4

Speculations: Gesture in Conceiving Ada and Absent Presence

What follows now is Speculation.

– Jacques Derrida¹

If woman had desires other than ‘penis-envy,’ this would call into question the unity, the uniqueness, the simplicity of the mirror charged with sending man’s image back to him-albeit inverted. Call into question its flatness. The specularization, and speculation, of the purpose of (his) desire could no longer be two-dimensional.

– Luce Irigaray²

Give me power with pain a million times over, rather than ease with even talent.

– Ada, letter to Lady Byron, 25 July 1843³

This chapter tells two tales of telos. It does so through two differently articulated cinematic fantasies concerning genetics in light of the overlapping writing of Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud and Luce Irigaray. Freud’s account of the first steps towards language through his grandson’s game with a cotton reel and its vocal accompaniment (understood to approximate ‘fort’ (gone) and ‘da’ (there)) has been a mainstay of psychoanalytic theory and feminist appropriation of that theory.⁴ Speculations sets aside the extensive literature on fort/da that tends to accept Freud at his word, a word that describes the carno-phallogocentric overcoming of human weakness in the world with a string of substitutions to recharge this privation with eventual ability. To wit and in short: the suckling infant loses the constant supply of milk (metonymy of the breast), loses the breast (metonymy of the mother), loses the mother with whom that infant felt in paradisiac union. However, that same infant spurred by these very losses is driven to substitute a toy – the cotton reel – for the absent mother, then to supplant the word for the thing and thus to enter into the hallucinatory pleasures of representation.5 Instead, the drive of this chapter stems from Derrida’s ‘To Speculate – on “Freud”’, a text that takes Freud at his word in a less literal and more literary sense: rather than accept what Freud says about this game, Derrida is fascinated with what his text does. He is especially fascinated with the gait of the text, so to speak, with the ways that Freud tries and fails to step beyond his ostensible pleasure principle. And rather than simply extracting the brief fort/da episode from the maddening non-progress of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, Derrida tracks the rhythm of gone/there, fort/da, across the whole text as grandson and grandfather effectively play the same game. We can call this game ‘autobiography’, as Derrida does, albeit that it is played along the altered lines of what he names an ‘athetic’ writing.⁶ As athetic, Freud’s texts confound logics of position and opposition, thesis and antithesis. This seemingly familiar and respectable genre – autobiography (the pole position of the self) – will turn out to have more in common with ‘science fiction’ than we may have expected. Philosopher and analyst Luce Irigaray steps in with yet another rhythm, one that counters both the Freud that she names and the Derrida that she does not, through what she holds to be the interests of the sexually different girl.⁷ What is extraordinary about Irigaray’s short lecture ‘Gesture in Psychoanalysis,’ is that she seems to want to both bypass the phallogocentric gambit of fort/da through the girl’s properly feminine choreography, and also to do what Freud does, in Derrida’s reading, namely project a legacy. The projection of legacy as teleological ambition is precisely what is at stake in the two films under discussion here, both of which trade on the vanguardist, sexually ambiguous persona of actress Tilda Swinton.⁸ This ambition, however, becomes subject to – cannot not become subject to – what Derrida names the ‘Postal Principle’.⁹

The first is an experimental feature made by an American artist with a long-term investment in feminism and with a long history of investigating the performativity of female identity through performance and 2D media.¹⁰ This film readily circulates with feminist contexts: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Conceiving Ada ostensibly functions as a feminist fantasy concerning the attempt of Emmy (Francesca Faridany), a contemporary American computer scientist, to save a ‘forgotten woman’ from a history that restricted her genius.11 Now given an annual ‘day’ in October, through the frame of a biopic with the added license of science fiction, Conceiving Ada proposes that Emmy has devised a way to speak through her computer interface directly to Ada, Countess of Lovelace (Swinton) in Victorian England.¹² This is not skype. Conceiving Ada is not satisfied with period drama. As science fiction – or ‘speculative fiction’ – the film crosses time as well as space to produce this ‘one to one’ with the woman credited with inventing the first computer language, Ada, who died of uterine cancer, aged thirty-six, in London in 1852. Emmy’s efforts don’t stop at first contact with the past; she banks on archiving Ada to both her computer’s hard drive and her unborn daughter’s DNA. In spite of Ada’s refusal, Conceiving Ada chooses to make the dead live again, there again, da again. Given time, she will be able to complete her work; she will be recognized. Ada will be saved. Feminists have long negotiated which strategies to inhabit in order to address the question of women’s contributions to various disciplines when historical records falter or finesse their presence. In broad strokes: should we restore female geniuses to their rightful historical places, or should the conceptual grounds of such canonising gestures themselves be deconstructed? My concern here is that Conceiving Ada lauds the former without doubling back to the latter. Moreover the recognition of Ada becomes bound up with a new fantasy of legacy, with a new proper line. Conceiving Ada attempts to seal tele as telos – the proper ending that was due to Ada. She should have been a progenitor: this will have founded her history. In so doing, will that future have been feminist?

The second is a short film (also exhibited as a five-screen installation), made by a British-based Turkish-Cypriot artist, more prominent as a fashion designer whose clothes often express technical ingenuity (a table metamorphoses into a skirt; a dress can be folded up and addressed as an airmail letter). Hussein Chalayan’s science-fiction short Absent Presence stars Swinton in an all-female political environment, performing a scientific experiment to demonstrate the ability of DNA to chart origins (thus speaking obliquely to Ada’s insights into the future applications of computing).¹³ Situating power asymmetrically between women of different ethnicities and nationalities, the film points to our ever-more technicized terror of the other and monitoring of their movements (a fear being weaponized to new extremes at the time of writing). Yet classical science’s teleological expectation founders as tele takes (its) place: the experiment fails to reformulate the DNA samples of three foreign volunteers as their seamless equivalents. Instead it produces futurist sculptures in which the volunteers struggle to recognize themselves. We never hear those foreign women ‘speak for themselves’. This is not an oversight or wanton effacement; rather, the film unravels the ostensibly autonomous white Western subject deploying key tropes of auto-affection. ‘Speaking for oneself’, subject to the postal principle, is in question. Auto-affection is always and already hetero-affective. Thus, as the genetic ‘tracks’ of her subjects take unexpected directions, so too does Swinton’s authority.

Postal principle

Thought to rest on mastery through substitution, fort/da subjects lost objects to being recalled. While ‘To Speculate on “Freud”’ was published in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond in 1987 (translated from the French edition of 1980), Derrida’s speculations derive from his mid-1970s’ seminars on Life Death (La vie la mort), in which he directly engaged the theorization of programmes of instruction given in pedagogical or institutional life alongside those given biologically, specifically in François Jacob’s work on heredity.14 ‘Life death’, as Dawne McCance remarks, ‘substitutes for either an and or an is a silent, invisible “trait blanc” between the words “life” and “death”’.¹⁵ This relation will also emerge from fort/da, written with varying punctual instructions in ‘To Speculate on “Freud”’. This invisible ‘treatment’ does not suggest that the two terms are ‘not two, or that one is the other, but rather that the difference at stake between the two is not of a positional (dialectical or nondialectical order)’.¹⁶ Yet these speculations speak rather more to Freud’s projection of his own institutional inheritance and the complicated scene of writing in which he is enmeshed than to genetics per se even as that scene itself demands the thinking of ‘life death’ all the way through. In fact Freud raises the term ‘speculation’ in order to allow himself ‘free rein’ and despatch any hint of philosophy, which is of ‘no concern’ and certainly not – Derrida’s suspicion! – the philosophy of speculative dialectics.¹⁷ If it was of concern, and if it did have something to say about pleasure, Freud would ‘readily express [his] gratitude’.18 As things stand, Freud feels free to speculate upon a cleared ground, without influence and thus without debt. For Derrida, Freud’s auto-acquittal serves the purpose of allowing for the inauguration of the entirely autonomous, free-standing, House of ‘Freud’: psychoanalysis will properly begin with the name of Sigmund Freud. They are gathered together ‘under the same roof’. Freud in fact tells us that he has

been able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself, to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated.¹⁹

Psychoanalysis will improperly begin with ‘SF’, to use the common abbreviation of ‘science fiction’ or ‘speculative fiction’.²⁰ In light of Donna Haraway’s ironic pressure upon the signature of ‘SF’, we might also insert ‘Speculative Feminism’ to this roster (‘So Far’, as she says, in an indication of a trajectory for which all bets may be off).²¹

Following the way that the form of Freud’s writing mimes that of which he writes, Derrida notes the fort/da of disappearance/reappearance that Freud himself plays with the pleasure principle. Derrida shortens this principle to PP. PP can then take in the primary processes (that bind the unbound energy that the PP ostensibly wishes to stabilize since ‘unpleasure corresponds to an increase in the quantity of excitation and pleasure to a dimunition’).²² To the Anglophone ear PP is ‘peepee’, with its twin senses of a little, perhaps child-sized, penis and the urinary fluids that flow from it in a manner that requires training. PP, too, is pépé, the affectionate French term for ‘grandfather’. Finally and most fatally, the PP cannot avoid the eruption of the postal principle. A postal principle haunts every address: every biography, every autobiography. It is necessary to underscore the auto-bio-graphic because ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is a text that, if it goes beyond anything, it goes beyond theoretical reflection. It is not a particular species of autobiography, since Freud drew on that which was close to hand, his nephew Ernst for example, even as he veiled this close connection, as my epigraph demonstrates. In his family house, Freud, ‘[t]he speculator was not in a situation to observe’ with any degree of neutrality (or indeed modesty, as it is discussed in Chapter 6 of this volume).²³ But without quite realizing it, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ text writes the conditions of autobiography itself. Ernst throws the cotton reel out of his ‘curtained cot’: Ernst reels it back again. Repeat. In banking on this return, in obtaining the ‘greatest pleasure’ in getting a good return, this ‘second act’ confirms the rewarding logic of re-presentation (fort/da in a nutshell).²⁴ The parallelo-grammatology between the game of the grandson and the writing of his interested witness, grandfather and analyst, does not stop at the particular but informs a general gesture of return: a turn back to the self, the auto-bio-graphical seal of one’s own envelope: fort/da. However, not only does the principle that Derrida suggests is already at work, require the necessity that a letter (including the self-addressed letter) can always not arrive and thus stay fort, dead and gone, ‘intentions’ notwithstanding, but Derrida’s repeated excursions into the matter of origins and ends depart from the anchorage that these bookends are classically taken to secure. Thus not only is re-presentation in question but the notion of an original presence itself. Across The Post Card, the post, the letter, address and destination affirm the play of a principle that can never guard against going astray:

In a word … as soon as there is, there is différance (and this does not await language, especially human language, and the language of Being, only the mark and the divisible trait), and there is postal maneuvering, relays, delays, destination, telecommunicating network, the possibility, and therefore the fatal necessity, of going astray, etc.²⁵

Reduced to its formal structure, the fort/da game seems automated, self-fulfilling, easy to cite, to cut and paste: ‘The interpretation of the game was obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement – the instinctual renunciation.’²⁶ There seems to be no question that it should provide the paradigm of language acquisition. It is Derrida who remarks on Freud’s assertions of the boy’s normality, his good behaviour, good relationships with everyone, that he ‘obeys orders not to touch certain things’ and ‘above all [that] he never cried when his mother left him’.²⁷ This mother is Sophie, Freud’s daughter. No reason to be forlorn. But Derrida is the one to ask, ‘Why didn’t he cry?’²⁸ (We can leave the pronoun to its ambiguity.) Already, Derrida suggests an economy balances out both the boy’s actions and the grandfather’s accounts: the ‘child too is speculating’.29 Ernst had a one-track mind, Freud affirms: ‘It never occurred to him to pull [the cotton reel] along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage.’³⁰ It does occur to Derrida to ask why: ‘why doesn’t he play train or carriage? Wouldn’t that be more normal?’³¹ He continues to wonder what the PP would prefer. Would Freud have played train? ‘What is it to play train, for the (grand)father? To speculate: it would never be to throw the thing.’³² Derrida reminds us that this normal little boy who does not cry does not actually throw away his toy but is able to recall it at any time. The reel is on a string and is thus a safe bet: ‘it does not really leave.’³³ ‘Fort:da’.³⁴

The sheer difficulty in maintaining the pleasure principle as such arrives with what is sometimes mistaken for its opposite – the reality principle (RP), while the latter is nothing but a deputy or even, as Derrida notes, a ‘domestic’ for the pleasure principle put to work when needs must, and needs must when the devil drives.³⁵ The RP ostensibly stands for later, for the lag of deferral, the deferral but not dismissal of the PP, which does not really leave. The question of the return, of making a return, ingrains itself not in an object as such but in ‘departure-returning itself’: ‘the greatest pleasure’, ‘the complete game’.³⁶ As Derrida notes, Freud’s footnote shows the supplementary spool of the child’s own reflection as he plays with his own disappearance, one that is never really gone when the mirror will always provide his return.³⁷ The mirror then provides the ‘self-addressed envelope’, sealed for Freud, forever at risk for Derrida.³⁸ And with this suite of speculative reflections under way, if we ‘admit that Freud is writing’, he ‘does not do fort/da indefatigably, with the object that the PP is. He does it with himself, he recalls himself’.³⁹ Something else steps in. The PP is not alone. Freud’s ‘speculative writing also recalls itself, something else and itself’.⁴⁰ This addition in that which is all additions, additive and addictive, is that which renders this text ‘autobiographical’. In so doing, it forges what Derrida calls a ‘strange contract’ and demands that we reconsider what we thought was the ‘entire topos of the autos’.⁴¹

As PP and RP lose their apparent polarity (reality check: not now, but later), they open onto a difference of a greater magnitude than that classically assumed to lodge in opposition. The back and forth of the text does not simply repeat, put lost objects back in their place. Freud even backtracks on the completion of the fort/da game: perhaps the distancing of ‘gone’ could be ‘staged as a game in itself’.42 Perhaps it renders a passive situation active. Perhaps there is pleasure in making disappear: a year later this ‘same boy’ was to be seen by Freud, the disinterested observer, throwing away his toys. He told them, like his father, Freud’s son-in-law to ‘Go to the fwont!’⁴³ A second footnote – added later and so discontinuous with the writing of the main text – tells us that ‘his mother’ died when the boy was five and three quarters and that he did not cry then either. The follow-up sentence tells us that in the intervening years a sibling had been born, ‘rousing’ him to ‘violent jealousy’.⁴⁴ Freud states no conclusions about this reaction to the boy’s mother’s death – that is, his own daughter’s death – but the implication is that Ernst’s murderous resentful thoughts did not wish for her traitorous return if, in so doing, she would be ‘shared’.

This is where, in spite of himself, Freud enacts the ‘athetic writing’ that so intrigues Derrida. Having the lessening of excitation in common, the PP cannot expel the ‘absolute other’, that is, the death drive.⁴⁵ There is no fortification against the other that is already ‘there’. A demon is already at home: ‘the very procedure of the text itself is diabolical. It mimes walking, does not cease walking without advancing, regularly sketching out one step more without gaining an inch of ground.’⁴⁶ This ‘not writing’, this step of writing, this ‘pas d’ecriture’ might frustrate Freud’s purported wish to step ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ but the autobiography that it conveys indicates a general condition for Derrida.⁴⁷ The pleasure principle – like Freud – writes to itself, sends to itself, ‘overlapped’ by an other.⁴⁸ This overlap gives a new architecture to the uncanny immune to containment by literary fiction.⁴⁹ Overlapped, and not opposed, by the death drive, in Derrida’s hands the life that ostensibly attaches to the PP is now ‘life death’ (the title of Derrida’s seminar). It has dropped punctual directive: no forward slash, no hyphen, no colon, no handholding.⁵⁰ Posed in this way, that is to say, without posing or opposing a position, the RP and the PP are différant, rather than strictly different, without defence from an infinite deferral. ‘There is no thesis of this differance. The thesis would be the death sentence (arret de mort) of differance.’⁵¹ If PP has now become both it and him (quietly in French since both are il), ‘Perhaps it is that the PP cannot be contradicted’.⁵² This only ironically infers the authority of Freud qua infamous patriarch and rather leads to the other track that overlaps the PP, without opposition and without a sound.

Derrida’s speculations on ‘Freud’ bear upon Conceiving Ada not only to remark upon the repetitions of fort/da that weave its narrative but also because this gesture’s investment in returns also ropes in a relation to descendants, to a legacy and to transference. Cutting loose from any philosophical inheritance, these are Freud’s own grounds, under one roof. Given that psychoanalysis is being forged as a discipline, its validation requires disciples. It cannot remain private. Home is where the institution is: Freud writes in and of the house of Freud, even as he entertains such a devilish guest as the death drive. From singular to plural, Freud’s address shifts between ‘I’ and ‘we’; ‘we’ projects the legatees who will return all credit to us. The grandson’s game – understood as a writing, or just as writing – confirms psychoanalysis even as it instructs the grandfather what to write. It is affiliation: Derrida remarks on the confluence of fils as both son and thread, strung together. The PP reapplies (to) a line of descent, which would run into trouble if this line was ever pissed away, fort, disappeared, died out. ‘[N]o legacy without transference’, says Derrida.53

Archive fever

The vexations of Conceiving Ada lodge not simply in the over-reliance on the charismatic pull of lead actress Swinton, nor with the evacuation of the epistemological question of how we know the past. Rather they lie in the fort-da game enacted by Emmy in retrieving Ada – making Ada da; in the transference that the film solicits but never questions between Emmy and Ada as well as between audience and Ada; in the plot that manages the intensity of the relation between two adult women through the heteronormative obligation that one of them – Ada – become the daughter of the other; and for this daughter’s conception to require a scene that goes beyond the ostensible digital dexterity of Emmy to include the input of her male partner, Nick. Expressly forbidden to touch Emmy’s home computer, Nick, the non-computing expert, goes ahead and does so anyway – to what effect the narrative does not state, but it is hard to read as anything but an insemination (and as reassurance of heterosexuality).⁵⁴ These are questions that critical writing on Hershman typically glosses over in lieu of praise of her own technical innovation – the film patented the use of ‘blue screen’: its period mise en scene were digitally composited. Critics draw attention to the fabrication of this film even as the film itself employs well-worn Hollywood practices for masking that very fabrication in the familiar interests of audience identification. Sharon Lin Tay authorizes Conceiving Ada as feminist because she understands the film to contrast ‘women’s loyalty and generosity to one another’ with the ‘continuous narrative of great men or the perpetual drama of the family romance’ and at the same time breaking with the structure and aims of classic realist linear narrative.55 Tay also determines the film according to a Deleuzian becoming that, she holds, licenses a definitive break from psychoanalysis. Without necessarily dispelling Deleuze, this chapter takes another path. Turning to psychoanalysis does not lead unquestionably to servitude to dogma. This chapter demonstrates that the kind of psychoanalysis that is at stake in Conceiving Ada requires a turn to the postal principle.

Conceiving Ada performatively stakes a claim for the contemporary existence – and success of (at least a certain kind of) – liberal feminism: the film opens with Emmy having sex with Nick, her less professionally eminent male lover before turning back to her award-winning work on her Apple (a tiny antique Mac by today’s standards, but signalling modernity, creativity, ‘coolness’ even a hint of radicality in 1997). Conceiving Ada too keeps its discipline in the family. Emmy works from home. Home is where the terminal is. Emmy writes computer programming, cutting-edge programming requiring secrecy for the sake of this house. It all takes place ‘under the same roof’. At this historical juncture – so recent and yet so very far away now – the ‘personal computer’ could convincingly provide that privacy: there was no Facebook to archive and marketize her data, no Cloud promising endless amorphous storage, no virtual window for unknown others to access personal information – including the videos of Emmy and Nick having sex from the cameras housed in every room.⁵⁶ Emmy too projects a legatee, unleashing her from the past and leasing her to the future, though not just any future. Emmy is an observer keyed to her observations, an interested witness. Through her screen, conceived in its most normatively ideological frame as a simple window, Emmy watches Ada’s attempts to write, but without being able to sign in her own name. Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Millbank, writes footnotes for other people’s texts, long, long footnotes for Luigi Federico Menabrea, for Charles Babbage: footnotes that overstep their space, yet signed only A. A. L and liable to be edited, over-written, co-signed.57 Ada has passionate extra marital affairs. Ada writes the first computer algorithm: Ada speculates upon the creative uses to which computers might aspire beyond calculation, beyond number and beyond quantity (thus, in Freud’s aspirant terms, beyond the pleasure principle).⁵⁸ Ada panics that she will run out of time, that her work will not be done in time. Ada throws herself away, a wastage repeated by her gambling at the racetrack that started off so well, so mathematically well met, but ends in debt, debts that she could have made good if she had had more time.⁵⁹ Ada is frequently ill; her pain is held in check with opium but she bleeds too much, and, in an age of ‘curative’ blood-letting, continues to bleed all the way to death. Save, Emmy puts a stop to this overspill and transfers Ada to a place in which archives are without fever, a fortified future perfect. The computer-programming language devised by the US military and named after Ada is not the repository that Emmy has in mind. Save, Emmy restores a lost ‘mother’ of mathematics: but Ada is found, or founded, as her daughter: kept in line, no more a legator but a legatee.

Irigaray’s legacy

As presented by Irigaray, Freud’s story of Ernst’s steps towards language and ‘the symbolic order’ is not a transferable, universally translatable account.⁶⁰ It is an account of the boy’s experience, generalizable to that of all boys. ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ is thus consistent with Freud’s essay on ‘Femininity’: it repeats the absence of sexual difference such that there is only phallic masculinity and its negation, otherwise referred to by Irigaray as the Same and identified as the dialectical habit of the history of canonical Western philosophy in Speculum of the Other Woman (the substantial volume that famously led Jacques Lacan to expel her from his school of psychoanalysis, L’Ecole Freudienne).⁶¹ For Irigaray, the girl remains unaddressed (in the double sense that she is not addressed or spoken to, and she has no address of her own). If Irigaray’s own ‘Speculations’ on ‘Freud’ in the vast opening chapter of Speculum named ‘The Blind Spot in an Old Dream of Symmetry’ have been of silent benefit to Derrida (as Amy Hollywood suggests) that silence is returned in her ‘Gesture’ (i.e. neither names the other even as the sexual poetics of their work often overlap).⁶² One could surmise that she has simply not read the essays collected in The Postcard, yet her earlier essay called ‘Belief Itself’, first delivered as a paper at The Ends of Man (the 1980 Cerisy-la-Salle colloquium in honour of Derrida), amply demonstrates this not to be the case.63 In the ‘Gesture’ essay, when Irigaray mentions raising ‘this question of Ernst’s maleness one day at a Cerisy conference … someone objected that Ernst could have been a girl’.⁶⁴ Irigaray’s answer was: ‘he was a boy … it couldn’t have been a girl. Why? A girl does not do the same things when her mother goes away’.⁶⁵ In the ‘Blind Spot’ she had previously remarked, ‘No fiction, no mimetic game, is allowed the little girl if it involves herself or her relationship to (re)production. Such games are “phallic”’.⁶⁶ In ‘Belief Itself’, Irigaray opens with the pointed concern that the girl, that sexual difference in the feminine, is detained at the ‘“poste restante” or P.O. Box where messages for unknown persons with no fixed address are held, undeliverable by the usual, already coded, telecommanded, circuits.’⁶⁷

It might be thought remarkable that, for The Ends of Man, Irigaray chose to address Derrida by means of their close mutual reading of the fort/da episode rather than his deeply critical reading of Lacan in ‘Le Facteur de la Verité’.⁶⁸ In that long essay, arguing against Lacan’s formulation of signification in his essay on Edgar Allen Poe’s Purloined Letter, Derrida infamously wrote: ‘Not that the letter never arrives at its destination, but it belongs to the structure of the letter to be capable, always, of not arriving.’⁶⁹ Far from a merely formal disagreement, Derrida’s challenge to Lacan, whom he names the ‘postman’ or ‘purveyor of truth’, was that in reading the itinerary of this stolen letter, he predictably finds it ‘between the legs of the fireplace’ and lodges it within a classical suite of femininity, truth and castration.⁷⁰ Derrida continues, by way of contrast: ‘dissemination threatens the law of the signifier and of castration as the contract of truth. It broaches, breaches [entame] the unity of the signifier, that is, of the phallus.’⁷¹

Irigaray’s desire for her ‘letter’ to arrive cannot be confused with that of Lacan, since the latter’s arrival would be in the form of what she calls the Same (the negative image of the phallus rather than any kind of positive difference). That Irigaray’s letter has a red ‘signature’ again refuses this same appropriation: ‘Belief Itself’ begins with a brief account of a dream from one of her female analysands, a story that this analysand had effectively withdrawn from another analyst on grounds that no useful interpretation emerged (it was stuck at the poste restante). In the dream, when the father and the son enunciate the words of Holy Communion – ‘This is my body, this is my blood’ – the woman bleeds. Rather than repeat the scene – the seen! – of the bloody wound of castration, this dream might be consonant with Irigaray’s own frequently cited desire to jam the machinery of converting the sensible into the patriarchal economy of signs.72 Rather she will come to insist on a ‘sensible transcendental’ in which flesh and word come together without losing touch with a feminine sexual difference that cannot be said to be ‘binary’ or ‘oppositional’ in any sense. What might appear to be a frontal criticism of Derrida – the implication that he too runs the risk of repeating the negation of the feminine even as he plays with sexual differences – becomes a complex step in her dance, her descendance, even as the feminine sexual difference of which her work has often spoken is not one.

When Irigaray takes Freud at his word in her ‘Gesture in Psychoanalysis’, the substitution of reel for word for mother for self is emblematic of the boy’s compensatory manoeuvre when encountering her sexual difference. She does not refer to the context in which Freud describes this game other than the bare bones of Ernst’s use of the reel and string when his mother is away. His ‘house’ is not in view in her account. Doubling Freud, she draws on her own clinical experience to sketch the girl’s movements, speculating that these are not the same as those of the boy. Stating that she gives no specific case history account in order to ‘respect the ethics of psychoanalysis’, Irigaray says that she will refer only to ‘certain movements and actions that occur in every analysis’.⁷³ These movements refer principally to the classical architecture of the analytic environment that privileges a dissymmetrical relation of patient to analyst – one that is not face-to-face and is brokered by the couch on which the analysand reclines. ‘Disobey[ing] not only social convention but also the relation of signs to language’, the scenography breaks with attention to the present and solicits reminiscences.⁷⁴ The scene is set to work upon transference, to push for the past to erupt in such a way that it cannot be mistaken for the present – and the relationship with the analyst who has nevertheless generated this repetition in order that it might be worked through. Irigaray also notes that the asymmetry between patient and analyst, one lying and one sitting down, is a gendered formation liable to register hierarchically organized sexual connotations for the men and women that inhabit them.⁷⁵ Given the dogmatism of the horizontal as the plane of the animal and the vertical that of man apparent throughout this book, we might also understand this scene as a species of domestication (emblematized by the order to ‘lie down’).

Unlike her own decorum in never revealing particulars and persons of her analytic practice within her philosophy publications, Irigaray writes with some ambivalence, ‘Some of my male and female patients have written for themselves, without even mentioning the name of their analyst in most cases. It is true that I am a woman. Which must partly explain why I am not cited.’76 She is not recognized, has not been addressed: she has been barred from descendance, left in the poste restante. Moreover in the rare circumstance when she has mentioned ‘a few fragments’ detailing her practice, she doubts whether any of her patients could ‘recognize themselves’ anyway.⁷⁷ Again her tone is ambivalent as to whether we can assume that Irigaray congratulates herself on her ethical discretion on refusing to ‘eat the other’ for the sake of her own subsequent writerly exercise (and that congratulation could vehicle a dose of the PP).⁷⁸ Following her description of the gestures of every analysis, Irigaray gives further attention to the case of Ernst/the boy in general, and then turns to the girl. We are never told from whence this girl derives. But ‘the girl’ proliferates into ‘girls’ as the essay steps along. She, Irigaray suggests, is not confronted with an other in the mother, and thus there is no other to be managed by introjection or incorporation. In the next sentence girls bear witness to the girl in mitigation against mere speculation: ‘on the contrary, girls often set up a defensive territory that can then become creative, especially in analysis.’⁷⁹ We can speculate that these girls reflect the totality of her own clinical experience and thus reflect Irigaray’s view of girls in general as her discussion moves into recognizable figures from her previous writing (such as the lips as one possible metonymy of the sex which is not one).⁸⁰ She further draws us in as witnesses however, to the evidence that girls display in the ‘school yard’ in which they

describe a circular territory around themselves, around their bodies … Sometimes girls whirl around in silence or else they giggle, and chatter, and chant nursery rhymes. Perhaps chant is not quite the right word: they make up variants, invent phonic and syllabic games.⁸¹

Regarding Ernst, Irigaray elaborates an aspect of the game that neither Freud nor Derrida pursues: the oral gestures made as these ‘o-o-o-o’ and ‘da’ sounds are pronounced. In her account, the ‘o-o-o-o’, understood by Freud to foreshadow ‘fort’, escapes the mouth without being held back or swallowed but comes to a halt with the ‘t’.82 Da, the dental consonant, in contrast, is swallowed. The sound of closeness is introjected; the sound of distance is limited and hence mastered. Whether or not this limited incorporation holds – and Irigaray herself raises the comparative question of languages other than German – Irigaray fleshes out the boy’s activities indicating the use of his arm. Ernst both vocally and physically gestures towards his absent mother (without walking or crawling towards her, as Derrida also remarks). It is as if Ernst is ‘listening to himself’ in this early linguistic manifestation, says Irigaray.⁸³ Again she echoes Derrida but apparently without his destinerrant loophole. Speaking, gesturing, returning to himself, it is also ‘as though Ernst were driving a car or a tank’, driving ‘with his mouth, his string and his reel’.⁸⁴ Banking on a journey that will always return home, she notes that Ernst also plays the game with his mirror image: his image may disappear, but he can always reel it in. Or he believes this to be the case. For Irigaray, fort-da is the vehicle of that belief ‘that the disappearance-reappearance, inside-outside, outside-inside can be mastered, whereas in fact they can no more be mastered than the life-death watch that is our obligation from birth, if not before’.⁸⁵

The girl, we learn, deals with her ‘anorexic’ distress at the mother’s absence without substitution (and hence mastery). On the one hand, she dances and in so doing creates a space of separation, a territory, for herself. On the other hand, she plays with a doll, again in the interests of developing her own symbolic space, and again in a fashion distinct from that of the boy. Irigaray firmly draws a distinction between dolls and boys’ toys. Dolls may assist with the formation of a symbolic space but they themselves do not symbolize. The symbolized object has become just that – an object, and Irigaray has it that ‘the mother is a subject that cannot easily be reduced to an object’ for the girl.⁸⁶ This is apparently because she already knows her sexual commonality with the mother in contrast to the boy’s formation of sexual difference that leads him to objectify and instrumentalize her. Significantly, that commonality is based on the auto-affective ‘not one’ that blurs the relation between inside and out. While the girl may sing melodically to the doll or alternatively address angry words to it, Irigaray never compares this to Ernst’s subsequent vocalizations: the girl never banishes the doll with a ‘Go to the fwont!’ For the boy fort-da is defensive: making mother present again ‘protects him from disappearing into her. This return annihilates that other return that might swallow him up, take him back into that first dwelling place inside her’.87 In phrasing it thus in ‘Belief Itself’, she places the boy in the frame of speculative dialectics (annihilating the other, leaving no remainder). For the Irigaray of ‘Gesture’, feminine sexual sameness mars the mastery of the game of fort-da and thus grows out of but not away from the sensible.⁸⁸ As the same, the two of them (mother and girl) can never be decisively parted. When the girls dance, they express a spiralling or ‘whirling’ sexual gesture in distinction to the fort-da that Irigaray identifies as both linear and the analogy of both sexual penetration and its masturbatory substitute.⁸⁹ Irigaray identifies this ‘whirling’ as the ‘sexual movement characteristic of the female’.⁹⁰ Later she says that they ‘whirl not only toward or around an external sun [an external point] but also around themselves and within themselves’.⁹¹

In spite of the critique of representation at work in Irigaray in common with Derrida, is there thus, nevertheless, a repetition of fort/da in her formulation? All the girls demonstrate the feminine of which Irigaray would write. All the girls confirm the House of Irigaray, just as Ernst confirms that of Freud, even as they are both in her analytic experience and in the school yard of our own everyday lives. They are her descendance. They dance (with) Irigaray’s legacy (remembering that Derrida puns across languages on the ‘Legs de Freud’ at some length, with the leg and the legacy further embodying the problem of how Freud’s text walks and/or works [marcher]).⁹² Irigaray emancipates their movement: feminine subjects need ‘to be free to walk, walk away and walk back, however it pleases them’.⁹³ The ‘paralysis’ of hysteria ‘strikes’ her legs when her proper autoeroticism is inhibited (when the girl cannot whirl).⁹⁴ But the girls’ steps should not suffer the drag of Freud’s inability to take one step beyond the pleasure principle. Likewise a future philosophy of the feminine should suffer no erasure.

Citing Derrida in ‘Belief Itself’, Irigaray includes several paragraphs of his interpretation of Freud’s account of Ernst, including that he was a ‘good boy’.⁹⁵ Her citation, however, begins after Derrida has queried whether Ernst was a ‘normal’ boy and thus could really stand as a ‘paradigm’ for human language acquisition.⁹⁶ While Derrida and Irigaray frequently overlap as we have seen, could we say it is in Irigaray’s interest to secure the boy’s position to better offset the girl, the girls, her girls, the chorus line of her legacy?

Derrida brings Freud’s principles into contact with each other to the ruination of position – and thus the discrete field of representation – in and through the labours of the boy, which are also those of the grandfather, producing a general condition other than the one the PP tries to render apparent. From within its own grounds, the paternal line begins to reel. For Irigaray, on the one foot, Ernst remains The Boy, hell bent on mastering the mother and nailing sexual difference as that between the one and the ‘nothing to be seen’, the exemplar fetishist.97 On the other foot, the girl generates the contact zone of temporary, temporizing and spatializing moves that improvise distances and fields. In so far as this whirl is the open-ended gesture breaching inside and outside without such openness ossifying into a wound or woundedness, perhaps this could become the general condition of sexual differences. A footnote in ‘Belief Itself’ issues a warning against reinstalling sexual difference as opposition: ‘all phallic norms make sexuality devilish in the sense that this order is interposed to blur the sympathy between the sexes.’⁹⁸ The devil in this detail is the guardian of opposition. It is not the demon revenant in Derrida (and Derrida’s Freud). There, no, there, it

comes back [revient] without coming back [revenir à] to anyone, it produces simple effects of ventriloquism without origin, without emission, and without addressee. It is only posted, the post in its ‘pure’ state, a kind of mailman [facteur] without destination. Tele – without Telos.⁹⁹

That demon is of no fixed abode. What might bypass attention is the sympathy between those non-oppositional sexes that Irigaray’s footnote also lets slip. This sympathy, or affinity, might both disarm those critics who would still cry ‘essentialism’ and depose Ernst as the masculine envoy.¹⁰⁰

Migration

Figure 4.1 Bird (Conceiving Ada, 1997, Dir. Lynn Hershman-Leeson, USA)

Conceiving Ada allows Emmy to send her artificial life forms or ‘agents’ into the past in order to retrieve information. Affectionately known as ‘Bird’, Ada is given a bird, a mechanical bird.¹⁰¹ Locating a notional point of origin of Ada holding this bird in a photograph taken by Babbage, Conceiving Ada speculates that Emmy can save, hence copy, and then deploy this bird much like a homing pigeon. Let loose, a homing pigeon will only return to its source, its ‘home’. But as Emmy’s copy, the bird is a double agent; it has a second home and thus returns to Emmy. The bird – which bird? – can be sent away (fort) in order to home in on targeted addresses within Ada’s life (as vague – or perhaps as precise! – as ‘Ada’s origin’, cue the primal scene of her conception). A bird for a bird, it is sent away in order to return home (da), having retrieved the information as requested, missive accomplished. This pet-name pet-bird has a specific flight pattern. On automatic pilot, she cannot trace a random flight through the past or score her flight with one wing while erasing it with the other as with Freud’s gait in his attempt to step beyond. No, the greatest pleasure is in the return(s). Who Emmy? In the instant that she interrupts Ada’s present as an invisible voice from the future Ada abruptly asks, as if to us, to the audience in the future, ‘My mother always told me I had a devil or an angel watching me; which are you?’ Emmy says that she is ‘a friend’. Emmy: Amie. Or Emmy: Ennemie.¹⁰² It’s a close call. Friend enemy, angel devil, mother daughter. In Irigaray, the devil

blurs the future and any hint we may receive of it … Only doubles are present and represented, only reproductions, kinds of negatives, reduced prints-only the angel can give light and expansion … Everything seems to be programmed, predictable.¹⁰³

What is predictable is a safe bet. Ada repeatedly asks, ‘can you save me?’ Her plea ostensibly replaces a religious figure of redemption – to be saved from her loose ways (loose with money – with figures, debts, speculation) and to be saved from her uterine cancer (blood loss on all sides), with digital archivation (being saved in digital storage and the promise of everlasting ‘life’). Emmy responds as her fingers grace the ‘return’ key: ‘yes, I think I can.’ In the film’s closing sequences the gilded bird cage that Nick has given Emmy is in shot: inside it sit two stuffed birds.

Figure 4.2 Devil Angel (Conceiving Ada, 1997, Dir. Lynn Hershman-Leeson, USA)

The Cartesian automaticity of the bird’s return repeats – even when, diabolically when, on her deathbed in the penultimate scene, Ada finally says, no, ‘do not save me’ and that she does not want all her secrets known, does not want to be a searchable database.¹⁰⁴ Going forth at the end of the film that she expressly wishes to be her end, Ada ‘wishes to die only in [her] own fashion’, to paraphrase Freud.¹⁰⁵ Derrida repeats Freud in stronger terms: regarding the death drive, the organism wishes to ‘die properly, I am living so that I may die properly, and so that my death is my own’.¹⁰⁶ Elsewhere in this book the pernicious end game of the animal question is explored to the effect that within this tyrannical conceptual field, the animal cannot die (a thesis most famously brought to attention by Derrida in several critical accounts of the work of Martin Heidegger). In her work into the archives of Western thought regarding death, including its most canonical formations in Hegel, McCance finds that women too have been philosophically excised from a ‘proper’ death and are held to merely ‘wither away’.107 Thus, McCance is attuned to the replay of the improper death of women in Derrida’s Life Death seminars, identified in the genetics of Jacob. In that context, Jacob imports a feminized relation between bacterial cells in order to argue that death is proper only to the internal capacity of the cell, and in the absence of such capacity, the cell does not properly die. Consequently, ‘Jacob says of the mother bacterium that, once her DNA passes to her daughters, she disappears but does not die.’¹⁰⁸

But Emmy and her agents can even tap Ada’s unconscious. Unseen like a Freudian analyst, Emmy speaks like one too: ‘Tell me what you remember most’, says Emmy the analyst, the digital archivist-programmer. Ada remembers lessons with one of her first teachers of mathematics; the above board formality doubled by a lesson of ‘footsie’ under the table and her child self’s voice-over speaking of her confusion between the passion for learning and sexual passion. Prompting Ada’s transferential recollection, Emmy’s own counter-transference remains unchecked. And since we are given Emmy’s viewpoint, our own transference is also solicited – she really is speaking to us, appealing to us – not least when Ada breaks the fourth wall of the film (in a move that is something of a signature for Swinton).¹⁰⁹ Conceiving Ada is frustratingly silent on Emmy’s decision to save Ada regardless (as is extant criticism of the film). Oddly, making Ada da means making her fort, keeping her at a distance. For she is not simply made present, there! – out of thin air, or even downloaded into the computer as a document, but sent ‘into’ Emmy’s child: the child that can have access to Ada’s memories rather than simply ‘be’ Ada. Ada dies, goes away, fort, but, returns in or as the child, as Emmy’s descendant, a guaranteed legatee. Indivisible, Ada has not been lost.

Palindrome¹¹⁰

Who Ada, who dada? From PP or pépé to dada, these syllabic doubles recall the ethical dilemmas of gender in the West after the emancipation of the vote and the entry of women into public life into which Mignon Nixon has suggested that feminist art might intervene.¹¹¹ Even without the patrilineal fealty exacted textually in Derrida’s reading of Freud, Nixon notes that the latter’s essay ‘Schoolboy Psychology’ positions the interweaving of culture and history as that which is effected by the transference between fathers and sons as they manage their ambivalent relations (and as evidenced in Chapter 2 of this book).¹¹² The pre-emancipatory model of father-daughter relations ‘stunt[ed] ambivalence rather than cultivating it’, she observes, since there was no room for women to rage against their fathers.¹¹³ However, emancipation attendant upon first-wave feminism began to put women in the same authoritative positions as men and thus spurred women into effecting the same kinds of transferential exchanges, thus impacting on history under the same terms. For Nixon, the murderous tenor of the ambivalence inherent to transference is of core concern; this necessarily includes the ‘affectionate’ cases in which ‘hostility shadows the singular esteem in which the teacher or analyst is held’.¹¹⁴ We might pause on this shadow in light of what seems like a purely affectionate transference between Emmy and Ada. ‘Schoolboy Psychology’ directly echoes the cannibalistic murder of the primal father by the band of brothers of Totem & Taboo, published one year prior. Nixon reminds us of the absolute authority of the subjects that this cultural transference negotiates and asks whether the critical relation to authorial coherence in recent art made by women might inscribe a ‘new edition’ of transference. It is, however, difficult to see Conceiving Ada’s inter-feminine exchanges in a particularly new light, speculative technologies of memory transfer notwithstanding (indeed the film is at risk of performing a ‘new edition of an old desire’).¹¹⁵

The mothers of Ada and Emmy are played by the same actress (Karen Black), and played in the same deeply unpleasant unsympathetic fashion. Worse than that, while Ada is presented as being born in the wrong time, the film saves its specific terrors for the maternal.¹¹⁶ While Victorian England may have preferred childbearing to mathematics as woman’s place, the film casts the mother as the one who destroys her daughter’s letter and metonymically her uterus. When Ada’s mother intercepts this intimate letter, written to one of her lovers, it provokes Ada’s refusal to be saved by Emmy – the one who will be her future mother after all. Who is it that is ‘conceiving Ada’ anyway? On her deathbed with her mother in shot through the mirror, doubling Emmy’s screen, Ada complains that her mother ‘knows everything’ and that she feels as if her mother is trying to ‘suck her back into her womb’ no less. ‘No wonder’, she exclaims, that her ‘womb’s dissolved’! No more generation: no gesture save annihilation. Both mothers call to her and Ada addresses the ‘angel devil’ (with what punctual mark we cannot tell). It’s the maternal return that takes the rap for death, while the text, misconceived as paternal permanence, proposes a fortress archive. ‘Do not save me’: delete me. Between the devil and the deep blue sea, Ada chooses death. ‘Think of your heirs’, Emmy implores, with some ambivalence to this abrupt rupture in their transference. Ada refuses again: ‘They will have to take their own chances, like I did, life itself is a gamble, besides I don’t want all my secrets known or to be watched after I am dead.’ Ada’s final words open a loophole: ‘Death makes the fragility of life delicious: in general I am not opposed to it.’ No, Ada is not opposed to death, life death. And/but the hard drive of Conceiving Ada already has her, mimed by its digital form.

But the present is a good place to which to return: there are only proper deaths at the appointed hour, are there not? And Emmy is a good mother, is she not? The closing scene flashes forward to domestic bliss between mother-daughter and daughter-mother. It may be avant-garde, a hip artist’s warehouse, but Conceiving Ada remains homeward bound. Emmy doesn’t force hours of mathematics on young Ada: they can differentiate between playing and working. Nick is still there, somewhere. There, there. Emmy lets Ada play with her memories on the computer. But didn’t Ada’s refusal turn on not wanting everything known? Young or new Ada – what to call her? – has total recall, and Emmy watches too. Again the time period allows the fiction that this digital archive retains a private signature, can remain secret, even as we know that Emmy has already accessed the past and saved it for her personal interest. Earlier in the film when Ada remembers her life at Emmy’s analytic prompt, the voice narrating the interweaving of sexual and intellectual passion is shown, startlingly, to have been that of this child. Is this an other, Irigarayan relation, adequate to the feminine? On the surface, it appears to figure the girl’s recollection (da) of a primal scene without anxiety listened to by a mother-analyst who gives her approval. There are only angels here, Conceiving Ada would have us believe. Yet, in spite of this affectionate tone, at the same time, the shadow of cannibalism haunts their relation as the biopic of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, becomes an auto-biopic.

Absence presence

Figure 4.3 Braids (Absent Presence, 2005, Dir. Hussein Chalayan, UK/Turkey)

The viewer may not notice at first, but the beginning of Absent Presence plays backwards. Even though the film is digital and thus there is no celluloid reel to actually be rewound, the trope is nevertheless at work especially since the mirrored image at stake doubles the process of winding, unwinding, rewinding, giving the sense of repetition, losing the sense of an end. What would securely bind the primary processes? In this film Swinton plays a scientist (referred to in the credits only as the ‘Operator’) whose work is bracketed by what appears to be a daily ritual of binding her long hair into complex and headache-inducingly tight woven braids prior to work and then unravelling them at the end of the working day. We are never told on whose authority she conducts her work, with initial automaton-like obedience. Playing this sequence of Swinton unbraiding her hair in reverse gives the impression she can perform the unlikely manoeuvre of ‘upbraiding’ it, so to speak, unaided, autonomously (a fiction that digital film is ideally placed to finesse). This elaborate procedure presumes that no stray filament will infiltrate and thus threaten to tie the Operator into the operation, diluting its results. Severe, but as Freud tells us of his grandson’s game, the greatest pleasure is in the return. As Derrida puts it, ‘The movement of reappropriation is the most driven drive.’117 Ostensibly at work on the others, she must maintain herself (as such). If only the binding could continue ad infinitum, and she has enough hair to suggest as much, the Operator would remain unruffled, untroubled by any excess of energy, on the even keel of the PP. She would keep coming back to herself, only writing to herself, keep addressing the postal principle of her own death.¹¹⁸ But pleasure: it’s a bind; the Operator comes undone.

Absent Presence doesn’t content itself with an easy mirror image of Swinton’s toilette opening and closing the frames of this short film. Crucially the tone of her voice-over, the style of her address, contrasts these sequences, bringing the voice as a key operative of auto-affection into play. Unlike the Operator’s hair, which readily suggests its filamentary propensity for entanglement, voice seems to give nothing away. As Derrida informs us in his early writings, voice appears to have no material body – it appears to not appear – and thus to belong with absolute propriety to the speaker: ‘My words are ‘alive’ because they seem not to leave me, seem not to fall outside of me, outside of my breath, into a visible distance; they do not stop belonging to me, to be at my disposal “without anything accessory”.’¹¹⁹ It is thus liable to support the fantasy of presence. Use of voice-over in cinema traditionally colludes with this (dis)appearance. Absent Presence attends to this tendency and, with Derrida, repurposes writing, trace, différance in the voice.

The image of the Operator’s scrubbed face and bound hair is brutally succeeded by a close-up of soapy water, in which we will learn she is washing clothes. If there is anything odd about the laboratory mise en scène, it is the portrait of the Operator on the wall. Not a simple indexical identification of this worker, it interrupts the apparent realism with an address. This portrait shows her with index finger raised to her lips: Be quiet? Don’t tell? Mum’s the word? To whom is this silent admonition addressed if not the Operator herself?

At first there is only the sound of a ventilation system, giving texture to the air. When the image cuts from Swinton’s hair reparations to the austere grey workplace, a diegetic radio is airing what sounds like a play: a man asks, ‘more frightened than a sighted person, you mean?’ Then the Operator’s voice-over calmly strikes up and supersedes the radio. Beginning, ‘It was decided to collect clothing from a group of anonymous women donors’, the Operator’s neutral third-person scientific report relates an experiment designed to trace how the women ‘came to be who they are from traces of their DNA left behind in their garments’. The donors are known only as women from outside London, and outside England. Reporting in this form is designed to betray no bias, to erase a merely subjective inflection, adding nothing. It aims for the report to faithfully reflect the experiment, point for point. In this biopolitical environment her crisp enunciation even reflects the eugenic drive to ‘link … reproductive control to the production of “proper” phonetic speech’.120 Indeed, as outsiders, the experiment evokes the elementary condition of racism directed at the foreigner whose genetic makeup is under scrutiny. The Operator continues: ‘How much could be divined about the women, simply from their genetic makeup?’ The theological tone of ‘divination’ marks the unquestioned confidence in the evidence in preparation, the anticipation of authority. But the change in tone occurring in the final scenes is not simply about reinstating an individual – returning the person to an impersonal voice. Rather the whispering, multitracked, hesitations with which the Operator’s voice-over concludes, exposes the divisibility interior to voice itself; its so-called ‘living presence’ vacillates even in the ‘first person’. This secret place of self-address turns on itself, and it mirrors the undoing of all the mirrors – all the returns – in this film.

What sets off this derangement? At the point at which the voice-over starts to explain something specific about genetic origins, geographies and biologies, the Operator’s voice multiplies and her voices are not synchronized. Phrases such as ‘even more accurately’ surfacing in the voice tracks are counter-posed by the loss of any single sentence to audibility. Briefly her single voice-over resumes: ‘Now we extrapolate and reduce the chain of DNA which makes her her and subject it to the test of urban living.’ But this test is not visualized. Instead the Operator’s apparent frustration with the technology surfaces. The SF genre imagines a ‘wet’ computer interface, which splashes everywhere when she strikes it, rendering a ‘dry’ inversion of the opposition circulated in early cyberpunk novels in which the ‘hardware’ of technology was counter-posed by the ‘wetware’ of the body. This is intercut with what seems like an anxious fantasy in which the Operator, repositioned as a student in a lecture theatre, repeatedly asks: ‘how am I supposed to know?’¹²¹ Positioned as the subject of knowledge this worker-scientist may be heard as entering a painful irony of epistemology – how, really, are we supposed to know?¹²²

Figure 4.4 Foreigners (Absent Presence, 2005, Dir. Hussein Chalayan, UK/Turkey)

Worse: the experiments do not follow the predicted pattern. When the three volunteers return, their three interviews with the Operator are screened simultaneously and the voice-over announcing where each one really comes from is played simultaneously, magnifying the mismatches. Albeit muffled, it is just about audible that the ‘individual presumed to be Chinese, was Korean’, and similarly that the one supposed to be from France was from Slovenia, and that the urban and rural also cease to align. The three women all speak to camera, but their voices are edited out. Rather than charting a story of origins and of ends, they do not return to sender, and when the clothing is further ‘subjected to the sound frequencies of London’ and fabulously digitally reconstituted, futurist sculptures stand in place of the outsider, foreigner women. With the appearance of these sculptures comes another style change in the Operator’s voice-over. Now she whispers with palpable unease: ‘how could we reduce her to this?’ We never learn how the women view their erratic results but their distant inspection does not convey the pleasure in returns.

The last sequence has the Operator repeating anxieties about the safety of water as she unbinds her hair: ‘Water is a currency of infiltration’, her interior voice whispers. As the reflective liquid surface of the Operator’s computer, water was not supposed to add anything. As the medium in which the clothing is washed, it should only siphon away, not encipher. Water has ceased to come clean. Looking dishevelled, she splashes water back over her face, again and again. The film dwells on this in a fashion beyond function. It is the most repetitive gesture in the entire (short) film. It is noticeable that Absent Presence refrains from posing the encounter between the Operator and the outsiders in the most habitual gendered and racist terms of sexual threat (as a violation, as an intrusion and as an impending imposition upon the fiction of genetic purity perpetrated by male foreigners against ‘our’ females). Ending without further speech to remark a position or programme of the Operator, any further investment in purity has been dissolved by virtue of the disseminal water. While that investment has operated at the level of the form and assumed neutrality of the Operator, it gives way to a sensual, sensible condition in which we are all ‘wetware’. Our vulnerability is staring us in the face. As Derrida wrote on the first page of ‘Plato’s Pharmacy’:

There is always a surprise in store for the anatomy or physiology of any criticism that might think it had mastered the game, surveyed all the threads at once, deluding itself, too, in wanting to look at the text without touching it, without laying a hand on the ‘object,’ without risking-which is the only chance of entering into the game, by getting a few fingers caught—the addition of some new thread.123

Figure 4.5 Splashback (Absent Presence, 2005, Dir. Hussein Chalayan, UK/Turkey)

The double gesture

In the space of a concluding section – of coming to an end with its implied synthesis – it is impossible to close this chapter, only to speculate with the odds unknown. Who is Ada? Is Ada? Conceiving Ada holds its tongue concerning the return of the dead, says nothing about this ostensibly feminist new ‘publication’, new edition of Ada, even as the indefinite article lapping at Ada’s name, either side, continues to sign life death together. She is a kind of revenant about whom it is difficult to decide if she is dead or alive. Are there two Adas? Mathematical Ada, the adder, the one who added up the calculations of others and found them wanting; now Ada added to Ada, data aiding Ada, shored up as if without risk of any subtraction, a good bet. Unbraided at the end that is the beginning, the Operator of Absent Presence is master of no one, including herself. We might rename the film Absence Presence to take the first term out of adjectival submission: life death. Perhaps the Operator is not one, to second Irigaray. Even as this film set about without any express feminist expectation, the Operator has been touching herself all this time.

In anticipation of the following chapters of this book, we might pause on a speculative thought, as suggested by Dawne McCance when reading the La Vie La Mort seminars in light of The Animal That Therefore I Am. It is also an affirmative thought as it slips outside of oppositional logic. She writes:

if the ‘death drive’ is to be conceived as a ‘force’ inherent in all organic life, it might be understood as ‘vulnerability’ or ‘passivity’ rather than as the ‘capacity’ or ‘power’ that … is said to elevate human over nonhuman life.¹²⁴

For as soon as the ability of instinctual renunciation – the effective, time-sensitive deferral of ‘not now, but later’ in the activity of recall supposed by fort/da – was put into question, Derrida’s long deconstruction of the question of the animal troubled the horizon of phallogocentrism.