Edward W. Said
         Representing the Colozined: Anthropology's Interlocutors
         At this point I should say something about one of the frequent
            criticisms addressed to me, and to which I have always wanted to
            respond, that in the process of characterizing the production of
            Europe's inferior Others, my work is only negative polemic
            which does not advance a new epistemological approach or method,
            and expresses only desperation at the possibility of ever dealing
            seriously with other cultures. These criticisms are related to the
            matters I've been discussing so far, and while I have no
            desire to unleash a point-by-point refutation of my critics, I do
            want to respond in a way that is intellectually pertinent to the
            topic at hand.
            What I took myself to be undertaking in Orientalism was an
            adversarial critique not only of the field's perspective and
            political economy, but also of the sociocultural situation that
            makes its discourse both so possible and so sustainable.
            Epistemologies, discourses, and methods like Orientalism are
            scarcely worth the name if they are reductively characterized as
            objects like shoes, patched when worn out, discarded and replaced
            with new objects when old and unfixable. The archival dignity,
            institutional authority, and patriarchal longevity of Orientalism
            should be taken seriously because in the aggregate these traits
            function as a worldview with considerable political force not
            easily brushed away as so much epistemology. Thus Orientalism in my
            view is a structure erected in the thick of an imperial contest
            whose dominant wing it represented and elaborated not only as
            scholarship but as a partisan ideology. Yet Orientalism hid the
            contest beneath its scholarly and aesthetic idioms. These things
            are what I was trying to show, in addition to arguing that there is
            no discipline, no structure of knowledge, no institution or
            epistemology that can or has ever stood free of the various
            sociocultural, historical, and political formations that give
            epochs their peculiar individuality.
             
            Edward W. Said is Parr Professor of English and Comparative
            Literature at Columbia University. His most recent contribution to
             is "An Ideology of Difference" (Autumn
            1985).
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Editor's Introduction: Essays toward a New Art History
         The following articles are best described as essays
            "in," not "on," the New Art History. They
            exemplify what we regard as some of the most interesting new
            directions in the practical understanding of art: the discourse of
            art historical description (David Summers); the materiality of the
            pictorial surface (Charles Harrison); the role of genre (Norman
            Bryson); the relation of visual representation and language (Robert
            Morris, Jan Baetens, and W. J. T. Mitchell); and the mediation of
            social and economic history through painting (Elizabeth Helsinger).
            These essays constitute a kind of first installment of work
            resulting from out call for papers on "The Disciplines of the
            Eye." This call continues to go out, and we shall welcome
            contributions that attempt to take stock of current thinking in the
            visual arts in a more general way essays "on" as
            well as "in" the patterns of thought emerging in the
            study of visual representation.
Norman Bryson
         Chardin and the Text of Still Life
         It can sometimes be that when a great artist works in a particular
            genre, what is done within that genre can make one see as if for
            the first time what that genre really is, why for centuries the
            genre has been important, what its logic is, and what, in the end,
            that genre is for.I want to suggest that this is so in the case of
            Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, and in the case of still life.
            Chardin's still life painting can reveal, as almost no other
            classical painting of still life can, what is at stake in still
            life, and what is that made still life one of the enduring
            categories of classical European painting. Understanding Chardin
            can force us right back to the fundamentals of the genre, to still
            life's origins in antiquity, and to the extraordinary
            development of the genre in the seventeenth century. Here I will be
            trying to investigate the genre of still life in the light of what
            Chardin's work reveals about it. In a sense I will be
            treating hardin as a critic, and not only as a painter, though
            everything he has to say about the genre is said in paint, and not
            as argument. If we can see Chardin's work with eyes fresh
            enough, we can let Chardin reveal to us still life's inner
            logic, its specific problems and solutions, and not only his
            solutions, but the solutions other still life painters look
            towards. In fact we probably have to turn to a painter to
            understand what still life is concerned with. It has always been
            the least discussed and the least theorised of the classical
            genres, and even today it is hard to find discussions of still life
            at a level of sophistication comparable to that of history
            painting, landscape, or portraiture. It is the genre farthest from
            language, and so the hardest for discourse to reach. There is no
            obvious tradition of theoretical work on still life, and in these
            circumstances it is appropriate to turn to a painter's
            practice for guidance. But first I need to make some preliminary
            observations about a striking and defining feature of the genre:
            its exclusion of the human form, and its seeming assault on the
            value and prestige of the human subject.
             
            Norman Bryson is professor of comparative literature at the
            University of Rochester and editor of the series Cambridge New Art
            History and Criticism.He is the author of Tradition and Desire:
            From David to Delacroix (1984) and the editor of Calligram: Essays
            in New Art History from France (1988). He is currently completing a
            study of still life painting, Looking at the Overlooked (1989).
Elizabeth Helsinger
         Constable: The Making of a National Painter
         John Constable is one of England's best-known landscape
            painters and greatest artists. While few will object to this
            statement, what it means will depend on when it was made. In the
            150 years since his death in 1837, the terms of Constable's
            greatness have shifted several times. In the nineteenth century his
            scenes of the Stour Valley in Suffolk were valued as images of a
            particularly English countryside: the placid river with its locks
            and barges, great overhanging trees, and distant green water-
            meadows beneath massive cloudy skies. In this century, though the
            popular conviction of his Englishness persists, Constable is better
            known as "The Natural Painter."1 As modernism rewrote
            the history of art, Constable was rediscovered as the man who
            excited Eugène Delacroix and other French artists in the 1820s: the
            natural painter whose freedom of technique, color, and chiaroscuro
            suggested a new way of representing the truth of landscape. The
            happy accident of his reception in France in the 1820s anchors
            English claims to participate in the development of an
            international style that moves through impressionism toward the
            more purely painterly and formal values of modernism. This
            Constable probably still dominates contemporary critical
            discussions of his work: the truthful student of nature who is also
            a painter's painter.2 There is more than a little chauvinism
            in this view of Constable, but it is the national feeling of a less
            confident age, always looking over its shoulder to other countries
            like France.
             
            1. This is the title of Graham Reynolds' seminal book,
            Constable, the Natural Painter (London, 1965).
            2. See, for example, Malcolm Cormack's recent book, Constable
            (New York and Oxford, 1986); hereafter abbreviated C.
             
            Elizabeth Helsinger is professor of English at the University of
            Chicago and coeditor of .Her Ruskin and the Art of
            the Beholder was published in 1982. This essay is part of a book in
            progress on representations of the rural scene in Victorian
            England.
Jan Baetens
         The Intermediate Domain, or the Photographic Novel and_the_Problem
            of Value
         In recent years, the problem of value has been drastically pushed
            away towards the periphery of the discipline of literary studies.
            More and more, this fact has come to be experienced as a source of
            frustration and misunderstandings.1 In this article, I would like
            to show the great extent to which a value-oriented approach is in
            fact inevitable. By the same token, however, I will also indicate
            the disturbing ambiguities that the consideration of the value-
            dimension may reveal. The example I will use for my demonstration,
            the case of the French photographic novel (figs. 1-3), is fairly
            straightforward (as all examples ought to be), but at the same time
            it betrays my slightly polemical intentions, since this genre is
            undoubtedly held in low esteem both within and without the domain
            of literary scholarship.
            It seems reasonable to assume that our twentieth century, with its
            turbulent successions of competing fashions and trends, has
            radically affected the concept of value, that is, the dialectical
            game of valorization and devalorization. The notion of value has of
            course become subject to "devaluations" on the content-
            level, as the mixtures and the instabilities of the criteria called
            on clearly lattest.2 In addition and more
            important value has been disobjectified,that is, snatched
            from the object of the judgment and located on the side of the
            judging subject.
             
            Jan Baetens teaches French at the Vlaamse Economische Hogeschool
            (Flemish High School for Economic Studies). He is the author of
            three books: Aux frontiers du récit: "Fable" de Robert
            Pinget comme "nouveau nouveau roman"(1987); Hergé
            écrivain: microlectures de Tintin(forthcoming); and Les Mesures de
            l'excès: notes pour un traverse de "Eglogues" de
            Renaud Camus et al. (forthcoming). He is currently at work on the
            various aspects of grammatextuality in literature and the comics.
Charles Harrison
         On the Surface of Painting
         Lucas van Valckenborch's Winter Landscape (fig. 1) hangs in
            the Kinsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It was painted four hundred
            years ago as one of a set of the four seasons. Measured by sales of
            reproductions, it is one of the most popular paintings in the
            museum, though it is by no means the most distinguished example of
            the genre to which it belongs. The picture is a snow scene. In the
            long series of represented planed that recede from foreground to
            horizon, fallen snow covers fields and roves. Across the surface of
            the canvas and scarcely diminishing in scale from bottom to top,
            touches of white paint represent falling snow. It is not a small
            painting, and these are not mere feathery indications, but palpable
            dabs from a loaded brush. To a taste fed on Modernist
            painting or, for the pedantic, to a prejudice fuelled by
            Modernist accounts of painting it is by virtue of this
            surprising frankness that the painting achieves more than mere
            anecdotal charm. It is not the illusion of depth in the picture
            that holds our sophisticated attention, nor the atmospheric re-
            creation of a leaden sky, nor do we admit to being engaged by the
            over-rehearsed animation of the peasants. What gives us pleasurable
            pause is the strange and distinctive form of skepticism about
            appearances that is set in play when the allure of imaginative
            depth meets resistance from the vividness of decorated surface.5
             
            5. Wollheim (Painting as an Art,p. 21) uses the term
            &lsquo;twofoldness' for &lsquo;this strange duality of
            seeing the marked surface, and of seeing something in the
            surface.' In his account this experience leads to a
            thematizing of the image, which &lsquo;ushers in
            representation.' Translated into his terminology, my
            suggestion would be that the Winter Landscape can be seen as
            catering to a Modernistic taste for the thematizing of
            &lsquo;twofoldness' itself.
             
            Charles Harrison is staff tutor and reader in the history of art at
            the Open University. He is the author of English Art and Modernism
            1900-1939 (1981), and he is now completing a second volume, English
            Art and Modernism 1940-1985.He is co-author (with Fred Orton) of A
            Provisional History of Art &amp; Language (1982), and his most
            recent book Essays on Art and Language is due out in
            1989. He has been associated with the Art &amp; Language group
            since 1971 and is editor of the journal Art-Language.
Robert Morris
         Words and Images in Modernism and Postmodernism
         To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic
            second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of
            language. To inquire into the relations between image and language
            is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I
            would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in
            the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past
            art. Certainly the term "image" has had a long and
            embattled history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be
            in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones?
            What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions
            and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the
            perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the
            mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical
            discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in
            the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to
            linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images
            that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such
            relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics.
            Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues
            and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from
            object.
            Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an
            entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a
            clarity of distinctions between the imagistic (whatever it is) and
            the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are
            inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art
            in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement.
             
            Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A
            collection of his writings is forthcoming.
W. J. T. Mitchell
         Ut Pictura Theoria:Abstract Painting and the Repression of_Language
         This may be an especially favorable moment in intellectual history
            to come to some understanding of notions like
            "abstraction" and "the abstract," if only
            because these terms seem so clearly obsolete, even antiquated, at
            the present time. The obsolescence of abstraction is exemplified
            most vividly by its centrality in a period of cultural history that
            is widely perceived as being just behind us, the period of
            modernism, ranging roughly from the beginning of the twentieth
            century to the aftermath of the Second World War.1 Abstract art is
            now a familiar feature of our cultural landscape; it has become a
            monument to an era that is passing from living memory into history.
            The experiments of cubism and abstract expressionism are no longer
            "experimental" or shocking: abstraction has not been
            associated with the artistic avant-garde for at least a quarter of
            a century, and its central masterpieces are now firmly entrenched
            in the tradition of Western painting and safely canonized in our
            greatest museums. That does not mean that there will be no more
            abstract paintings, or that the tradition is dead; on the contrary,
            the obsolescence we are contemplating is in a very precise sense
            the precondition for abstraction's survival as a tradition
            that resists any possible assault from an avant-garde. Indeed, the
            abstract probably has more institutional and cultural power as a
            rearguard tradition than it ever did as an avant-garde overturning
            of tradition. For that very reason its self-representations need to
            be questioned more closely than ever, especially its account of its
            own nature and history. This seems important, not just to set the
            record straight about what abstract art was, but to enable critical
            and artistic experimentation in the present, and a more nuanced
            account of both pre-and postmodern at, both of which are in danger
            of being swallowed up by the formulas (and reactions against the
            formulas) of abstract formalism. If art and criticism are to
            continue to play an oppositional and interventionist role in our
            time, passive acceptance and reproduction of a powerful cultural
            tradition like abstract art will simply not do.
             
            1. I define modernism and "the age of abstraction" here
            in familiar art historical terms, as a period extending from
            Kandinsky and Malevich to (say) Jasper Johns and Morris Louis.
            There are other views of this matter which would trace modernism
            back to the emergence of an avant-garde in the 1840s (T. J. Clark),
            or to romanticism (Stanley Cavell), or to the eighteenth century
            (Robert Rosenblum, Michael Fried). My claim would be that
            "the abstract" as such only becomes a definitive slogan
            for modernism with the emergence of abstract painting around 1900.
             
            W. J. T. Mitchell,editor of ,is professor of
            English and a member of the Committee on Art and Design at the
            University of Chicago. His most recent book is Iconology: Image,
            Text, Ideology.
David Summers
         "Form," Nineteenth-Century Metaphysics, and the Problem of Art
            Historical Description
         It will be useful to consider briefly how the ideas surrounding
            "form" work in practice. Such ideas rapidly developed
            to a high stage of sophistication, subtlety, and complexity, but
            they did not, I believe, stray from the foundations I have tried to
            indicate for them. Let us consider the example of Wilhelm
            Worringer, who, like Alois Riegl, found it preferable to discuss
            ornament rather than images because ornament is a purer expression
            of form and therefore provides a less encumbered view into
            form's spiritual meaning. Concerning interlace ornament of
            the first millennium in Northern Europe, Worringer wrote that it is
            "impossible to mistake the restless life contained in this
            tangle of lines"; it is "the decisive formula for the
            whole medieval North." The "need for empathy of this
            inharmonious people" requires the "uncanny pathos which
            attaches to the animation of the inorganic"; the "inner
            disharmony and unclarity of these peoples … could have borne no
            clearer fruit."4 Here forms mostly lines and edges and
            their relations are compared to a natural outgrowth, a fruit,
            and are interpreted in such a way as to permit the characterization
            of all peoples among whom artifacts with such forms were made and
            used. The range of formal style becomes coextensive with the range
            of the deep principles of the worldview of races, nations, and
            epochs.
            It is not necessary to follow the ideas of form and expression to
            quite the hypertrophied consequences Worringer did, although many
            authors have done so and many more have done so less
            systematically. The important thing for my purposes is the pattern
            of inference from form to historical statements and conclusion.
             
            4. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to
            the Psychology of Style,trans. Michael Bullock (Cleveland and New
            York, 1967), p. 77.
             
            David Summers is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of the History of
            Art at the University of Virginia. The author of Michelangelo and
            the Language of Art (1981) and The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance
            Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (1987), he is currently
            writing a book to be titled The Defect of Distance: Toward a
            University History of Art.
Arnold I. Davidson
         Questions Concerning Heidegger: Opening the Debate
         Through the thickets of recent debates, I take two facts as clear
            enough starting points. The first is that Heidegger's
            participation in National Socialism, and especially his remarks and
            pronouncements after the war, were, and remain, horrifying. The
            second is that Heidegger remains of the essential philosophers of
            our century; Maurice Blanchot testifies for several generations
            when he refers to the "veritable intellectual shock"
            that the reading of Being and Time produced in him.5 And Emmanuel
            Levinas, not hesitating to express his reservations about
            Heidegger, can nevertheless bring himself to say that a person
            "who undertakes to philosophize in the twentieth century
            cannot not have gone through Hiedegger's philosophy, even to
            escape it."6 In this century, perhaps only Ludwig
            Wittgenstein has had a comparable impact and influence on
            philosophy. I do not mean to deny that one can reject the over
            seventy volumes of Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe as worthless,
            that one can, as with Wittgenstein, find that his work is obscure,
            indulgent, impossible to read, that nothing in it contributes to
            philosophy. But both Heidegger and Wittgenstein write in
            anticipation of this reaction, recognizing that their desires,
            differently articulated, to overcome philosophy will help to
            determine how their writing is received. Stanley Cavell's
            characterization of Wittgenstein's Philosophical
            Investigations describes (not by chance) Heidegger as well:
            Philosophical Investigations,like the major modernist works of the
            past century at least, is, logically speaking, esoteric. That is,
            such works seek to split their audience into insiders and outsiders
            (and split each member of it); hence they create the particular
            unpleasantness of cults (at best as a specific against the
            particular unpleasantness of indifference or intellectual
            promiscuousness, combating partialness by partiality); hence demand
            for their sincere reception the shock of conversion.7
            When combined with Heidegger's political engagement, the
            particular unpleasantness of cults and indifference are more than
            joined. Thus it can seem as though one must either exculpate
            Heidegger, explain away his relation to Nazism as an aberration
            from the outside, or reject his thought entirely, declare that his
            books should no longer be read. In an attempt to begin to confront
            these issues,  is publishing this symposium.
             
            5. Maurice Blanchot, "Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from
            Maurice Blanchot to Catherine David," trans. Paula Wissing,
            p. 479 of this issue.
            6. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with
            Philippe Nemo,trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, 1985), p. 42.
            See also the last line of Gadamer, " &lsquo;Back from
            Syracuse?' " p. 430.
            7. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism,
            Morality, and Tragedy (New York and Oxford, 1979), p. xvi;
            hereafter abbreviated CR.
             
            Arnold I. Davidson,a coeditor of ,is associate
            professor of philosophy and member of the Committees on General
            Studies in the Humanities and on the Conceptual Foundations of
            Science at the University of Chicago. His most recent contribution
            to  is "Sex and the Emergence of
            Sexuality" (Autumn 1987).
Hans-Georg Gadamer
         "Back from Syracuse?"
         It has been claimed, out of admiration for the great thinker, that
            his political errors have nothing to do with his philosophy. If
            only we could be content with that! Wholly unnoticed was how
            damaging such a "defense" of so important a thinker
            really is. And how could it be made consistent with the fact that
            the same man, in the fifties, saw and said things about the
            industrial revolution and technology that today are still truly
            astonishing for their foresight?
            In any case: no surprise should be expected from those of us who,
            for fifty years, have reflected on what dismayed us in those days
            and separated us from Heidegger for many years: no surprise when we
            hear that in 1933 and for years previous, and for how long
            after? he "believed" in Hitler. But Heidegger was
            also no mere opportunist. If we wish to dignify his political
            engagement by calling it a "standpoint," it would be
            far better to call it a political "illusion," which had
            notably little to do with political reality. If Heidegger later, in
            the face of all realities, would again dream his dream from those
            days, the dream of a "people's religion"
            [Volksreligion], the later version would embrace his deep
            disappointment over the actual course of affairs. But he continued
            guarding that dream and kept silent about it. Earlier, in
            1933 and 1934, he thought he was following his dream, and
            fulfilling his deepest philosophical mission, when he tried to
            revolutionize the university from the ground up. It was for that
            that he did everything that horrified us at that time. For him the
            sole issue was to break the political influence of the church and
            the tenacity of academic bossdom. Even Ernst Jünger's vision
            of "the worker" [der Arbeiter] was given a place beside
            his own ideas about overcoming the metaphysical tradition via the
            reawakening of Being. Later, as is known, Heidegger wandered all
            the way to his radical talk of the end of philosophy. That was his
            "revolution."
             
            Hans-Georg Gadamer is professor emeritus of philosophy at the
            University of Heidelberg. His books include Truth and Method,
            Philosophical Hermeneutics, The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
            Aristotelian Philosophy,and The Relevance of the Beautiful and
            Other Essays. John McCumber,associate professor of philosophy at
            Northwestern University, is the author of Poetic Interaction:
            Language, Freedom, Reason (forthcoming).
Jürgen Habermas
         Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a_German
            Perspective
         From the perspective of a contemporary German reader, one
            consideration is particularly important from the start.
            Illumination of the political conduct of Martin Heidegger cannot
            and should not serve the purpose of a global depreciation of his
            thought. As a personality of recent history, Heidegger comes, like
            every other such personality, under the judgment of the historian.
            In Farias' book as well, actions and courses of conduct are
            presented that suggest a detached evaluation of Heidegger's
            character. But in general, as members of a later generation who
            cannot know how we would have acted under conditions of a political
            dictatorship, we do well to refrain from moral judgments on actions
            and omissions from the Nazi era. Karl Jaspers, a friend and
            contemporary of Heidegger, was in a different position. In a report
            that the denazification committee of the University of Freiburg at
            the end of 1945, he passed judgment on Heidegger's
            "mode of thinking": it seemed to him "in its
            essence unfree, dictatorial, uncommunicative."7 This judgment
            is itself no less informative about Jaspers than about Heidegger.
            In making evaluations of this sort Jaspers, as can be seen from his
            book on Friedrich Schelling, was guided by the strict maxim that
            whatever truth a philosophical doctrine contains must be mirrored
            in the mentality and lifestyle of the philosopher. This rigorous
            conception of the unity of work and person seems to me inadequate
            to the autonomy of thought and, indeed, to the general history of
            the reception and influence of philosophical thought. I do not mean
            by this to deny all internal connection between philosophical works
            and the biographical contexts from which they come or to
            limit the responsibility attached to an author, who during his
            lifetime can always react to unintended consequences of his
            utterances.
             
            7. Ott, "Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus,"
            p. 65.
             
            Jürgen Habermas is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Frankfurt. His most recent books include the two-volume work Theory
            of Communicative Action (1984) and The Philosophical Discourse of
            Modernity: Twelve Lectures (1987). John McCumber is an associate
            professor of philosophy at Northwestern University. He is the
            author of Poetic Interaction: Language, Freedom, Reason
            (forthcoming).
Jacques Derrida
         Of Spirit
         I shall speak of ghost [revenant], of flame and of ashes.
            And of what, for Heidegger, avoiding means.
            What is avoiding? Heidegger on several occasions uses the common
            word Vermeiden:to avoid, to flee, to dodge. What might he have
            meant when it comes to "spirit" or the
            "spiritual"? I specify immediately: not spirit or the
            spiritual but Geist, geistig, geistlich,for this question will be,
            through and through, that of language. Do these German words allow
            themselves to be translated? In another sense: are they avoidable?
            Sein und Zeit (1927): what does Heidegger say at that time? He
            announces and he prescribes. He warns [avertit]: a certain number
            of terms will have to be avoided (vermeiden). Among them, spirit
            (Geist). In 1953, more than twenty-five years later and this
            was not just any quarter-century in the great text devoted to
            Georg Trakl, Heidegger notes that Trakl always took care to avoid
            (vermeidenagain) the word geistig.And, visibly, Heidegger approves
            him in this; he thinks the same. But this time, it is not Geist nor
            even geistlich that is to be avoided, but geistig.
            How are we to delimit the difference, and what has happened? What
            of this meantime? How are we to explain that in twenty-five years,
            between these two warning signals ("avoid,"
            "avoid using"), Heidegger made a frequent, regular,
            marked (if not remarked) use of all this vocabulary, including the
            adjective geistig?And that he often spoke not only of the word
            "spirit" but, sometimes yielding to the emphatic mode,
            in the name of spirit?
             
            Jacques Derrida is Directeur d'Études at the École des Hautes
            Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and also teaches at the
            University of California, Irvine. His most recent contribution to
             is "Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a
            Shell: Paul de Man's War" (Spring 1988). An English
            translation of De l'espirit: Heidegger et la question is
            forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press. Geoff
            Bennington,author of Lyotard: Writing the Event,is a lecturer in
            French at the University of Sussex. Rachel Bowlby,author of
            Virginia Woolf: Feminist Destinations,is a lecturer in English at
            the University of Sussex.
Maurice Blanchot
         Thinking the Apocalypse: A Letter from Maurice Blanchot_to
            Catherine David
         I prefer to put this in a letter to you instead of writing an
            article that would lead one to believe that I have any authority to
            speak on the subject of what has, in a roundabout way, become the
            H. and H. affair (just as there was Luchaire affair, a Chaumet
            affair, and so on). In other words, a cause of extreme seriousness,
            already discussed many times although certainly endless in nature,
            has been taken up by a storm of media attention, which has brought
            us to the lowest of passions, intense emotions, and even violence.
            I understand why people are talking about Victor Farias, who has
            contributed some unpublished information with a polemical
            intent, it is true, that does not help one to appreciate its true
            value. But how has it happened that Philippe Lacoue-
            Labarthe's book, published in 1987, was greeted by a silence
            that I am perhaps the first to break?1 It is because he avoids
            anecdotal accounts, all the while citing and situating most of the
            facts mentioned by Farias. He is severe and rigorous. He lays
            essential questions before us.
             
            1. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La Fiction du politique: Heidegger,
            l'art et la politique(Paris, 1987). I also cite Lacoue-
            Labarthe's book, La Poésie comme experience (Paris, 1986),
            devoted to Paul Celan.
             
            Maurice Blanchot,one of France's preeminent writers, has
            written, among many other books, The Last Man, Death Sentence, The
            Madness of the Day,and The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary
            Essays.Paula Wissing,a free-lance translator and editor, has
            recently translated Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in
            Their Myths?
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
         Neither an Accident nor a Mistake
         Something … happened … in the first half of this century, and the
            second half, hovering between nightmare and parody, is only its
            shadow. Even so we must take its measure. Not on a small scale,
            based on the last three or four centuries…. But since philosophy,
            even in its possibility, is at stake, the true assessment,
            incalculable as it is, of the entire history of the West is needed.
            And that is another matter altogether.
            We know that this other matter was, at the time, the Heidegger
            affair…. Since Nietzsche no thinker has delved so deeply and so far
            into the question of the essence of philosophy (and consequently,
            the essence of thought), nor has there been anyone who has opened a
            dialogue of such breadth and rigor with the tradition of the West.
            Nonetheless, a detail concerning this subject requires our
            attention: to subscribe, as I do, to Heidegger's theses (and
            particularly to his theses about philosophy), or even to grant a
            primary place to his thought, does not amount to any kind of
            declaration or profession of "Heideggerianism," as it
            is called…. Strictly speaking, the idea of a
            "Heideggerianism" is meaningless. It is not out of
            coyness or inconsistency that Heidegger constantly reminded us that
            "there is no philosophy of Heidegger." This clearly was
            an expression of his own question in condensed form: the question
            of Being could not in any way produce a new thesis on Being or,
            even less, give rise to any sort of "concept of the
            world." …
             
            Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe teaches philosophy at the University of
            Strasbourg. His books include The Literary Absolute (with Jean-Luc
            Nancy), Le Sujet de la philosophie, L'imitation des
            moderns,and, most recently, La Fiction du politique,forthcoming in
            an English translation from Basil Blackwell Press. Paula Wissing is
            a free-lance translator and editor. She has recently translated
            Paul Veyne's Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
Emmanuel Levinas
         As If Consenting to Horror
         I learned very early, perhaps even before 1933 and certainly after
            Hitler's huge success at the time of his election to the
            Reichstag, of Heidegger's sympathy toward National Socialism.
            It was the late Alexandre Koyré who mentioned it to me for the
            first time on his return from a trip to Germany. I could not doubt
            the news, but took it with stupor and disappointment, and also with
            the faint hope that it expressed only the temporary lapse of a
            great speculative mind into practical banality. It cast a shadow
            over my firm confidence that an unbridgeable distance forever
            separated the delirious and criminal hatred voiced by Evil on the
            pages of Mein Kampf from the intellectual vigor and extreme
            analytical virtuosity displayed in Sein und Zeit,which had opened
            the field to a new type of philosophical inquiry.
            Could one question the incomparable impression produced by this
            book, in which it immediately became apparent that Heidegger was
            the interlocutor and equal of the greatest those very
            few founders of European philosophy? that here was someone,
            this seemed obvious, all modern thought would soon have to answer?
             
            Emmanuel Levinas has been professor of philosophy at the École
            Normale Supérieure Israélite de Paris and at the University of
            Paris I (Sorbonne). Among his books that have been translated into
            English are Totality and Infinity, Ethics and Infinity,and
            Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence. Paula Wissing,a free-lance
            translator and editor, has recently translated Paul Veyne's
            Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?
