Tammy Clewell

Florida State University
tclewell@mailer.fsu.edu

 

Ewa Plonowska Ziarek. The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism. Albany: SUNY Press, 1996.

 

In The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism, Ewa Plonowska Ziarek offers a welcome intervention in current debates on postmodern ethics. It has been widely recognized that the possibility of a contemporary ethics crystallizes around the dominating figure poststructuralism has addressed as “the other.” However, the frequent argument has also been made that contemporary thought merely sides with a romantic view of marginalized others to secure for itself a dubious position of innocence. The importance of Ziarek’s book, especially when juxtaposed with critical appraisals attempting to rescue poststructuralism from itself, resides in her elaboration of the special sense of responsibility and obligation emerging not in spite of but within deconstructive criticism.

 

Ziarek also shows how understanding the ethical relevance of poststructuralism entails nothing less than a reconceptualization of both literary modernism and philosophical postmodernity: modernism no longer evaluated in terms of an aesthetic autonomy severed from political concerns; and postmodernity no longer restricted to the Habermasian view that Derrida’s deconstruction exhausts the paradigm of subject-centered reason but fails to move beyond it. For Ziarek the persistence of themes like exhaustion, impasse and skepticism suggests that evaluations of modernist aesthetics and poststructuralism have not taken into account their “rhetoric of failure.” By rhetoric she means the double significance of “failure” which not only negates traditional patterns of thinking, but also affirms an encounter with alterity, what Derrida has called poststructuralism’s “search for the other and the other of language” (10).

 

Ziarek brings together the philosophical texts of Stanley Cavell, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Walter Benjamin, and the literary texts of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, and the Polish modernist Witold Gombrowicz. She argues that the philosophical texts not only engage but also deconstruct skepticism, the negative thesis (roughly beginning with Descartes) claiming the impossibility of all truth and knowledge. For Ziarek the “deconstruction of skepticism” reveals what may at first look like a conflicting distinction between the epistemological negation of truth and the ethical signification of otherness. What allows for a “certain rapprochement” between otherness as both an epistemological and an ethical issue “is precisely [poststructuralism’s] turn to modern aesthetics where the intense confrontation between the claims of alterity and the claims of rationality is perhaps more readable than in philosophical discourse” (8). In her readings of Kafka, Beckett, and Gombrowicz, Ziarek suggests that modernism’s self-referential aesthetic undoes the concept of truth and the representational theory of language. Instead of purifying art, Ziarek’s modernist exemplars show how this loss of meaning produces a desire for discursive community based on a nostalgic notion of authentic speech. Because the texts disclose otherness not as an external threat but as an inherent feature already at work within self and community, modernist aesthetics has the potential to reopen a repressive socio-linguistic totality.

 

The first chapter, “Stanley Cavell and the Economy of Skepticism,” pursues one of the most important questions in the book: can the signification of alterity be contained within the logic that assimilates divergent meanings into a coherent system? (9). By locating a contradiction in Cavell’s revision of skepticism, Ziarek answers no. In The Claim of Reason, Cavell takes issue with the typical reading of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language as a refutation of skepticism. The problem is that both skepticism and its philosophical refutations equally assume that skepticism’s significance is limited to its negation of the possibility for knowledge. Instead of a refutation, Cavell revises skepticism to disclose its special “truth”: that our relationship to the world and others is not a question of knowledge, where knowing is an epistemological issue of certitude, but rather a matter of acknowledgment, a recognition of the other as different and separate from oneself. However, Ziarek also locates a competing emphasis in Cavell’s work which suggests that without any grounding for knowledge, the meaningfulness of language can only rest on a common linguistic practice, on what he calls attunement, the being together of speakers within a discursive community (27).

 

Ziarek convincingly argues that while acknowledgment recognizes the other, attunement undermines that recognition by subsuming alterity to an inherently conservative and nostalgic notion of community. Ziarek never loses sight of the fragility of Cavell’s conception of community, a crucial point since the need to bring clarity to any instance of linguistic confusion converges for Cavell with the very need to discover whether a community of speakers exists in the first place. Nevertheless, because Cavell’s appeal to community is based on an aesthetic issue of “representative speech” (that is, on the procedures of ordinary language philosophy), Ziarek rightly claims that Cavell’s formulation cannot signify different voices unharmonized within community, reducing them to mute and silent subjects (44).

 

Ziarek draws an important parallel between Cavell and Levinas: both reinterpret skepticism as an ethical rather than an epistemological issue. For Levinas the revision of skepticism entails “an indictment of the violence of rationality” (84). Specifically, he takes issue with the tradition of skepticism because this philosophy of the subject exercises power through the unmistakably violent inscription of the other in the subject’s own representational register. Conversely, it is precisely “an absence of a similar critical attention to the operations of power in Cavell’s writings” which, Ziarek seems to imply, contributes to the way Cavell’s revision of skepticism persists in silencing otherness (83).

 

Given Ziarek’s claim, it is regrettable that she does not address Cavell’s account of the “violence of skepticism,” an explicit problem of sexual difference which falls outside the scope of Ziarek’s book. In the “Introduction” to Disowning Knowledge, Cavell reads Othello, like many of Shakespeare’s plays, as a dramatization of the problem of skepticism.¹ Defining the “violence in masculine knowing,” Cavell writes:

 

Othello's problem...is that Desdemona's acceptance... of his ambition strikes him as being possessed, as if he is the woman. This linking of the desire of knowledge for possession, for, let us say, intimacy, links the epistemological problematic as a whole with that of the problematic of property, of ownership as the owning or ratifying of one's identity. (10)

 

Similarly, in “The Uncanniness of the Ordinary,” Cavell admits that his earlier account of King Lear (concluding The Claim of Reason, which is Ziarek’s main focus) neglected the way “the violence of skepticism deepens exactly in [philosophy’s] desperation to correct it”.²I cite these passages not so much to challenge Ziarek’s quarrel with Cavellian community, as, more simply, to suggest that Cavell has increasingly come to see skepticism as a politically charged issue of gender entailing the violent reduction of the female subject.

 

In any case, Ziarek does not draw on Cavell merely to annihilate his formulations. While she clearly rejects Cavell’s notion of the “aesthetic unity of community,” she also admirably locates within his own discussions of metaphor and modernism the undeveloped possibility for a less violent, alternative understanding of aesthetics. Cavell’s description of metaphor suggests language games not dominated by collective agreement. Ziarek therefore suggests that figurative language points to what cannot be unified by the regulative functioning of community (58). Displacing Cavell’s alignment of metaphor with unnaturalness, Ziarek maintains that “metaphor reveals the signification of alterity always already inhabiting linguistic exchange” (59). Similarly, Cavell’s highly ambivalent account of modernism–as both “a slackened conviction in community” and a textuality “haunted” by the other of reason and the subject–enables Ziarek to recover Cavell’s “truth of skepticism.” Rather than subsuming difference, Ziarek offers an “aesthetics of acknowledgment” suggesting a particular responsibility to the other which the ethical subject of discourse bears (63).

 

The second chapter, “The Rhetoric of Failure and Deconstruction,” extends the issue of skepticism and the signification of alterity to an evaluation of Derrida’s deconstructive theory. Ziarek’s clarification of Derridean iteration marks one of the chapter’s highlights: iteration also offers her a viable alternative to both Habermas’ new paradigm of communicative reason based on intersubjectivity and Cavell’s theory of community, both of which claim to move beyond the centrality of the subject but which still locate the source of meaning in subjectivity (95). For Derrida iteration signals the risk of linguistic failure because it describes the subject’s inability to control all possible meanings in his or her everyday speech acts. Ziarek insightfully shows how Derrida generalizes this risk of failure as a fundamental feature of communication. Like skepticism, deconstruction works through the problem of linguistic failure; it does not, however, perpetuate skepticism’s sense of disaster, loss, and catastrophe. Rather, the risk of linguistic failure enables Derrida to trace “how the subject does not constitute the other as the recipient of its message, but, in the Levinasian sense, is exposed to alterity prior to any intention to communicate” (101).

 

Derrida rejects theories of community (like Cavell’s) which are motivated by a nostalgia for authentic speech. Instead, he offers a “community of the question” which Ziarek endorses because it celebrates absence, division, and difference as the conditions of being in common. Derridean community thereby submits the ideal of communion, Ziarek stresses, “to responsibility for the violence and exclusion it entails” (103). Concomitantly, Derrida’s investment in modernist literature, not the valorization of self-conscious discourse over pragmatic everyday usage which many have assumed, also discloses within the excess of language an affirmation of alterity. Derrida’s reading of Ulysses hinges upon the concluding word in Joyce’s text: “yes.” For Derrida, Joyce’s “yes” serves neither a semantic nor naming function, but rather marks the “I” in an address to the other. Ziarek follows Derrida to suggest that “yes” does not unify the text’s disparate elements as much as it signifies that aesthetic unity itself may always be interrupted by “the affirmation in laughter of the Other” (112).

 

The unequivocal strength of The Rhetoric of Failure resides in these early chapters where Ziarek brings a welcome clarity to the way the structure of linguistic exchange and the more conscious intervention of figurative discourse enable a signification of otherness. For Ziarek, Cavell’s (undeveloped) metaphoricity, Derrida’s iterability, and, as she later takes up, Benjamin’s transmissibility all point to a future-oriented and unpredictable opening of possibilities, a politicization of aesthetics which has everything to do with actually embodied others. What is surprising, then, is that even when Ziarek turns her attention to modernist literature, where, as she states, the confrontation between alterity and reason is more apparent than in philosophy, she persists in pitching her discussion of otherness on a level of theoretical abstraction–as precisely that which resists representation. Ziarek thus neglects the opportunity to contend with specific racial, gender, class, and sexual issues which give to the question of the other the kinds of explicit political implications she nonetheless claims for her insights. Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter, to cite perhaps the most well-known example, has explicitly related Derridean iteration–the possibility for change which inheres in every repetition–to the realization of sexual identities not necessarily determined by a heterosexual norm.³ And yet, Ziarek’s “failure” to engage the way others materialize within our predominantly institutionalized forms of community also converges, paradoxically, with the very strength of her book. Her selection of literary texts–Kafka’s parables, Beckett’s How It Is, and (the lesser known) Gombrowicz’s Cosmos–focuses on modernist texts which, because of their obvious aesthetic preoccupations, appear to be most resistant to the politics of subjectivity that she convincingly locates in them.

 

The third chapter, “‘The Beauty of Failure’: Kafka and Benjamin on the Task of Transmission and Translation,” draws an important distinction between the “aestheticization of politics” and the “politicization of aesthetics.” Worth emphasizing here is Ziarek’s mention of Kafka and Benjamin as modernists who confront the problem of fascism. As one of the most extreme examples, fascism aestheticizes politics by appealing to a desire for community grounded on a mythologized sense of natural linguistic commonality. However, Ziarek locates in Benjamin’s theory of translation, as in his account of the mechanical reproduction of art, a powerful “antidote to the modernist nostalgia for the being in common,” and “a safeguard of sorts against the complicity of this nostalgia with fascism” (131). Because the task is not to reproduce the “truth” of the original, Benjamin’s notion of translation and reproduction both suggest “a certain kind of iterability that drastically changes the meaning of the original, its structure, and its relation to history” (129).

 

Similarly, Kafka’s short pieces, including “Couriers,” “My Destination,” and “The Pit of Babel,” variously show the “movement of transmissibility”: that is, a detachment from the primacy of origins and an important sense of obligation which an understanding of textual transmission renders possible. The tendency has been to read Kafka’s parables as sustaining a transcendental signifier that cannot be put in words. However, Ziarek, drawing on Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, argues that what the parables thematize as failure is not the loss of truth existing outside signification, but “the fact that the very idea of truth is one of the effects produced by language” (127). Ziarek’s excellent reading of “The Great Wall of China” contains many of the concerns about community raised throughout the book. The parable begins with the recognition that the wall, a patchwork construction riddled with gaps, cannot secure empire. Suggesting the dissolution of any epistemological grounding, the wall itself perpetuates the threat of external invasion. In Ziarek’s words:

 

[I]t is this imaginary threat of penetration from the outside that provides the most expedient means to neutralize alterity inside the community: to exclude everything that is foreign, contaminating, or unsettling to its linguistic unity. The porous wall consolidates the community of speech in more pervasive ways than the work of any closure would be able to accomplish: it binds the people together by making them define themselves against the threat of the other--the foreigners, who are in turn marked as locusts or wild beasts, that is, as those who are deprived of community, speech and humanity. (148)

 

For Ziarek, “The Great Wall of China” undermines the very desire for “speaking with the same lip.” Although the text suggests a sense of failure, Kafka’s parable also politicizes aesthetics by showing the violent exclusionary politics inherent in discursive communities longing for linguistic immanence.

 

In the fifth chapter, “The Paratactic Prose of Samuel Beckett: How It Is,” Ziarek recasts her earlier discussion of the “obligation of transmission” in terms of Beckett’s “obligation of invention.” Critics have typically read Beckett’s aesthetics as a negative epistemology which undoes traditional categories of subject and object, representation and property. However, Ziarek sides with the affirmative and inventive features of Beckett’s writing. How It Is marks an important shift in Beckett’s work, from a solipsistic and self-reflective subject (as in The Unnameable) to a subject situated in relation to the other. The text’s notorious difficulty stems from the repetition of phrases without logical and semantic connections, a composition in which the predominating figure according to Ziarek is parataxis–a trope of disconnection and interruption (171). By suspending grammar’s capacity to determine the object of representation, Beckett’s paratactic style enables a signification of otherness which Derrida has called an “impossible invention,” impossible because alterity can only be signified in the blanks between the words, not in the words themselves.

 

“How it was I quote before Pim with Pim and after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it…” In Part I’s opening phrase, Ziarek suggests that the anonymous speaker occupies a secondary position in the sense that he does not initiate his speech act, but engages in quotation. Ziarek also traces the temporal lapse, the slippage from the past–“how it was”–to the present–“how it is.” This temporal withdrawal from the past suggests that the signification of the other is precisely what cannot be recovered. It is this “remainder” in Beckett’s writing–the residue which persists after the traditional resources of signification have been erased–that enables the other to emerge despite (or perhaps because of) the limited present possibilities of representation. Beckett’s “impossible invention” thus places the decentered subject in the position of a witness and a scribe in relation to the other, a relationship that reveals a crucial understanding of obligation. As Ziarek point out, Beckett himself locates obligation at the core of his aesthetics, which clearly moves the task of writing beyond desire, knowledge, and pleasure. In “Three Dialogues,” Beckett defines his project as “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (170).

 

The final chapter, “Witold Gombrowicz: Forms of Life as Disfigurement,” does not conclude as much as repeat Ziarek’s major contribution to contemporary ethics: the displacement of subject-centered discourse is not exhausted by skepticism’s account of the impossibility of all truth or meaning; rather, this displacement gestures toward an ethical encounter with the other which the grammar of our forms of life cannot determine or predict in advance. Given Ziarek’s conceptual elaboration, there is bound to be a certain repetitiveness in her book; however, its rigor unquestionably consists of the range of thinkers and writers–against the current picture of many of them as priests of negativity–which Ziarek profitably rereads in terms of their rhetoric of failure.

 

In her reading of Gombrowicz’s last novel Cosmos (published in 1965), Ziarek introduces a modernist text which, like her other exemplars, shows how an encounter with the other exceeds the very structure of its representation in language. Like Gombrowicz’s theory of form, Cosmos dramatizes the limits of interpretive strategies; one based on a rational hermeneutic, the other on a sensual autoeroticism. In a parody of the conventions of both detective and gothic fiction, Cosmos shows how Witold and Fuchs, two young detectives of sorts, set out to solve the mystery of a hanged bird. In their obsessive frenzy to interpret the accumulating events seemingly associated with the bird’s death, they nearly commit a murder in order to complete the formal arrangement of disparate anomalies (219). By withholding this aesthetic unity, Gombrowicz’s novel–in its very dissolution of form–suggests that what is philosophically disturbing is not the failure of interpretation, but rather its very success. It is from this “failure” that Ziarek brilliantly succeeds in elaborating the compelling possibility of a contemporary ethics, challenging our understanding of poststructuralism and modernist aesthetics, and their relationship, in the process.

Notes

 

1. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 1987), 10.

 

2. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago, U of Chicago P, 1988), 173.

 

3. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), passim.