Hugh J. Silverman
. . . what interests us here is neither the subject nor the author. Nor is it the “other”—whatever this may come to mean—of the subject or the author. Rather (and to limit ourselves for the time being to the question of the subject alone), what interests us is what is also at stake in the subject, while remaining absolutely irreducible to any subjectivity (that is, to any objectivity); that which, in the subject, deserts (has always already deserted) the subject itself and which, prior to any “self-possession” (and in a mode other than that of dispossession), is the dissolution, the defeat of the subject in the subject or as the subject: the (de)constitution of the subject or the “loss” of the subject—if indeed one can think of the loss of what one had never had, a kind of “originary” and “constitutive” loss (of “self”). (Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, The Subject of Philosophy)1
Near the beginning of Nietzsche’s Götzen-Dämmerung [Twilight of the Idols], written in September 1888, one finds the last of six theses concerning the question “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became a Fable” [Wie die “Wahre Welt” endlich zur Fabel Wurde]:
Die wahre Welt haben wir abgeschafft: welche Welt blieb übrig? die scheinbare vielleicht? . . . Aber nein! mit der wahren Welt haben wir auch die scheinbare abgeschafft! (Mittag; Augenblick des kürzesten Schattens; Ende des längsten Irrtums; Höhepunkt der Menschheit; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)
The true world—we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? but no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)2
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe cites this very same sixth thesis in his own essay “The Fable (Philosophy and Literature)” first published in French in 1970 and collected in Le Sujet de la philosophie (1979) and later in the English version, The Subject of Philosophy (1993). Suppose now that—and this will be my thesis here—Zarathustra’s moment were also the prefigured moment of postmodernism announced decades before its time. In a moment, according to Zarathustra’s pronouncement, the true world would be turned into an apparent one and the apparent one would also be abolished. The result would be that neither the true world nor the apparent one would prevail. At this precise moment, this noontime, this moment of what in Thus Spoke Zarathustra3 had been called the moment of the eternal return, both the real world and the apparent one would be simultaneously abolished. What remains would be only remains: the remains of the whole history of metaphysics. Also what remains would be the postmodern world—announced by Nietzsche more than one hundred years ago. And equally critical would be the status of the subject which had become—somewhere at the time of the Enlightenment—a reality to be reckoned with. In the postmodern world, the modern subject will also have become a fable, a fiction—neither real nor apparent . . . incipit (here begins) postmodernism.
The Truth of the Modern Subject
The modern subject became a reality in the discourses of modernity at a time when the concept of the self shifted from a simple representation of personal identity, to the idea that the subject itself was the source of its own thinking processes. Beyond the Cartesian conception of the subject as the self-same cogito, Lockean and Humean personal identity appeared and, subsequently, the Kantian “Ich denke.” It was assumed that the subject was somehow outside of the representations of itself. It was assumed, as Lacoue-Labarthe reports, that there is “such a thing as presentation, a full, whole, virginal, inviolate, and inviolable presence.”4 This reality was distinguished from all actual or virtual appearances to the self. Appearances were appearances for a consciousness and that consciousness would retain its pure “full, whole, virginal, inviolate, and inviolable” state. Rousseau named this condition “l’homme sauvage” and sought to recover this state somehow in spite of the corrupt nature of society.
The Hegelian consciousness would seek to incorporate all appearances into itself while retaining its own protected encompassing qualities. The modern subject would ultimately know whatever it knows, incorporate all that it could incorporate, consume all that it could consume. That would be its reality. Above all, the modern subject would confirm and reaffirm the history of metaphysics of which it was an integral part.
Hence, when Nietzsche suggests that the history of metaphysics is itself concluded in the history of an error, the modern subject would also be so concluded. Yet the modern subject has survived and persevered well into the twentieth century. And with it the history of metaphysics has also been preserved. Heidegger’s report that the subject is nowhere to be found in his conception of the relation of beings (or possibly Dasein?) to Being marks the subject in crisis. For Heidegger, the subject appears as difference, as a truth that cannot be thematized in the ontic world of experience. In the relation of Dasein (or a being?) to Being, there is only the speaking of difference, the calling of Being, the naming of alterity as Mitsein. Yet the subject is reaffirmed in Sartre as a transcendent object, as an in-itself, as an object of consciousness. The reality of this subject is the reality of a history of metaphysics in which the subject plays a key role.
In 1966, Foucault announces at the end of Les Mots et les choses that “man is like a face drawn in the sand,” that the human subject is dead, and that it will soon vanish from the terrain of human discourse. What this implies is that with the death of the subject, the subject will no longer participate in the contemporary epistemē, the epistemē which we have come to understand as postmodern.5 However, with Lacoue-Labarthe, it is evident that the modern subject is not dead, that it has not vanished from the scene, that it is not erased from the discourses of the contemporary. Rather the modern subject has become—like Nietzsche’s true world—a fiction. As with his reading of Nietzsche, Lacoue-Labarthe notes that “the ‘concept’ of fiction escapes conceptuality itself, that . . . it [is] not included in the discourse of truth” (LL-SP, 4). If fiction is somehow outside truth, then it is also outside appearance. Hence, the question of literature is a question of the thematizing of the subject without reference or appeal to its truth or appearance. Fiction is indeed the operative term for the postmodern discourses of the contemporary age. And the human subject has become one such fiction.
As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it, “to think fiction is not to oppose appearance and reality, since appearance is nothing other than the product of reality. To think fiction is precisely to think without recourse to this opposition, outside this opposition; to think the world as a fable” (LL-SP, 5). And correspondingly, to think the subject as opposed to the objectivities of the world is also to think outside the opposition between the subject and the object, subjectivity and objectivity. Merleau-Ponty had struggled for years—from the time of Phenomenology of Perception (1945), and even The Structure of Behavior (1942) has evidence of the same—to overcome the dualism of the subject and the object. His interrogations always ended up with a concept of the ambiguity of the two—both subject and object interwoven in what he later—in The Visible and the Invisible (1961)—called a chiasmatic intertwining. Still the idea was that somehow the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity as a conflict, as an antagonism, as a distance, could be overcome through incorporation, through embodiment, and ultimately through visibility. But Foucault announces—perhaps prematurely, like Zarathustra (and Nietzsche’s Madman) who believes he has come too early—that the subject is dead altogether. This would mean that there is no longer even any opposition or dialectic between the subject and the object. The death of the subject necessarily implies the death of the object, because with the erasure of the subject would come the obliteration of the objectivities which have so fascinated modern empiricist thought since the seventeenth century. The Husserlian version of the Hegelian dialectic between Bewußtsein and Gegenstand is itself erased with the death of the subject—if the Bewußtsein goes the Gegenstand must also go. Hence, Merleau-Ponty’s last effort to save the subject by seeing it as an embodied subject —rejected by Foucault when he reads the contemporary epistemē as the end of the age of the human subject—also implies the loss of the objects of consciousness as well.
What Lacoue-Labarthe offers—almost a decade after the death of Merleau-Ponty and half a decade after Foucault’s 1966 pronouncement concerning the death of the subject—is the account that the (de)constitution of the subject or the loss of the subject is “the loss of what one has never had, a kind of ‘originary’ and ‘constitutive’ loss (of ‘self’)” (LL-SP, 82). This loss which he represents as a translation of Verwindung is not a getting over something that one once had, but a recovery from a belief in a reality that never was. For Lacoue-Labarthe the subject is a fiction, a fable which is told not in opposition to some reality, nor as just some appearance, but as outside both reality and appearance, as a view of both reality and appearance. But as we have come to learn with Derrida, to be outside is also to reaffirm the inside—in this case, now as a fable. When the modern subject becomes a fable, it is a story that can be told again and again—often in different versions but never as some originary condition of reality.
The Truth of the Fable
Lacoue-Labarthe inquires: “What if, after all, philosophy were nothing but literature? We know how insistent philosophy—metaphysics—has generally been in defining itself against what we call literature” (LL-SP, 1). Philosophy in its history of metaphysics has struggled to be other than literature, to define itself as concerned with the truth, with what is, with what cannot be otherwise . . . Philosophy in its obsession with logical thinking has exhibited a profound fear of literature, of what might be nothing more than a story, of what is confirmed only through interpretation and critical readings. Philosophy in its passion for truth has excluded all forms of fiction from its State as dangerous, as corrupting, and as terrifying—unless it is properly and fully controlled by the State, by ethical devices that limit its range and effect, by technologies that weed out the harmful effects of the literary. And yet, as Lacoue-Labarthe asks (along with Merleau-Ponty in his critique of the algorithm) whether philosophy’s desire for a pure speech has not always been compromised by the necessity of exposition through a text, through some sort of writing (the dialogue, the treatise, the essay, etc.). Each time philosophy is obliged to speak itself in a text it runs the risk of being taken for literature. But, as Lacoue-Labarthe asks, what is meant by literature? Is literature a set of traces, marks, inscriptions, writings? Or is literature what has conventionally been called fiction? (LL-SP, 2). If the term literature is meant to signify the former, then philosophy would have great difficulty separating itself off from literature since most philosophy is eventually written. But if literature is meant to signify fiction, then philosophy becomes fearful. In this second sense too philosophy would have to somehow ask about the differences between philosophy and literature as if from the outside: “the outside would have to allow of unfolding, that is, exposition, properly metaphysical Darstellung: presentation, unveiling. The discourse of truth, in other words” (LL-SP, 2). Yet, he continues, “exposing would therefore be a way of not posing the question; posing the question prohibits exposing, for by necessity it is impossible to expose the question of exposition itself” (LL-SP, 2). Only if literature is taken as ideology can it be exposed by philosophy—as philosophy. But if literature resists the transference into ideology, if it remains something other than philosophy, then it can neither be exposed from within exposition itself, nor can it be resolved into a theoretical position of its own. In order to develop this curious relation of philosophy to literature, the question of its fictionalization, Lacoue-Labarthe cites a text from Nietzsche’s Will to Power, a note from the year 1888. Here Nietzsche writes: “Parmenides said: ‘one cannot think of what is not’;—we are at the other extreme, and say ‘what can be thought of must certainly be a fiction.’”6 [“Parmenides hat gesagt ‘man denkt das nicht, was nicht ist’;—wir sind am andern Ende und sagen ‘was gedacht werden kann, muß sicherlich eine Fiktion sein.’”] If this text from Nietzsche is situated at the end of the history of metaphysics—at the other end—as opposed to the beginning (where Parmenides is located, and where there can be the possibility of non-being outside of what is thought), then Nietzsche’s text returns to what is not said in Parmenides: namely, that what is thought must surely be a fiction. But if what is thought is a fiction, then all philosophy must be a fiction. And with the completion of the history of metaphysics—at the other end [am andern Ende]—all that can be thought must be read as a fiction. Thus, either fiction is included in conceptuality itself, or all conceptuality is literature. This location of fiction somewhere between what cannot be thought (Parmenides’ beginning) and what can be thought (Nietzsche’s end)—“Le pensable et le pensé”—opens up a space in which philosophy—and the whole history of metaphysics—“is not the discourse of truth but a fictional language [la métaphysique n’est pas le discours de la vérité mais un langage fictif].”7
Lacoue-Labarthe suggests that for Nietzsche this whole history of metaphysics is dominated by the official (Parmenidean, Platonic, Hegelian) line. In this version, the discourse of truth wants to separate itself off from literature, from fiction. Literature would then be associated with appearance—with Heracliteanism. And Heracliteanism—as opposed to the official line—would be at the other side of the history of thought. This other side would reveal appearance to be the true fiction for philosophy. Here Lacoue-Labarthe again cites Nietzsche, this time from Twilight of the Idols: “Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The ‘apparent’ world is the only one: the ‘true’ world is merely added by a lie.” [Sofern die Sinne das Werden, das Vergehn, den Wechsel zeigen, lügen sie nicht . . . Aber damit wird Heraklit ewig recht behalten, daß das Sein eine leere Fiktion ist. Die ‘scheinbare’ Welt ist die einzige: die ‘wahre Welt’ is nur hinzugelogen . . .8 ] Hence for Nietzsche, “fiction is the lie that is truth” (LL-SP, 5). This reversal—at the other end, or perhaps only behind, the official history of metaphysics—moves to the other side, operates at the opposing site in which the discourse of truth prevails. But this move to the alternative is insufficient. It is only half of the deconstructive move. And for this reason, Nietzsche is not yet deconstructive. For as has already been noted: “Nietzsche is the reversal of Platonism and hence still a Platonism—and ultimately the accomplishment of metaphysics itself” (LL-SP, 5). To the extent that Nietzsche can only offer appearance as fiction in opposition to reality as truth, the role played by fiction has not yet been found. For, the history of Platonism and anti-Platonism is the history of philosophy—and this history has become a fiction, an episteme, a discourse in which reality and appearance are opposed, in which, near its end, subjectivity and objectivity are the last attempts to separate off the real from the apparent, the unitary from the multiple, the self from alterity. The modern phase of the history of philosophy is the final phase in the development of the opposition between philosophy and literature. And this history is ultimately a fable, a story told again and again—full of sound and fury, . . . Sturm und Drang, . . . hope and despair, . . . control and madness. Thinking fiction is thinking the world as a fable where the history of philosophy is always a story told with a moral—a particular truth to be told.
The Postmodern Subject as Fable
If the history of metaphysics, the history of philosophy, the history of the opposition between Platonism and anti-Platonism, between reality and appearance is fiction, then what of the modern subject that appears on the scene near the end of this history? After Nietzsche, after the history of philosophy became fiction, Heidegger links Dichtung to Denken. What was already a question in German romanticism—the “dichterisch completion of philosophy”—is transformed into the identity of thinking and poetizing. With Heidegger, it is not that the poets themselves could speak the truth, that they could say what they themselves are for in a destitute time, but that Denken itself opens up the space for Dichtung. With Heidegger, Dichtung takes place in the Open established by the ontico-ontological difference, but this is also where Denken occurs [sich ereignet]. And Denken takes place where truth (alētheia) is the coming out of concealedness of what has been hidden. Heidegger’s truth, Heidegger’s alētheia, is a poetized truth. Heidegger’s truth is already an appearance, a Scheinen, a fiction narrated—not by a subject but in a space of difference. Heidegger’s truth is neither Platonic nor anti-Platonic. His truth comes after the end of the history of metaphysics. Heidegger’s truth narrates the fiction of the identity of difference, the story that there is some identity to the differential Open in which Dasein’s possibilities are articulated. From the Being of beings to language (Sprache), Heidegger discovers Dichtung—first the Dichtung of the German romantics, then the Dichtung that itself discloses as the “house of Being.”
But Derrida’s Heidegger is what is in question here. Derrida views Heidegger’s thought as differential to the core, because it offers a notion of difference that is both temporal and spatial. Indeed, it describes difference as both veiled and unfurled, as both pointed and open, as textual and philosophical . . . Differance itself is a fiction. There cannot be anything that is differance. There cannot be any subject that is not already a fiction. There cannot be any text that is not already an outside the text. There cannot be any outside the text that is not already text. There cannot be any differance that is not already textuality.
And Lacoue-Labarthe remarks on the poetic character of Zarathustra.9 He also asks—in contrast to Heidegger’s “Who is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?”—“What is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra?” (LL-SP, 47). The question is a perplexing one since it is no longer a question—as it was in Heidegger—of what sort of being Zarathustra might be, of what sort of prophet, of what sort of philosopher, of what sort of thinker Zarathustra could be, but rather what sort of site is Nietzsche’s text called Zarathustra? Is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra a philosophical book or is it dichterisch? Or is it, as Heidegger suggests, denkerisch-dichterisch? The Darstellung of Zarathustra is critical here. Zarathustra is neither purely denkerisch, nor purely dichterisch. It is also not fiction. With Zarathustra something begins and something ends. With Zarathustra, the whole history of Platonism and anti-Platonism comes together in a fable. Zarathustra is a story—or perhaps many stories—told about the overgoing and undergoing of a discourse, of a speaking, of a perspective. It is not that Zarathustra is some sort of subject. It is that many stories are told. In each story, there is a difference. In each narrative, a new perspective is offered. In that there is a difference, the narrative is the fiction of a subject that is not yet of its time, in that there is a new perspective with each coming, the modern subject is still presenting itself. Zarathustra is located somewhere between this modern subject and the postmodern subject that remained (and still remains) a fiction. The moment of Zarathustra, however, is—as Nietzsche recognized—untimely. It comes before almost a hundred years before its time.
Zarathustra is both poetic and thoughtful. Zarathustra is a patchwork of the poetic and the thoughtful, of the literary and the philosophical, of appearance and truth, of the subject speaking and the subject spoken, of the centered identity of the self and the de-centered differential self . . . And what is Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo?10 If Zarathustra is the speech of Nietzsche, what is Ecce Homo? “Behold the man.” Is the man in question a modern subject? Is it Nietzsche himself—a nineteenth century wayward philologist-philosopher? “Why I am so clever.” “Why I am so wise?” “Why I am a destiny?” Who is this I? Is it Zarathustra? Is it Nietzsche? Is it a fiction? Nietzsche himself was a receding, quiet, unobtrusive person, we are told. The titles of Ecce Homo sections ring truer to the persona of a Walter Kaufmann or a Jacques Lacan than they do that of a Nietzsche. And the book Ecce Homo, is it not a fiction too? Would it not be a mistake to take it for autobiography? And its autobiographical textuality is equally transferrable to Zarathustra. Or is it? At the end of his writing career, Nietzsche desperately attempts to make a show of the human subject—ecce homo. “Only when you deny me can I come again,” he writes—or quotes from his Zarathustra in his Ecce Homo. But he fails at his Selbstdarstellung in Ecce Homo—perhaps even more than in his Zarathustra.
The modern subject—in its purity, in its unity, in its identity, in its inviolable condition—proved to be the object of recherches long after Nietzsche’s death in 1900. Indeed at this turning from the nineteenth century into the twentieth, the search for the self, for the modern subject became even more desperate, even more passionate, even more futile, even more absurd. With Freud, for instance, it can be expected that there is somewhere a pure, unadulterated, uncomplexed, unperverse subject. Perhaps it is only an ideal. Perhaps it is even an ideal which is not even desirable—too Apollonian for Freud’s taste. Yet what would one need psychoanalysis for if there were not a concept of cure, if the modern subject could not reveal what lies latent in its unconscious life. It is assumed that “there is, in general, such a thing as presentation, a full, whole, virginal, inviolate, and inviolable presence, a wild state where we could be, where we would be, ourselves, unalienated and undissociated subjects (in whatever form), before any transgression or prohibition, before any war or rivalry—obviously also prior to any institution” (LL-SP, 101). Husserl—another contemporary of Freud—also had a conception of a pure, transcendental ego. If only he could recover, uncover, disengage, engage, activate, reactivate a subject that is pure of corrupting assumptions, expectations, presuppositions. Sartre knew that the ego could not be pure, but he tried to make it into an object nevertheless. Skinner and the behaviorists wanted the subject to be an object—controllable, predictable, conditionable—at all costs. The modern subject had to play the role of the condition of all acts of consciousness or the conditioned of all behaviors. Lacan wanted to understand whatever it was that speaks in the language of the patient. If it was a subject, it was a speaking subject—signifying, discursive, narrated.
With Lacan—the Écrits appeared the same year as Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses in which he announces the death of the modern subject—the speaking subject operates as if it were a fiction. Lacan’s interest in Joyce is no accident. He could read as much into Joyce’s subject as he could in the language of his patients. The speaking subject—the postmodern subject—is a fiction.
Like philosophy itself, the subject is narrativized, textualized, contextualized. Like philosophy itself, the modern subject has become a fiction. The modern subject has become one story or another. But there is more. The modern subject in Lacoue-Labarthe—following Derrida—has become a fable.
A fable is a fabulation, a tale told with a moral—usually a tale about animals—Aesop’s fables, Lafontaine’ s fables, where animals undergo a trial, a test of experience, and they learn a lesson from what they have undergone. The fable offers a distinctive lesson, a moral that will be evidence to humans that if they act accordingly they will be better people. To say that the postmodern subject is a fable is to say not only that it is a potential fiction, but also that each enactment will bring a different lesson, another moral, one further way of being. The post-modern subject is many tales, many morals, many lessons. It is not any one way to be—the modern ideal has been surrendered, the loss or distortion (Verwindung) cannot be recovered. It is a matter of getting over the loss. But there was nothing lost in any case. The postmodern subject is not dead. It is not wiped from the scene. It is not despairing of its lost unity. The postmodern subject is many fables—each juxtaposed alongside the others. The postmodern subject is indeed already many subjects, many stories, many different narratives, many ways to be. The styles are perhaps different, the contexts are perhaps different, the traditions are perhaps different, the engenderings are perhaps different, but the differences are not different.
The moment of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the moment of the beginning of the postmodern. Incipit Zarathustra, incipit the postmodern. The postmodern is both a completion and a commencement, an end and many different beginnings.
Conclusion
In the essay “Obliteration,” (LL-SP, 57–98) Lacoue-Labarthe raises the question of the (de)constitution of the subject. Derrida returns to this question in his Introduction to the English translation of Typography. Derrida writes:
[I]f the ‘desistance’ of the subject—the giving up (aufgeben) of the subject, taking distance (Abstand nehmen) from the subject (and its ex-sistence), and refraining from addressing (unterlassen) the subject—does not first signify a ‘self-desistance,’ we should not come to some conclusion thereby about the passivity of the subject, or about its activity. Desistance is better for marking the middle voice. Before any decision, before any desition (as one might also say in English to designate a cessation of being), the subject is desisted without being passive; it desists without desisting itself, even before being the subject of a reflection, a decision, an action, or a passion. Should one then say that subjectivity consists in such a desistance? No, that’s just the point—what is involved here is the impossibility of consisting, a singular impossibility: something entirely different from a lack of consistency. Something more in the way of a ‘(de)constitution.’11
Derrida makes a case for desistance as a new configuration—but a configuration suggests a stability of the figure—a stability of the figure of the subject that neither Derrida nor Lacoue-Labarthe find appropriate. But this configuration is understood as a desistance—“a certain desistance of the subject, a (de)constitution rather than a destitution” (LL-T, 2). Derrida reads desistance as ineluctability—a pre-impression that marks the desistance of the subject.
What this all means is that the modern subject—neatly constituted by/from a transcendental ego (Husserl), or a libidinized ego (Freud), or a pure ego (William James), or a enduring consciousness (Bergson), or a subjectivity (Sartre)—is, in the postmodern, (de)constituted. Any particular configuration of the figure of the subject consists in a fable told in one of many different ways. Each accounting is the subject’s Selbstdarstellung, the subject’s textuality. Who one is is how the moral is elaborated. This does not mean that we are not who we are. Quite the contrary. But we also do not live the fiction of a pure, inviolable, indivisible identity. The configuration of a self is no longer that of an “existing” self—the existential identity, or Heideggerian Eigentlichkeit that was the last effort to save the modern subject from its anguish, errancy, absurdity. The postmodern subject—as a fable—tells many stories about itself. It is not as though any story will do. To de-sist—to be ineluctable—means to be a patchwork of a self that is seeking an outside to the existing self. If the outside as a fable turns out to designate the inside—the identity of the self—the subject in its postmodern phase will survive, will (de)constitute itself, will desist. We are not just the stories we tell ourselves or the stories that are told about us. Yet we do live by our de-constituted selves. Nietzsche says that he is a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus. Is this a true story? Or is it fiction? Once philosophy has become a fiction, it is no longer a matter of sorting out the difference. We live in the differences, the postmodern differences.