Today’s text does not properly belong to the order of Preposterous Reading, insofar as no evidence exists to suggest either of its tenants knew—or had any relation to the work of—the other. That the pair of works in question share so close a foundation and materialize over the same four-year stretch (1980-84, though hers came first) would appear to be entirely a product of happenstance. Any suggestion otherwise is therefore irresponsible. Doing so despite, this text rebounds to the taxon of preposterousness with a premise so ridiculous, unfounded, and ill-advised that it ought not be believed. It is also (and I know you don’t mind, but I say it anyway) not the text I promised of you. That essay—about verity, Alberti’s mirrors, and epistemologies of black and white in Andriessen and Greenaway—will be out later next month. But today is 40 years to the day since Prometeo (09/25/1984), just shy of 41 since Promethea, and 100 plus some days since Nono’s birth. I thought, perhaps, we’d mark the occasion. With caution, though: playing with texts this way, playing with fire.
h/e/o/a (fugues)
Luigi Nono’s Prometeo and Hèléne Cixous’s The Book of Promethea
I slowly enter my gift to myself, splendor ripped open by the final song that seems to be the first. I enter the writing slowly […] It is a world tangled up in creepers, syllables, woodbine, colors and words—threshold of an ancestral cavern that is the womb of the world and from it I shall be born.
[…]
I call the cave by its name and it begins to live with its miasma. I then fear myself […], I, creature of echoing caverns that I am, and I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.
—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
(incohare)
To begin. (It begins to live.) Not with either specimen at hand—Luigi Nono and Hélène Cixous, cordoned for four decades, will survive in isolated abeyance a moment longer—but with Hölderlin, Hölderlin as he, too, is about to begin, or beginning to begin, rather, with Hölderlin’s instant of the poem’s beginning, there, at the beginning of a poem.
A question of beginnings.
And of poetics.
(Instants, too.)
Two early stanzas from Hölderlin’s “As on a holiday…” [Wie wenn am Feiertage…]:
So now in favorable weather they stand
Whom no mere master teaches, but in
A light embrace, miraculously omnipresent,
Godlike in power and beauty, Nature brings up,
So when she seems to be sleeping at times of the year
Up in the sky or among plants or among peoples,
The poets’ faces likewise are sad,
They seem to be alone, but are always divining,
For divining too she herself is at rest.
But now day breaks! I waited and saw it come,
And what I saw, the Holy be my word.1
For she, she herself, who is older than the ages
And higher than the gods of Orient and Occident,
Nature has now awoken amid the clang of arms,
And from high Aether down to the low abyss,
According to firm law, as once, begotten out of holy Chaos,
Inspiration, the all-creative,
Again feels herself anew.
It is expected that here, now, at this moment, there will follow an interpretation of this (remarkable) text as it pertains to as-yet-undisclosed future theses. Material given, elucidation can (must) now begin in earnest. And yet it cannot so begin. Any attempt to write through Hölderlin necessitates an immediate backsliding to another before, a dawn, a beginning that is ongoing and already precedes this one here: there can be no writing about this poetry that does not recourse inexorably to writing about the writing of poetry itself. This recursive drawing-back to primordial origins is, it would seem, the exigency of the text itself, a text which stops up and reverses any natural flow of exegetical time. Benjamin himself cannot even get a commentary on Hölderlin off the ground before admitting: “an aesthetic commentary on two lyric poems shall be attempted, [but] this intention requires several preliminary remarks on method.” (Benjamin 18) Method itself (meta-hodos, the pursuit of knowledge) is forever at stake in the reading of Hölderlin and, more to the point, always asserts itself preliminarily (prae-+limin, coming before a threshold, the threshold of beginning). To confront Hölderlin—to “now go and greet” him, in Avital Ronnell’s wise phrasing—is to, in the same gesture, mark one’s movement of remove (Geh aber nun) from him and to do so from the very start.
And especially with a poem like this. In a body of work already singularly articulate as regards the relation of poetry to Being, the unfinished and untitled “As on holiday…” “deals,” as Paul de Man puts it, “with the specific tension from which the poetic act is born and, more than any poem, expresses its essence.” (de Man 255) “As on a holiday…” advances an articulation of the essence of the beginning of the Being of the poem—no small matter. But where—or rather when—to begin assessing such a thing? Three times in these two stanzas, the word “now” (jetzt) arrives to drag time into the unstable presence of the present. The final two instances of Jetztzeit are out of joint and non-reducible. Now first signals the instant of revelation—Aber jetzt tagt, But now day breaks, that frightful moment in which poet and Nature (she who holds the poet in an embrace and “brings him up”) flood the other in the light of their mutual becoming (nature after all not being Nature until the poet names her so). This is, perhaps, the poem’s (and this poem’s) most significant “now,” the instant in which the poet becomes the poet. Four lines later, however, one finds another “now,” this one anterior to that earlier breaking of day, the now of the awakening of Nature from her divining rest that must necessarily precede her coming and the poet’s observation of that approach. Two nows, the one after is before—where, then, to begin? Can one admit of any “now,” any present of the poem solid enough from which to command an exegesis?
Hölderlin is idiosyncratically slippery that way. His poems are forever failing to become material objects capable enough of mobilization (aided and abetted by the fraught and open state of his final drafts, themselves intense problems of uncertain meaning requiring the intervention of philology). They remain on the side of philosophy. As the very mediation of immediacy (his own phrase), Hölderlin requires uncommon commentary. One must contort with him, moving backwards in the poem’s order of signification so as to progress an ontological theorizing. Blanchot, even before he has done so, concludes the same: “To question Hölderlin is to question a poetic existence so strong that, once its essence is unveiled, it was able to make itself the proof that it was an impossibility, and to extend itself out into nothing and emptiness, without ceasing to accomplish itself.” (Blanchot 114) One must account for that ceaseless rocking.
And so: while the content of “As on a holiday…” concerns the subject at hand (Prometheus) greatly—the Titan god, the bringer of fire, Prometheus, the striving for a beginning of a poetics of humanity doomed to fail and yet always to be sought, Prometheus, pro+mēthos, foresight, forethought, the character already a mediation of the thought that goes out to meet the dawning of Being—, there is a parallel and perhaps more rewarding exercise in observing instead the motions of critical thought as it folds and unfolds inside the light of Hölderlin’s dawn. More rewarding, for example, to consider not what the poem says but how thought negotiates the saying of such a poem.
Three essays, then, each, to various degrees, concerning “As on a holiday…”: one by Maurice Blanchot in The Work of Fire; one by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight; and, the text to which both are wholly indebted, Martin Heidegger’s centripetal exegesis-cum-pharmakos in Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry2. What is at stake: how written thought negotiates an object forever slipping between the ineffable and the mediate; how written thought thinks Hölderlin.
(meta-hodos)
Circuitous progress is not necessarily indicative of anything extraordinary in Heidegger except Heidegger himself. Circles, rings, and detouring from detours are his way. (No hay caminos, hay que caminar, as someone said.) And while much fuss has been made that his circling probes of Hölderlin serve only to reinforce his own project, it’s worth acknowledging the ways in which Heidegger’s poetic analyses move in circularities sympathetic to the poem at hand and, in doing so, reveal something unique to Hölderlin in their movement.
Heidegger’s analysis works by painstaking variation, with each of the poem’s select terms—Hölderlin, Blanchot notes, built his glittering world from permutations of a highly limited lexicon—transformed by slow accrual into a kind of bottomless transparent container that reveals the entire text beneath it. While it’s true that Heidegger moves more or less laterally through the poem, almost word by word (though skipping, as many have noted, whole passages that do not serve him), the language by which he does so fails to amount. It spirals, substituting each word with a variation of another, until all terms contain the others inside.
Take “Nature.” Heidegger is among the first to note (and it is among the first things he notes) that the metaphysics of “As on a holiday…” hinge on an equivalency of Nature with the essence of Being, a hinge he erects by way of the Greek: “φύσις is an emerging and an arising, a self-opening, which, while rising, at the same time turns back into what has emerged, and so shrouds within itself that which on each occasion gives presence to what is present.” He then rotates through a series of trap-door modulations. First, Nature (φύσις) is “a rising into the open”—Offen, The Open is emergent in his thinking during these years—which is in turn described as “the lighting of that clearing into which anything may enter appearing.” But “the very clearing of the open,” he clarifies, “becomes most purely discernible as the transparency of brightness that lets the ‘light’ pass through” and “thus it is the hearth and the place of light.” Then, he modulates: “the illumination of ‘light’ belongs to the fire; it is the fire” which, he says (another modulation) “is above all brightness and blaze.” He then, having come this far, routes the circuit backwards: “Thus the fire, as the illuminating-blazing ‘light,’ is the open, that which has already come to presence in everything that emerges and goes away within the open.” Heidegger lands at last, in the final pirouette, on “φύσις is what is present in all,” a restatement of his very first definition (the conclusion, too, already reminiscent of Hölderlin’s own Allgegenwärtig, Nature as “miraculously omnipresent”). (Heidegger 79)
The brief retracing of the circuit is the key gesture: Heidegger is emphasizing by demonstration the verticality inherent to his method. The reader is permitted, this first time at least, to see the process in reverse, and to measure the relatively little distance one has come while going far. Distance is a bizarre consequence of this unitarian sensibility: the ratcheting of proximity to a notion of truth afforded by strings of endless re-definition also paradoxically installs distance in the same gesture, such that the thing (in this case “Nature”) becomes distant from itself when returned to itself. Revealed to hold, like “caves and womby vaultages” (Henry V II.iv.133), the whole of the poem’s origin inside it, the word, when gazed upon, now newly distends into a sanctuary for what is present in all.
Heidegger’s method aims at elucidating the baffling fact that in each of Hölderlin’s discrete words, the poem is always already saying all that it will have said. Blanchot, before beginning his own account of Hölderlin, observes the odd culminate result of such a methodology: in place of a conclusion aimed at general summation of the poem’s meaning, he says, Heidegger instead “[finds] again in each instant the passage of the poem’s totality in the shape of which the poem has momentarily settled and paused.” (Blanchot 112) Heidegger knows he cannot zoom out and trace the passage in toto; the Being of the poem is only present in the presence of the instant, of the now, of the word that is Holy.
Blanchot, meanwhile, has other methods. He greets Hölderlin by way of a continuous deferral of exegetical finitude. Blanchot is a doubter, an inquisitor, a prolonger. Even the title of his essay—The “Sacred” Speech of Hölderlin—contains a pair of quotations that throw into suspension any absolute conclusion: what, exactly, is the state of “sacred” here? Is it pure quotation, or else couching an ironic disbelief? His text, likewise, obeys: the essay weaves a deferential quotation practice drawn widely across Hölderlin’s output through an instinctive need to question its conclusions at every turn. It is an essay of continuous suspicion, whereby arrival at what appear to be paradoxical but argumentatively permissible conclusions have their status as fact undermined by the immediate statement with bare-faced dubiety. Recall, however, the fragment of Blanchot’s quoted at the beginning of this essay: “To question Hölderlin,” he wrote, is to reveal poetry making itself through the same motion that unmakes it in the nothingness of impossibility. Questioning is his method.
No less than eight such doubting injunctions crosshatch the essay, each time casting the whole into wider arenas of metaphysics. He begins with simple logistics—“But how can such a call [of Nature to the poet] be made?” (115)—and pulls outward so that, by the seventh, the doubt is on the scale of the very possibility of the poet’s speech: “But how can that be? How can the Sacred, which is ‘unexpressed,’ ‘unknown,’ which is what opens provided only that it is not discovered, which reveals because unrevealed—how can it fall into speech, let itself be alienated into becoming, itself pure interiority, the exteriority of song?” (126) As the responses become necessarily more disperse in return, the essay accumulates a sense of growing shadow as evermore clarity leads into a kind of dark. “Before the poem, the day is the darkest there is.” (Blanchot)
Blanchot’s eighth and final question then comes like lightening before the only section break in the text. Having acknowledged Heidegger’s desire to elide Chaos with silence, he asks: “[W]hy and how can silence let itself be joined to speech?” (126) Then empty space. He follows on with a brief meditation on silence that quickly and astonishingly rotates on its side to find, lurking beneath it, a meditation on nothing less than death. Blanchot’s questions have, effectively, attenuated exegesis to such a point that the very existence of the poet’s living world is erased. “[F]or the poet, death is the poem.[…] Impossible, the reconciliation of the Sacred with speech demanded that the poet’s existence come nearest to nonexistence. That is when, for one moment, it itself seems possible, when, before foundering, it agreed to assert itself in song, come from an already silent body, uttered by a dead voice[.]” (131) That he can strip poetry this far—the absolute death of the poet—and yet be faced with the fact that the poem remains, calling itself forth from that very death as if from the first, is a kind of methodological admittance that poetic beginnings cannot be broached; the mediation in language forever barricades itself between. Blanchot’s modest and passive final line—Such is the “sacred” speech of Hölderlin—concludes nothing. It only casts one back towards what came before.
Both Heidegger’s translucent verticalities that cloud the quality of the surface and Blanchot’s ceaseless interrogations that fail to empty poetry from time belie a fundamental fullness of Hölderlin, a richness that appears not on the surface (“Hölderlin’s themes are poor,” Blanchot admits (114)) but must be drawn out from its depths. There is, then, a kind of necessity to exegesis bordering on divination: he cannot be made to say one thing or another but, when mediated by way of another, will reveal no less than the very essence of Being. Writing through Hölderlin is a partial preservation of an infinite richness.
Of the three, Paul de Man’s commentary is far and away the most levelheaded, though this is principally the result of his writing about Heidegger’s writing about Hölderlin, largely sidestepping any direct conflict with the poet (though on occasion he catches small eddies of equally circuitous tides). Though the essay parades as a sober critique of Heidegger’s philological methodology, de Man’s real thrust is couched in a peripheral meditation on the role and responsibility of literary commentary. “Why does Heidegger need to refer to Hölderlin?” is his more pressing question. Why, in other words, should a thinker so insistent on the dispossession of all anterior philosophy spare this singular writer—especially, as de Man notes, when Rilke would have been the more proximate poet to Heidegger’s own sensibilities? De Man’s answer: Heidegger, just as much as Hölderlin, needs a witness. “The witness is Heidegger’s solution to the problem that has tormented equally poets and thinkers, and even mystics: how to preserve the moment of truth.” It is Heidegger’s project to attempt a capture of Being in language, but doing so requires a presumptuous knowledge of Being that constitutes a bridge too far for Heidegger. And yet, still, “[t]he experience of Being must be sayable; in fact, it is in language that it is preserved. There must be someone, then, of unquestionable purity, who can say that he has traveled this route and seen the flash of illumination. One such person is enough, but there must be one. For then, the truth, which is the presence of the present, has entered the work that is language. Language—Hölderlin’s language—is the immediate presence of Being. And the task that we, who, like Heidegger, cannot speak of Being, inherit, is to preserve this language, to preserve Being.” (252-3)
Which brings de Man around to his real answer: “The preservation of Being is the commentary, the ‘thinking-of’ (an-denken) Hölderlin. That is the method.” (Recall Benjamin, the urgency of method always uncomfortably exposed in reading Hölderlin.) De Man continues: “Hölderlin knows Being immediately and he says it immediately; the commentator need only know how to listen. The work is there, itself a parousia. […] To preserve the work is simply to listen to it, in all passivity, knowing that it is uniquely and absolutely true.” (253)
(ascolta)
This “thinking-of” Hölderlin, which is itself a listening in search of a language situated between the ineffable and mediate; this “thinking-of” Hölderlin which retraces its steps but finds the footprints changed; this “thinking-of” Hölderlin which, by the question’s ceaseless prolongation, arrives at an empty nowhere where poetry is yet beginning; this is perhaps as close a model as can be found for the Prometheus of Nono and Cixous. Such an understanding requires a Heideggarian hinge whereby Hölderlin figures as Prometheus by another name, but that hinge is hardly a new leap; Zweig said as much in his The Struggle with the Daemon, calling Hölderlin “[one] of the Promethean race which is in revolt against customary forms and tends thereby to destroy itself.” (Zweig 246) And Nono, too, went so far as to make the pair explicit, bequeathing the German poet’s “Schicksalslied” from Hyperion with an island of its own in Prometeo (not to mention the Diotima quartet and the host of Hölderlin-adjacent works in his last years). What Hölderlin enacts in the methods of Heidegger and Blanchot, Promet/h/e/o/a draws out of Nono and Cixous. In both cases, the figure serves as site of encounter with absolute truth.
The two works, however, could not be more different; Cixous calculated that they be so. The Book of Promethea is perhaps her most famous endeavor in écriture féminine, a writing against phallocentric language in search of excess and eternity more native to the female body. It is the love-journal (story isn’t quite right) of two women, an account of the impossibility of accounting for the violence of love as it takes place between H (a surrogate but unstable narrator whose “I” is forever eliding with Cixous herself) and Promethea. Split into several parts—a long introduction on the nature of the book followed by two “notebooks” spanning 150 days—the book is an promiscuous and protean receptacle of individual moments, roving with a deep, physical hunger across the history and culture of 15,000 years. (Cixous compares the book to the caves at Lascaux, a series of shadowed and damp internal spaces on which unmediated inscription seems to take up “a magical identification… with an effect in reality.” (Wing xiii)) In global registers, however, the book is governed by a more consistent motion, an ever-present double departure elsewhere native—as Hölderlin has already demonstrated—to the dawning of poetry: “Leave so I can move toward you.” (Cixous 118)
Nono’s Prometeo, meanwhile, is—though much ink has been spilt over the felicity of this word—an opera, and his last. An intense collaboration with the Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari (who assembled the textual fragments that comprise just around half of the work’s libretto and supplied the other half with excerpts from his own Il Gioco di Maestro [The Master’s Game]), the work absconds narrative in favor of a series of “islands,” each a reconfiguration of the notion of history as funneled through the thought-body of Prometheus. Together, this archipelago, delivered entirely in the dark, bears the subtitle “a tragedy of listening.” At nearly two hours, and requiring custom acoustic spaces, extensive electronic manipulation, soloists, chorus, and instrumental specialists, Prometeo is a staggering work with no less staggering a wager: it is an attempt to name, in Heidegger’s words (on Hölderlin), “the space of time that is only once, time of the primordial decision for the essential order of the future history of gods and humanities.” (Heidegger 98)
The restlessness of poetry in the throes of feminine love; a mythic, eternal present culled from the bath of history by two men. These are two vastly different things, yes—but Prometheus, pro+mēthos, foresight, forethought, the poem’s beginning, lies somewhere between. Where? And, more to the point: how?
Twin knots lie nestled in the Cixous/Nono Promet/h/e/o/a, one belong to each. They are nexuses of intensity, sites in which the fraught conjunction of time demanded in an impossible writing of Jetztzeit manifest in eccentric and unstable motility. Two questions, then, meant to draw them out:
1. Does “listen” say anything?
and
2. To what end are there dates?
At initial glance the questions appear to have little in common. The first has to do with a relation between music, text, perception, receptivity, and authorship. It belongs principally to the domain of phenomenology, while the second—a question of specificity, form, truth, legibility, and time—belongs to a hermeneutics of inscription. They answer to vastly different disciplines and obey opposing methods of inquiry—and yet, to ask them of their respective texts is unconceal residues still lingering of the continuous tension between a Promethean imperative to write the absolute present and the inescapable resonance of space and time inherent to duration. Each will be addressed in turn.
1. The command—listen (ascolta)—is the most identifiable textual repetition in Prometeo, recurring seven times across five scenes in Cacciari’s libretto and repeated extra-judiciously by Nono in the score. It is a rare word which foregrounds its semantic content in a work of low textual perceptivity; one cannot fail to notice its articulation, even when not sung in a manner meant to draw explicit attention to its meaning. Most often set as three discrete entrances of varying permutations of the chorus, each given a syllable of the word, the music disperses the potential for any extraneous vocal or affective signification. Likewise, it is not followed by an implicit colon; there is no listen to, which would superimpose a narrative authority onto the voices that they do not here possess. Failing to complete an arc of signification, “listen,” then, despite its perception, does not ever enter into the order of functional speech.
What, then, is it doing?
In a short essay on voice and text (edited by Nono) that Cacciari sketched in the years preceding Prometeo, the future Mayor of Venice asserted that “there is no clarity or intelligibility without defining limits, and the particular text becomes the symbol of the presence of limits that permit understanding and clarity.” (Cacciari 51) That remains true here, only what is clarified is clarity itself. The perception of the utterance of “listen” enacts an intense dilation of the whole in the instant, the breaking of day that reveals only that day is breaking, “the shining light,” to borrow Hölderlin, that “open[s] to the opened glance.” (“To Landauer”) Hearing “listen,” one hears oneself hearing the command to do so, one is drawn to attend to the drawing to attention. As with Heidegger’s spirals, it is not semantics that count here: “listen” is a transparency that reveals, even in the dark of death, the continuous beginning of the Being of the work.
“A symbol of the presence of limits,” Cacciari calls the word in music. “Listen” is indeed a limit but not, crucially, a limit of Prometeo, which is theoretically and historically boundless. Rather, “listen” unconceals the inevitable failure and limit of receiving ears for whom any understanding of the word as word, given as it is in suspended time, requires recourse to memory where it can be reconstructed, thereby losing in the same gesture the attention to the absolute present which the word as word demands.
2. Little comment has been made on the instability of Cixous’s calendar. Upon entering Promethea’s notebooks proper, dates, or at least general indications of the passing of time, begin gradually to appear. At times they lingers as a demarcation above and astride the text, shrouded in in italicized parentheses—“(June 1. The notebook of Metamorphosis)” (138)—only to relocate a few pages later as one of many lines, “12/6” (142) and “Tuesday’s transfiguration:” (144) and “In the car at night, Constantinople, Saturday.” (146). Elsewhere they proceed only by sequence: “(The sixtieth day already)” (124), only to lose the parentheses a while later—“Day 132. Three weeks of wind and cold” (166)—and, at last, the italics too: “The hundred and fiftieth day already.” (187) Meanwhile everywhere, at the level of the text, are buried reiterative inscriptions of “today,” “now,” “this page,” “the last day,” “here.”
The shifting syntactic and typographic registers through which temporal concretization is in constant flight signify a peril of the ontology of the book itself. At once a journal—marked by time—of love’s changing ecstasies and yet a promise—to the Other—to capture the singularity of the moment, the book-as-object cannot hold fast to any registration of the clock. At times, a violent day’s irreducibility weighs heavily on the writing, as in the attempted recounting of their first fight which desperately craves the safety of a past from which to do so (while remaining, of course, bound to the present): “Today for the first time a present is completely beyond me. I need to wait for a bit of the past to take form so I will be able to approach this night…” (93) Elsewhere, it tries to think ahead of itself, only to slide back exhausted: “It’s not tomorrow that I want you. It was today, this very day, this very past day. […] I am dead for the tomorrows. Tomorrow I am not yet born… (But tomorrow do I already love you?)” (165) The book, the pages of paper on which the present is being written, are caught in the elastic tension of a refusal to betray the passing of time while holding fast to their form, an inscription of a phenomenon of duration.
Derrida—the Derrida with whom Hèléne Cixous shared the closest of bonds—is called to testify. Writing on Celan, he said: “This mark that one calls a date must nonetheless be marked off, in a singular fashion, detached from the very thing that it dates, and must, in this demarcation, in this very deportation, become readable, readable as a date, precisely, by wresting itself or subtracting itself from itself, from its immediate adherence, from the here and now, by freeing itself from what it nonetheless remains, a date. It is necessary that in the date the unrepeatable […] repeat itself, effacing in itself the irreducible singularity that it denotes.” (Derrida 15)
Already the echoes of Hölderlin, of Blanchot’s Hölderlin in particular, and a latent origin of a poetics rises to the fore. These untenable—and, more often than not, unremarkable (they do very little to interrupt the text and provide no scaffolding for the reading experience)—demarcations of time’s ongoingness store without resolution the necessity of what Derrida calls the date’s effacement. The mutability of its status as text speaks to a subtraction of self from self, a defacement of origin that calls to mind Blanchot’s command that “whoever wants to be a mediator must first be torn apart.” (Blanchot 130) Time—the singularity of occurrence indicated by the inscription of a date—must undo itself in the very gesture of its appearance such that the true instant (love, poetry, Nature) may begin to appear. The calendar appears to destroy itself.
1. and 2.
It might be said that both of these strange torn thresholds contain the strongest traces of Promethean thought. They are the marks of violence wrought by forethought, their ceaseless motion an index of that poetry. The question remains, however, as to how to think them in the same space. Cixous, gratefully, has built that hinge herself:
“The thing I would like to do: record Promethea’s right-now, its mystery, the drastic nature of its pure violence.
[…]
—A need to be as present as possible in the present. […]
And immediately after the present, right now, when the present still is there, has just left, has just gone into the next room, and this room still smells of juniper, it is still warm and echoing softly, and in the air there are still transparent echoes of its colors: fire and honey, honeyfire.
—Promethea is the astounding Present given to me by God. I am astounded. I accept.
Just before forgetting, slightly before memory, yes, before the past begins to pick up what is left over,
I stop everything. I stop circulation, I hold my blood.
I lean my heart against the door of my breast.
And I listen.”
Like de Man’s Heidegger, Cixous, in the preservation of the witness of Being, forgoes her eyes for ears. The present of presence is not read or seen or even written, it is heard absolutely. She continues:
“I want to know the present as presently as possible.
[…]
I sing Necessity: the possibility almost impossibility of this gesture. It began with no plans, with no future, without my knowing it was beginning, what, something, the book of burning fires, it began with intolerable heart pains.”
To begin: necessity of singing that begins without the knowledge of beginning.
Those pains, those intolerable heart pains—“tragedy of listening.”
(echo)
The space of reverberation is the body. (Barthes 201)
(Take Barthes at his word, and accept the extreme consequences for Nono.)
“It is the inaudible or the unheard that slowly or not does not fill the space, but discovers it, reveals it. And it causes one suddenly, inadvertently, to be inside the sound, that is, not to start to perceive it, but to feel oneself part of the space, resonating.” (Nono 245)
(This body that reverberates inside this body)
[What else is Renzo Piano’s custom wooden basin, all black and cavernous, if not history’s womb?]
“The question driving me mad is: how can one manage to be simultaneously inside and outside?” (16)
(Cixous now; and:)
“This book is entirely internal” (14)
“I want to talk about the inside from inside, I do not want to leave it” (18)
“(The book that follows is inside her. It is maybe even her womb itself.)” (9)
(Everything echoes here)
This is reverberation: the zealous practice of a perfect reception: contrary to the analyst (and with reason), far from “floating” while the other speaks, I listen completely, in a state of total consciousness: I cannot keep from hearing everything, and it is the purity of this reception which is painful to me: who can tolerate [intolerable heart] without pain a meaning that is complex and yet purified of any “noise” or interference? Reverberation makes reception into an intelligible din, and the lover into a monstrous receiver, reduced to an enormous auditive organ—as if listening itself were to become a state of utterance: in me, it is the ear which speaks. (Barthes 202)
(Nono’s listener/Cixous’s lover, monstrous receiver)
“Very hard to listen, in silence, to others, to the other.” (Nono 246)
(The other, the poem, reverberant even already in the silence.
—choked back, now, rebound, to the now of beginnings, ever still:)
I suffocate because I am word and also its echo.
References:
Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
Benjamin, Walter. “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.” Translated by Stanley Corngold. In Selected Writings: Volume 1, 1913-1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 18-36. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.
Blanchot, Maurice. “The ’Sacred’ Speech of Hölderlin.” In The Work of Fire, translated by Charlotte Mandell, 111-131. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Cacciari, Massimo. “Music, Voice, Text.” In Posthumous People: Vienna at the Turning Point, translated by Roger Friedman, 47-56. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Cixous, Hèléne. The Book of Promethea. Translated by Betsy Wing. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
de Man, Paul. “Heidegger’s Exegeses of Hölderlin.” In Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 246-266. 2nd ed., rev. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
Derrida, Jacques. Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan. Edited by Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.
Heidegger, Martin. “As when on a holiday….” In Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, translated by Keith Hoeller, 68-99. New York: Humanity Books, 2000.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. “As on a holiday…” Translated by Michael Hamburger. In Hyperion and Selected Poems, edited by Eric L. Santer, 192-197. New York: Continuum, 1990.
Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler. New York: New Directions Books, 2012.
Nono, Luigi. “Towards Prometeo.” In Nostalgia for the Future: Luigi Nono’s Selected Writings and Interviews, edited by Angela Ida de Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, 235-246. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018.
Ronell, Avital. “On the Misery of Theory without Poetry: Heidegger’s Reading of Hölderlin’s ‘Andenken.’” PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 120, no. 1 (2005): 16–32.
Wing, Betsy. “A Translator’s Imaginary Choices.” In The Book of Promethea, translated by Betsy Wing, v-xiv. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.
Zweig, Stefan. The Struggle with the Daimon. In Master Builders: A Typology of the Spirit, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. New York: The Viking Press, 1939.
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Housekeeping:
—My interview with Clara Iannotta, about her appointment at the Festival d’Automne in Paris (which draws on a previous text housed here), is now available in VAN.
—October 4th and 5th, I’ll be in New York, offering a paper on Ti McCormack, Hervé Guibert, and non-dialectical forms of infection at NYU’s Sounds of De/Composition conference. That text will be available here the following week. Please do reach out if you’re in town.
—This essay stands in place of another, planned for next year, on Nono and his proper Preposterous collaborator Massimo Cacciari. We have some time and lots planned between now and then, but know I have not overlooked their generative potential in the meantime.
This line slightly altered from Hamburger’s version, following a literal translation that prevents confusion in the commentaries by retaining the “Holy.”
My copy of the Heidegger is published by Humanity Books, listed on the cover as “an imprint of Prometheus Books.”