Kleist in hand.² Perhaps the centrality of dramatic representation (contrasted sharply by de Man from dancing) in both texts is the fraught opening through which an even more perverse, that is, relentless mechanism gains access to the critical operations of de Man’s text. The paradoxical affirmation of both wavering and balance is thus a symptom that would then suggest, would it not, that conditioning the enunciation of de Man’s reading is the very object and condition of faith, but now formulated in accord with Nietzsche’s twilit maxim: “I am afraid we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar” (Twilight 483).
 
If such a reading makes sense then it rebounds upon Fear and Trembling in ways that cast an even colder eye on dancing and leaping. God and grammar are conflicting, thus competing incarnations of the transcendental. They thereby invite us to pluralize the transcendental, indeed they invite us to pluralize the structure of transcendence and immanence, suggesting that dance, if it exemplifies exemplification, that is, if dance is the very paradox of a relation within and between transcendence and immanence, then it is perhaps the figure of the “negative capability” (to invoke Keats) required as one thinks and acts in between two worlds, or, to put it less melodramatically, between one hegemonic order and another. Dance is thus not just a way to embody the imperceptible difference between the Knight of Faith and others, or between faith and belief, but it is a way to imagine, perhaps even practice, the steps to be taken in the space between the world referred to by philosophy and the world called for through philosophical critique. The dancer, as a student of what Elias calls figuration, exemplifies a different way of approaching the experience and execution of the slow and difficult work of social transformation.
 

Three

 
Interest in the example goes back a ways. Aristotle takes it up in Book Two, chapter twenty of The Rhetoric, where he worries over its two chief varieties (133-42). More interesting is Plato’s earlier discussion of the example in The Statesman, where it surfaces in a spectacular meditation on revolution.
 
Recall that wonderful moment in the dialogue where, after recognizing the false start of their reflection on the essence of the statesman, “The Stranger” proposes to “Young Socrates” that they consider the wisdom embedded in a story, in fact, the story that explains the quarrel between, of all people, Atreus and Thyestes (of Poe and later Lacan/Derrida fame). Without elaborating the details, The Stranger moves to situate this story among all those stories that derive from what he calls the “great event” (269b), an event that would appear to link all stories (Lévi-Strauss later called them “myths”) to the shift between autochthony and sexual reproduction, in effect, to the advent of the human. At the heart of this story––and let us not forget that it is recounted in a dialogue on the statesman––stands the concept and the figure of revolution and counter-revolution.
 

There is an era in which God himself assists the universe on its way and guides it by imparting its rotation to it. There is also an era in which he releases his control. He does this when its circuits under his guidance have completed the due limit of the time thereto appointed. Thereafter it begins to revolve in the contrary sense under its own impulse––for it is a living creature and has been endowed with reason by him who framed it in the beginning. . . . Hence it is impossible that it should abide forever free from change, and yet, as far as may be, its movement is uniform, invariable and in one place. Thus it is that it has received from God a rotation in reverse––the least possible variation of its proper motion. To revolve ever in the same sense belongs to none but the lord and the leader of all things that move, and even he cannot move the universe now in the one sense and now in the other––for this would flout eternal decrees.
 

(269d)

Recapitulating our theme of movement that is uniform and invariable, The Stranger concludes by explaining that the universe can execute thousands of revolutions because “its balance [is] so perfect” (270b).

 
This account of spinning and counterspinning is rich indeed. Aside from finally getting the discussion of the statesman off on the right foot, it links this not so subtle discussion of regime change to the vexed theological problem of God’s agency, “his” physical relation to what the French would call the sens of the universe. As if pairing the interventionist God with autochthony and the “human universe” with sexual reproduction, Plato appears to set up de Silentio by drawing close and immediate attention to the perceptibility of the change between this world and the other. Clearly anticipating many of the central themes of Genesis (the description of Eden, the Flood, the autochthonous creation of humans, etc.) Plato, despite the rhetoric of uniformity, balance etc., stresses a “cosmic crisis” that reduces humanity to “a remnant” (270d), one that does not perceive the revolution because its coming into being is the revolution. It is as though when the ballet dancer leaps into her pose, she effects the passage from the world in which belief is hegemonic to one in which faith is. Or, in Plato’s vocabulary, she effects the passage from the world in which the statesman as leader (c. 275) is to be modeled on the shepherd, to the world in which the statesman is to be modeled on the weaver (c. 281).
 
The matter of examplification arises as Young Socrates and The Stranger segue from the story to the model of the weaver. Specifically, the example comes up as a way to clarify precisely in what way a fissure opens between the cosmology referred to in the story and the dialogue itself. Linking the strategy of his presentation to its referent, The Stranger points out that it is difficult to explain important things (like the essence of the statesman, or the emergence of sexual reproduction) without using examples. However, the problem with examples is that in their very accessibility they routinely point back to the wrong world. Here the issue is not the paradoxical particularity of the example stressed by de Man, but rather the move the example effects between the familiar and the strange, a move that always threatens to subject the latter to the former, thereby losing it altogether. What bothers The Stranger about his necessary recourse to the story––and surely it important that he is given these lines––is that its insight is blinding; that is, to the precise degree to which the story frames consideration of the statesman in an illuminating way, it obscures the nature of the difference between the familiar account of this figure and the new philosophically strange one. Both he and Young Socrates are thus faced with the daunting prospect of leaping from one world to the next without knowing whether they will make it. Apparently when dance is the example of the example, it puts this dilemma on display, implicitly thematizing not simply the epistemological problem of the referential relation between philosophical interpretation and the changing world, but the ontological problem of the relation among possible worlds, say the Copernican versus the Ptolemaic, or, closer to home, the capitalist versus the communist. Spinning backwards, it is as if Kleist’s text were saying: recognizing art in the machine is one thing, but acting as if you inhabit the world in which that insight becomes hegemonic is quite another.
 
Enter Nietzsche who, like Kleist, is a sworn enemy of the spirit of gravity and devotee of the dance, and who, like Kierkegaard, is worried about the destiny of philosophy. Although passages like the one that serves as my epigram abound in Nietzsche’s corpus, it is a mistake to confuse them with all that he has to say about dance. In fact, the more satisfying challenge presented by Nietzsche is to think the relation between such passages and those found in the testimony of those who witnessed his infamous demise. In a letter written after his first urgent encounter with his fast faltering friend and former colleague, Franz Overbeck describes Nietzsche’s state thus:
 

That is, growing inordinately excited at the piano, singing loudly and raving, he would utter bits and pieces from the world of ideas in which he has been living, and also in short sentences, in an indescribably muffled tone, sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant and unspeakably horrible things would be audible, about himself as the successor of the dead God, the whole thing punctuated, as it were, on the piano, whereupon more convulsions and outbursts would follow, but as I said, this happened only at few fleeting moments while I was with him; mainly it was utterances about the profession which he had allotted to himself, to be the clown (Hanswurst) of the new eternities, and he the master of expression, was himself quite incapable of rendering the ecstasies of his gaiety except in the most trivial expressions or by frenzied dancing and capering.
 

(Middleton 353)

This account is essentially repeated and thus confirmed by the housekeeper at 6 via Carlo Alberto who testified that she, when drawn more than once to an inexplicable commotion in Nietzsche’s room, peered through his keyhole to see him perching on furniture and dancing naked in the center of his quarters. Liliana Cavani, in Beyond Good and Evil, frames Nietzsche’s dancing differently, but she grasps dexterously its function as passage.

 
Easily set aside as the choreography of his imminent decline, this material calls out to be read in relation to what dancing is doing in and to Nietzsche’s critique of the western world. As if partnered with that notorious Russian émigré Emma Goldman, Nietzsche may well be linking dance and revolution, not by setting up the former as the so-called litmus test of the latter, but as the very way to think about how to, as it were, get from here to there. The frenzied dancing witnessed by Overbeck all too readily indulges our inclination to be somewhat stupefied wallflowers unless we consider that such action may well be an attempt to find one’s footing, as Derrida was later to suggest, the mochlos, in the madly impossible/impassable shift between the world of the last men and the revolutionary world without precedent, as Benjamin was to call it. Instead of a sign of madness, dance becomes the means by which to float an example of how to withstand the becoming real of the critique of philosophy when philosophy itself is spinning out of control, losing its footing in the practice of interpretation. We know, of course, that Nietzsche’s timing was way off, but that does not trip up the project, an insight that can be maintained even as we acknowledge that the man was troubled, indeed deeply troubled in 1890. He may have been a Hanswurst, but he was no fool. Or he was a fool in precisely that non-foolish way that in The History of Madness Foucault sought to ventriloquize. In this regard, one might do well to think carefully about what Nietzsche is saying about madness in the fourteenth aphorism of Daybreak, Part One.
 
Some examples, then, of what dance is doing in Nietzsche’s text. The epigraph has already drawn attention to dance instruction and the writer who can finesse the gulf between the possible and the impossible. Dating from 1878, it establishes that Nietzsche’s interest arises early. The Birth of Tragedy, from 1872, contains several passing references to dance (perhaps most powerfully in Section One’s linkage of dance, Dionysus, and Bakhtinian carnival, the Sacaea), but what most emphatically recommends it to our attention is that in its “director’s cut” (from 1886), Birth of Tragedy includes an “Attempt at Self Criticism,” an addition that strings together the early work and the late work, while throwing leaping, dancing, and laughing into the mix.
 
Toward the end of the “Attempt,” Nietzsche indulges in the practice of self-citation, leading us back to the middle of Part Four in Zarathustra, specifically to the section entitled, “On the Higher Man.” Two things seem to be at work here. One is the recognition that dance has become an important conceptual friend, one that helps Nietzsche think and write. The other is more performative: if Nietzsche senses that “The Attempt” and Part Four of Zarathustra have something to do with each other, this is because both give form to irony or, as it is called in Birth of Tragedy, self-criticism. In effect, what is to be found in Part Four and certainly in “On the Higher Man” is a version of the sentiment uttered by Captain America (Peter Fonda) at the end of Easy Rider: “we blew it, man.” Specifically, in attempting to distinguish between Zarathustra and the last or higher men, Nietzsche draws attention to the politically disabling contradiction of leadership, that the revolution cannot, and will not, be taught, while deriving what authority this insight has from something like revolutionary pedagogy. In a nutshell, Part Four is a meditation on the position of the ironic (pointedly neither traditional or organic, nor universal or specific) intellectual. If he recognizes that such material fits with his backward glance at his own formation, this is because the position of the ironic intellectual structures his relation to everything and everyone with whom he was once confused. Like the seductive power of Socratic ignorance, the distinctly ironic character of Nietzsche’s criticism casts him as a “man interrupted” (as suggested earlier, the subject of permanent parabasis) not, as is often concluded, as Mad Max. In being about leadership this is also about politics. Perhaps surprisingly it is also about dance.
 
“On the Higher Man” returns us immediately to the figure of the tightrope walker (more literally the rope dancer) who appears now epigrammatically suspended between the “all” (alle) and the “none” (keinem). Along the line we are confronted with, among other things, the death of God, the pollution of gestation, and the absolute limits of both scholars and the mob. In section 17 one reads the following:
 

A man’s stride always betrays whether he has found his own way: behold me walking! But whoever approaches his goal dances. And verily, I have not become a statue: I do not yet stand there, stiff, stupid, stony, a column; I love to run swiftly. And though there are swamps and thick melancholy on earth, whoever has light feet runs even over mud and dances as on swept ice.
 
Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high, higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!
 

(Thus Spoke 406)

In Section 20 this reeling call falls back on itself. Gesturing ironically Nietzsche writes, “You higher men, the worst about you is that all of you have not learned to dance as one must dance––dancing away over yourselves!” (407), a formulation that, in context, compares those––somewhere, one would think, between the all and the none––with ears calibrated to hear Zarathustra to the ponderous circus elephants of Section 19, elephants who, if we recall Marx’s discussion of the dancing table, appear to be anti-Hegelian, creatures who, in Nietzsche’s mind, can only stand on their feet. The undecidable punning that operates in Vom höheren Menschen (the higher/hearing men) would appear to restate the irony in advance.

 
In the preceding citation it is impossible to ignore “Kierkegaardian” resonances. Specifically, like de Silentio, Nietzsche directs our attention to the man on the street, indeed to the stroller. He invites us to search there for evidence of the proximity between the pedestrian and his goal. The opposition between the dancer and the statue would appear to re-channel de Silentio’s attentive preoccupation with the leap that immediately and imperceptibly reveals the pose of the Knight of Faith: the one who has reached his/her goal.³ The leap of the dancer, higher and higher, while certainly Kierkegaardian, is also complicated by the emergent inadequacy of the “higher men.” In the course of this section, as I have proposed, certainly one goal appears undermined, namely that of reaching the higher men. Indeed, the very concept of leadership is set aside, but as part of the articulation of this insight dance (and later laughter) works to fuse goal and failure, making this very confusion into what dance achieves or, in another sense, sustains.
 
It seems crucial to stress here that Nietzsche is not exactly using dance as an example. But nor is it simply a figure. When he characterizes Zarathustra as a dancer, dancing only gets less familiar, less particular, and not simply because we have trouble getting any kind of fix on who or what Zarathustra is. Given that exemplification, as I have proposed, seems to have assumed the responsibility within philosophy of articulating its limit, that is, the zone of indistinction between world interpretation and transformation, Nietzsche’s strategy––for lack of a better word––seems to address itself to this very responsibility, a responsibility one might also link to the delicate matter, at once political and choreographic, of leading. At least this is one way to make sense of Nietzsche’s tendency to dance when it comes to the end of the world and, for the sake of parallelism, the end of the book. This last receives provocative treatment in The Gay Science, a text whose two editions (1882 and 1887) actually bookend Zarathustra.
 
Dance appears in aphorism 381 of Part Five as part of a meditation on the hermeneutics of difficulty. Influenced, no doubt, by the attacks on scholars of the sort we have already noted in Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s discussion of difficulty sets in motion an opposition between scholars and dancers. Rehearsing the reception problem flagged in the epigraph from Zarathustra––Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen––Nietzsche opens by insisting that books may just as readily be filled with intentions to communicate as with intentions to confuse and challenge. Not content to thereby permanently interrupt the hermeneutical value of intention, he moves quickly to sing the praises, indeed the philosophical praises, of brevity. Thereon follow the terms of suppleness, lightness, etc. Aware that he writes as a scholar, one whose quickness is slowed by anxiety about ignorance, Nietzsche then counsels philosophical scholars in particular to aspire to the conditions of dance, writing: “I do not know what the spirit of a philosopher might wish more to be than a good dancer” (Gay 346). The pose of the ironic intellectual is again at issue. Specifically, Nietzsche troubles here the very logic of exemplification, that is, the expository concessions necessary to bring philosophy within reach of those seeking to bring either clarity or change (or both) to their lives. The “friends” he targets, ironically understood to lack understanding, are told to train. Train to dance. It is as if dance is the means envisioned for finding one’s footing in the hermeneutically and politically impossible space of being in two places––understanding and misunderstanding, this world and the next––at once.
 
Consistency dictates that Nietzsche’s repudiation of the logic of exemplification not be overstated. It is not that dance doesn’t exemplify, but that it assumes exemplary status in figuring, at the limit of book and world, the very limits of exemplification. With Nietzsche we come to someone who seems to have recognized one of the enabling philosophemes of the West, one that in splitting apart captures deictically the means by which philosophical discourse tries to refer to its own limit from the inside. It is not altogether surprising that the outer edge, the end of Gay Science (and remember this is an end added to an earlier end in strict conformity with the logic of the supplement) culminates in an invocation of the “kingdom of the dance,” followed by song. Although there are several other references to dance in the pages of The Gay Science, they all trace and retrace the edges, the ends of the book and the world. As such they urge that the dancing that consumed Nietzsche’s final days not simply be understood either as the unambiguous sign of the impending disaster, or as the metaphor for the faltering steps of a life exhausted in a collection of books with which it has since become confused. Instead, in the spirit of his own evocation of the link between dreaming and dancing (indeed “ghost dancing,” cf. aphorism 54), the frenzied dancing of the end might provocatively be read as a warding off of the revolutionary awakening for which neither the dreamer nor the philosopher is quite prepared. The point may well be to change the world, but if “change” is not simply a new version of the already anticipated, that is, the same, then the leader rushes in at his or her peril. Nietzsche invites us to consider that dance is the way not to think, but to do leading differently. In this he may have indeed broached the question of politics within and in the wake of the postmodern. After all, Rudolf Pannwitz, one of his early German “followers,” was the first (1912) to use the term Postmodernismus as the means by which to designate the crisis breaking out in and against modern European culture.
 

Four

 
Nietzsche’s apocalyptic tone gives the relation between one world and the next a verticality that Jacques Derrida helps us see through and resist. Wittingly or unwittingly (now, alas, a permanent undecidable) he does so by making dance matter to his own deconstructive embrace of philosophy. This is abundantly clear in the discussion of “sexual difference” with Christie McDonald in their interview titled, “Choreographies.” Perhaps even more pertinent is the set of formulations that take place in Derrida’s lecture, “Mochlos; or, the Conflict of the Faculties,” from 1980. To be sure, dance is not the explicit topic of his address, but leaping and securing one’s footing assuredly are, and by now I hope we recognize that a certain philosophically inflected, if not executed, dance is thus very much at stake.
 
The occasion of Derrida’s remarks is the centenary celebration of the founding of the graduate school at Columbia University. As such, he is concerned to think aloud and at length about the extent to which Kant’s 1798 essay, “The Conflict of the Faculties,” limits and/or enables the thinking of Columbia’s present. If it makes sense to say that this discussion inaugurates the line of inquiry now concluded in “The University without Conditions,” this is because in both texts Derrida is calling us to consider what is at risk in finding new footing for an institution like the university. Aware that a certain steroidal, even disastrous capitalism is itself embarked on the task of reorienting the university, Derrida insists that strategic options remain open for those committed to calling for another change and a different future. The drama of the address derives largely from the delicacy with which Derrida sketches the nature of the abyss on which we are poised. The footwork of the piece is far too fancy to summarize, nor is that the purpose of this last spin. Instead, I plant and turn quickly to the concluding passes of the piece to delineate how they engage what above I have called the verticality of Nietzsche’s tone.
 
The issue that concerns me is the one Derrida introduces under the heading of “orientation.” He asks: “How do we orient ourselves toward the foundation of a new law” (30)? The question is spurred by Derrida’s proposition that our moment is one in which we both have to take a new kind of responsibility for the footing of the university, and acknowledge, even accept, that such a footing is already, as it were, under foot. In other words, the problem of orientation, of our bearings, arises because our moment is a span, it is a zone of indistinction between one footing and another, between one rationale for the founding of the university and another. It is not a question of this world and the next in the sense that Augustine summons under the heading of the City of God. That is verticality plain and simple. Rather, it is a question of, let’s say, the horizontal displacement of absolutely immanent worlds. It is a question of thinking and enduring what political scientists call “transition” as an event, as a rupture characterized not by an absolute break, but by an absolute indistinction brought about by the co-presence of worlds whose political, economic and cultural structures are radically incommensurable. Invoking his titular term, Derrida writes:
 

Traditional law should therefore provide, on its own foundational soil, a support for leaping to another place for founding, or, if you prefer another metaphor to that of the jumper planting a foot before leaping––of “taking the call on one foot” (prenant appel sur un pied) as is said in French––then we might say that the difficulty will consist, as always, in determining the best lever, what the Greeks would call the best mochlos.
 

(30-31)

As though having thereby secured his own footing, Derrida proceeds to perform a “brutal leap” (31) back into the disputed shoes of his quarrel with Meyer Schapiro, a distinguished professor of Art History at Columbia, the point of which is to link the question of orientation to the problem of distinguishing between the left and the right (whether in the realm of shoes or in the realm of politics––for Rancière, of course, they may well be the same thing). That Kant’s engagement with the matter of orientation toggles between sleeping and fighting––with the issue of whether to lead with the left or the right moving in tandem––implicates Schapiro’s insistence upon the orientation of the shoes in a certain martial and therefore rightist art.

 
There is, obviously, a great deal to say about all of this––about academic disputes, about the orientation of the neo-liberal university, about political affiliation and leadership in the wake of the postmodern––but my dance card is now empty. Nonetheless, it is worth observing that Derrida’s discussion, precisely when read in the context of Nietzsche’s dancing, leaping, and leading––and perhaps the sin for which he can never be forgiven (remember here his own account of forgiveness) is that he has spun out the webwork in which the dismissive consensus that has authorized the left to stop reading Nietzsche is hopelessly self-entangled––it is worth observing that this discussion immediately encounters in the problem of changing the world, or stepping from one hegemonic foundation to another, the problem of choreography, of knowing, as it were, with which foot to lead. Nietzsche and before him Kierkegaard certainly have led us to expect this without thereby leading us to the radically horizontal, even aphoristic (taken etymologically) perspective found in Derrida, where faculties/disciplines, texts, and worlds collide. What confronts us here is a still urgent question about the very means by which to figure the activity, both psychical and physical, of stepping beyond the headlong emergence of neo-liberal hegemony. Not to withdraw from it (where to, exactly?), but to lead it elsewhere and survive the passage.
 
My purpose here has been to propose that there is a symptom, a sign, to be read in the recourse taken by philosophy to the example of dance when attempting to coordinate metacriticism of its own referential capacities with revolutionary calls for the transition from, to use Marx’s formulation, interpreting to changing the world. If, as Jacques Lacan writes, the symptom is “a symbol written in the sand of the flesh” (232), what is one to make of the scrawl left by philosophy’s recourse to dance? As with all symptoms, this one too operates on more than one level. The erratic genealogy traced here suggests that as philosophy poses with increasing directness the question of its self-overcoming, the manifest practice of exemplification (of appealing to the local and concrete) increasingly aligns with a practical sublation of philosophy thought to be embodied, even realized, in dance. What enables dance to serve this function is the latent way that the spinning it entails can be shown (the latent is never patent) to have shadowed philosophical reflection in the west for quite some time. Not for nothing does Paul Valéry’s “Dance and the Soul” (from 1921) stage its meditation on philosophy after the war (should it not be more sensuous, less abstract?) in the form of a Socratic dialogue. Between the latent and the manifest is the absent, that is, the structural dislocation that in preventing the latent and the manifest from becoming one and the same provides the symptom with both its structure and its force. Dance figures here as something of an index where all of it that has nothing to do with philosophical reflection points to, indexes, what is missing in philosophy. Nietzsche evokes this by counterposing the book that is studied, read, re-read, underlined, memorized, etc. with the book that simply makes us get up and move. While this overstates the physicality of dance (it is both more and less than that), it does draw pertinent attention to the movement that escapes philosophy, or to the movement that in escaping philosophy figures, as absent, the change interpreting the world is being pressured to give way to. In one sense, this invites us to recognize in dance the symptom of philosophy’s strained relation both to theology and to politics. In another sense, this discloses the philosophical force of dance, a force that in pushing philosophy to its limit, in putting it on edge, points to something more in dance. Paradoxically, this more may precisely be the place from which the vital political energies of the future are approaching us. Indeed, they are closer than we can think.