Derrida, Cixous, and the Impostor
After all, a little charlatanism is always permitted to genius, and in fact is not ill-suited to it.
—Baudelaire, “La Genèse d’un poème”
Genèses, généalogies, genres et le génie (Geneses, genealogies, genres and genius), one of Derrida’s last books, is the text of a lecture given in 2003 to mark the gift made by Hélène Cixous of her archive to the Bibliothèque nationale de France. One year after the publication of the third volume of Kristeva’s Le Génie féminin, genius and gender are once again associated in relation to an individual figure—in this case, the writer Hélène Cixous. As Derrida’s compound title indicates, genius is not the sole topic of his discussion, but the occasion is the pretext for a thoroughgoing reevaluation of the notion as exemplified by Cixous herself and, in particular, as implied by the narrative of her past affair with an American boyfriend and self-proclaimed genius recalled in her recent Manhattan (2002).
Genius, named last in Derrida’s title, is the topic on which his book begins, and it is addressed in the form of a series of questions:
What is a genius?
What of genius?
What of this common noun which claims to name what is least common in the world?1
The questions continue, and one in particular returns at regular intervals, directed at genius itself: “Genius, who are you?” (Génie, qui es-tu?), which is also punningly read as a recognition of the impossibility of any answer: “génie qui es tu”—“genius who are silenced.” Genius, says Derrida, does not lend itself to discussion in the form of statements that assert “Genius is….” Questions addressed to genius—even in the likely absence of any reply—are preferable to statements about genius. The issue of statements by genius is another matter, and I shall return to it presently.
The refusal of constative assertion is due in part to the nature of genius itself, but also to the fact that there is something bothersome about the very notion: “The name ‘genius,’ as we know only too well, is an embarrassment…. And has been for a long time.” But rather than repudiate it outright, as Barthes or Sartre had done, Derrida is selective in his refusal of the aspects of genius that might otherwise make it inadmissible as a concept. He rejects only what he calls “an obscurantist abdication before genes, … a concession to the genetics of ingenium or, worse still … a creationist innatism.” Whether it be the “biologizing naturalism” of the genetic view, or the “theology of ecstatic inspiration” that underwrites “the intoxication … of writing under dictation,” these received notions of genius get in the way of Derrida’s questions because, as Sartre and Barthes had already pointed out, they merely encourage “mute adoration before the ineffable.”2 The ineffable is very different from the silence of the genius apostrophized by Derrida in an enquiry that reconsiders a number of the assumptions previously associated with genius and ends up giving the concept a new lease of life.
The aim is to “demonstrate in what ways the concept of genius, if indeed it is a concept, must be removed both from its common meaning and from its place, however obvious and plausible, in the homogeneous, homogenetic, genetic, generational and generic series.” The genealogies engendered by the early etymological sense of genius are now antithetical to any validity the concept may have in the future. Derrida’s genius is neither genetic nor genealogical, and its gender is not necessarily male. Past conceptions of genius have treated it in the singular and attributed it to men: “The geniuses of a woman … have never been recognized in the feminine.” The gender of genius is ungrammatically feminized in Derrida’s French when he rewrites it as “une génie” and ascribes it to Cixous: “More than one genius [une génie] in one.”3
As this formulation indicates, genius is also viewed as manifold, and not as a single identifying characteristic of the kind that made it possible to talk about le génie de la langue française. This national linguistic genius is another component of the inherited conceptual baggage that comes in for reassessment as Derrida pits Cixous’s distinctive literary idiom against the genius of the French language in the form of an encounter between two different kinds of linguistic genius. The “genius of the language” conventionally refers to “its grammatical, lexical or semantic riches, the infinite potentiality of its specific resources,” and, as Rivarol argued, its riches are writ large in the works of the writers of genius like Pascal or Boileau who pay homage to it by displaying its essential characteristics. The genius of Cixous’s language does not subscribe to such continuities. Its relation to French is ambivalent, “both a responsible inheritor and yet a violent, unpredictable, eruptive, heteronomous, severing,” and its effect is to open the eyes of the French language to an unconscious and previously unacknowledged genius contained within it.4
The notion of genius as innate endowment also comes under scrutiny when Derrida claims that “[a] genius that was a natural gift would not be a genius.” To describe genius as a gift would be to assimilate it into an economy of exchange, whereby gifts are annulled through the presupposition of some form of return—whether reciprocation in kind, gratitude, or simple recognition. If the work of genius is given and received by a donor and a recipient who each know what is given, then, by being translated into terms of contract and symbolic value, it too ceases to be a gift. The gift of genius, as Derrida conceives it, is given without knowledge of its content: “Genius gives without knowing.” And by the same token, “those who receive from it (whether individual or institutional subjects) do not and must not know what they are receiving, which is always something more, always something other, and older and more unpredictably new, more monstrously unheard of and inexhaustible, more inappropriable than anything we can consciously picture it as being.”5 Derrida’s is an even more radical reading of the originality of genius than that of Kant for whom genius entailed the ignorance on the part of genius itself as to its own procedures, but not the ignorance of the beholders on whom its recognition depended.
This rethinking of genius as a gift is part of Derrida’s rethinking of its originality, though he does not use the word. The novelty so often celebrated in genius, its capacity to dispense with convention and break the mold, is taken to the extreme of an absolute singularity that is articulated as event rather than as entity. The events created by the singularity of genius are without precedent and resist replication: “the quality of genius consists precisely in bringing about, in giving rise to, giving tout court, giving birth to the work as event, by breaking paradoxically with all genealogy, all genesis and all genres.”6 This makes genius the odd one out in the words listed in Derrida’s title: not to be explained by reference to genealogies or geneses, genius is resistant to generic assimilation or gender assignment (genre having both these senses in French), and singular as distinct from their plurals. It is for this reason that it does not lend itself to constative definitions, for to say “genius is this or that” is to imply that genius is repeatable, that it can be the same thing in more than one instance, and so to negate its essential singularity.
Singularity was also the core feature of Kristeva’s account of genius, but hers was the singularity achieved by human subjects as a necessary condition for living in the modern world. Derrida’s singularity of genius as event has more to do with literature than with living: “the quality of genius in the happening of genius [événements géniaux] is bound up with Literature and its All-powerful-other.” Literature here has a capital L, and the formula “All-powerful-other” is taken from Cixous, who declares repeatedly in Manhattan, “I loved Literature above all else.”7 Once again, literature provides the horizon for the evaluation of genius, as it did for Barthes and Sartre (negatively) or for Jouve and Blanchot (positively), and indeed for Kristeva in the prominence given to Colette, as if each provided a necessary measure for the other in some implicit resistance to the categorical, quantitative definitions of genius that were being pursued elsewhere.
COUNTERFEIT GENIUS
It is, however, Literature with a capital L that allows the impostor to enter the frame. The young Hélène Cixous is sitting on one side of a desk in the Beinecke Library in Yale reading Homer, Shakespeare, and Joyce while a young American sits across from her reading Milton. Cixous is tracing the figure of Ulysses, a character she both fears and admires, but whose “tricks” she dislikes, through three national literatures. The literature to which each of the two readers is devoted becomes the bond between them, and Cixous soon falls for the young man whose fraudulent claim to be ill and dying lends a “supernatural theatricality” to this “false reality.” Cixous’s love of literature translates into a fear of betraying “a powerful-other,” so that, despite her distaste for Ulysses’s trickery, she falls for a man who calls himself Gregor (like the character in Kafka’s Metamorphosis), whose first letter to her turns out to have been taken word for word from the Letters to Milena, whose imprecations against the world are actually a poem by Mandelstam, and whose supposedly mortal illness is borrowed directly from Kafka and a host of other tubercular writers. He claims to be writing a novel that has been accepted by Knopf and is set to change the course of American literature. He intimates that he is friends with the conductor Klemperer and an associate of the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Kusch. More theatrically—and, a skeptic might say, more suspiciously—he also sports an eye patch, symptomatically brings a faux crocodile suitcase to his assignation with Cixous in a hotel bedroom, and bears a scar down his chest that may not actually exist. In sum, “Gregor’s identity as a dying man was just temporary and cobbled together, a fabulous montage of quotations and references borrowed from world literature, classical, and extremely modern literature.”8 However, Cixous is seduced by this ragbag of literary allusion and allows herself to believe that it is proof that Gregor is the genius he gives himself out to be.
Fake genius, however, is not as easily distinguished from the real thing, as Cixous’s mother (or common sense) might have one believe. The six-thousand-franc phone bill that Gregor inveigles Cixous into running up at her mother’s expense contributes to the conviction with which Mme Cixous accuses her daughter of sheer gullibility: “You cannot distinguish between a genius and a liar. Whereas I didn’t even read the letters from the suspect genius.” But nearly half a century on from the affair, Cixous is still not willing to concede the point, and instead persists in seeing a kind of genius in Gregor, even if it is not the one he himself laid claim to:
He wanted to be Kafka and so to escape Gregor…. Or rather he would have liked a certain Kafka to be him, Gregor. He would have liked to be a great writer of fables and allegories I say and I have always thought that he almost was, I have always been able to think that he had genius I say and after the end of the affair I was still able to think that by some misfortune his genius was misplaced and he himself hadn’t realized it while he wanted to be one at all costs he had taken himself for someone else entirely to the utter ruin of his own identities.
If Gregor is almost a genius, it is not despite his imposture, but because of it. Imposture was the very substance of the genius that he never quite had: “If he had written down the story he made up day after day in order to pass himself off as a real writer, perhaps he would have been a real writer.”9 The story he made up about himself might have been a work of genius, if it had been carried off with greater conviction. However, “[t]he one thing Gregor lacked was his own willingness to be taken in by it: What a mistake, but it was ineluctable, not to have believed in himself (who, I don’t know) in the presence of a self who was of equal worth to another and to have become a thief of souls. A genius thief. You can tell genius from what it steals. From the fact that it steals.” The identity of true genius is stolen from others. But it requires the right kind of credulity to fly (the French word voler means both “to steal” and “to fly”), and Cixous recognizes her own part in creating the impostor in place of the genius: “this character would never have existed if I hadn’t believed him to my core—cruel credulity.” She sees in retrospect that her mistake was to have given credence to the genius Gregor pretended to be rather than to the very fact of pretending: “I loved him for his counterfeit genius he would like to have been loved for his other genius, the genius for counterfeiting.”10 The genius of the impostor consists precisely in his imposture, and it is the presence of such imposture that brings genius back on the agenda for consideration.
COUNTERFEITING GENIUS
There is something characteristically twentieth century about this conjunction of genius and fraudulence. Or rather between genius and the possibility of fraud. Sartre may have denounced genius as a form of imposture, but elsewhere genius frequently appears as a kind of bravado where the would-be genius declares—in the first person—her or his claim to genius in a manner that suggests a measure of provocation, and introduces a margin of potential fakery along with the assertion of genius itself. There are some fine examples of this, all of which, as it happens, come from figures who made France their adoptive home or had close associations with it. The first, Gertrude Stein, complicates the first-person attribution, since the assertion of her genius is ostensibly attributed to Alice B. Toklas in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (published in 1933), whose author is nonetheless clearly identified on the cover page as Gertrude Stein herself. Early on in the text she has Alice B. announce:
I may say that only three times in my life have I met a genius and each time a bell within me rang and I was not mistaken, and I may say in each case it was before there was any general recognition of the quality of genius in them. The three geniuses of whom I wish to speak are Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and Alfred Whitehead. I have met many important people, I have met several great people but I have only known three first class geniuses and in each case on sight within me something rang.11
Unlike Cixous’s Gregor, Gertrude Stein appears to be entirely convinced of her own genius, and she makes sure that Alice B. distinguishes it from mere greatness or importance.
However, the company she places herself in does not completely exclude a margin for potential imposture. Picasso is one of the most commonly cited examples of genius in the twentieth century, being the iconic artistic genius to complement the equally iconic mathematical genius of Einstein. But this image of creative genius brings with it the suspicion of charlatanism, which is what Braque implied when he declared that “Picasso used to be a great painter. Now he is just a genius,” as if genius equated with a form of showmanship or posturing that had nothing to do with great art.12 The genius in this view is someone who merely performs the role of genius, and the performance becomes a substitute for the reality.
A similar charge is provocatively invited by Salvador Dali in his Diary of a Genius, where, not content with the claim made in the book’s title, Dali begins with the declaration—in the first person—that he is “the genius of the greatest spiritual order of our day, a true modern genius.” He promises to show through his own example that “the daily life of a genius, his sleep, his digestion [that great nineteenth-century index of mental superiority], his ecstasies, his nails, his colds, his blood, his life and death are essentially different from those of the rest of mankind.” This record allegedly makes his book “the first diary by a genius,” who also, as it happens, had the “unique fortune” to be married to “the genius Gala.”13
And yet it is also possible to see the impersonation of genius as an index of the very thing it seems merely to simulate. The imposture that Socrates accuses Ion of is based on a fraudulent claim to knowledge—about chariot racing or medicine or warfare—that the rhapsode passes off as his own, as well as on Ion’s lack of knowledge about the workings of the poetry he recites or the inspiration on which it draws. Like Dali or Gertrude Stein, Ion is boastfully confident about his own talent: “I reckon I can talk on Homer better than anybody. [No one else] who has ever lived has had so many fine thoughts to deliver about Homer as I.”14 Nevertheless, the thrust of Socrates’s accusation is concerned less with Ion’s presumptuous assertion of his abilities than with the unjustified claim that, should the need ever arise, his knowledge of the way generals speak would be enough for him to actually become a general. Ion is a fraudulent general, not a fraudulent rhapsode.
But this is to talk as if these distinctions were clear, whereas what Cixous admires is the undecidability of the fraud perpetrated by Gregor, particularly on the matter of his scar—a scar of a rather different kind from the one that identifies Ulysses as the person he claims to be. On reflection, Cixous cannot say whether the scar on Gregor’s chest really existed, whether it was a fake, or whether it simply was not there, and if the latter, whether Gregor had willed her to see something where there was nothing, or whether he wanted her to acknowledge that the scar was pure fabrication. So many undecidables, but their undecidability is the point: “If he devised the scenario, the Scar is a stroke of genius, genius as undecidability, undecidably genius: Should I have ‘not seen it’? Or ‘seen’ it? Seen that it was ‘fake.’ … Perhaps he was holding it out to me with a begging hand to be read, like a confession?”15 Poised on a knife edge between real and fake, the scar positions genius itself on an equally undecidable divide between genuine and fraudulent. And, in a further step, makes it synonymous with that very undecidability.
It is this undecidable character of genius that Derrida homes in on in his reading of Cixous’s Manhattan, and it becomes the core of his rethinking of the concept. Gregor’s status as “the ideal type of counterfeit and counterfeiting genius” points to “a vertiginous truth,” the “essence of the truest genius: namely the ever present risk of an undecidable counterfeiting.” He suggests that the discovery of Gregor’s imposture might have been enough for Cixous to lose her faith in the “All-powerful-other” of the Literature out of which Gregor fabricated his phony identity, and thanks to which she allowed herself to be taken in. But, in Derrida’s discussion, literature itself has the same undecidability as genius, for it is the very essence of literature to strip readers of the capacity to distinguish between reality and fiction. The undecidability extends still further than the relation between fiction and reality, for it concerns literature in general. It becomes the mark of literature in Derrida’s argument to make the very distinction between literature and nonliterature one that it is within the power of literature itself to erode: “The All-powerful-other deprives us, under the name of literature, of the right or the power to decide between literature and non-literature, between fiction and documentary, and this is a situation without equivalent in the world and in the history of humanity.”16 Just as genius hovers between itself and its counterfeiting, so Literature is the hesitation both between fiction and nonfiction, and between itself and its not-self—literature and nonliterature.
Rethinking genius for both Cixous and Derrida goes via imposture. Or, as Derrida himself says, “counterfeit and counterfeiting genius is not worst placed to give us the pretext for thinking genius [lit. to give us genius to think].” At the start of the twenty-first century, the “untenable word” of genius is placed back on the agenda for renewed reflection: dismantled and reconstituted on the basis of the very feature—imposture—that had been most responsible for bringing the notion into disrepute.17 A gift that neither donor nor recipient may be aware of, an event that may be registered but that has no identifiable content, an equivocation that simultaneously affirms its importance and casts its existence into doubt.
For theory, literature remains the horizon against which genius loses or acquires its worth. And where that worth is affirmed, it is in a mode that resists the quantifications that seemed so often to lead to the undoing of genius. All this suggests that genius fares best as the focus of open-ended enquiry—as Blanchot’s “enigma,” as the pretext for Jouve’s “wonderment” or Kristeva’s “admiration,” or as a reflection, like that of Cixous or Derrida—which does everything except turn it into an object of knowledge. It is in this form that genius remains “good to think with.”