And indeed, it has been a profound joy to work with J. Hillis Miller, I consider my encounter with him and his work a blessing of my life! And his on camera persona simply emanates warmth, wisdom, intelligence and humor. He mitigates not only the "darker sides of Deconstruction" but also the darker side of life! Just consider the anecdote (this will be in the film) he tells how he and his wife Dorothy decided where to be buried. "We knew that people DO die in California, but we could not think of us being buried there!" Hillis' stories are full of such anecdotes and warm memories of his friends. And since you started with the quote from "The Critic as Host," may I say how great a host that critic, J. Hillis Miller is? Both my cameraman and I were treated royally by Hillis and his wife Dorothy, and made available their homes for our filming, upward of forty or fifty hours to include the prep time, us the intruders with our cumbersome equipment, questions, imposing on their time, moving the furniture around, etc. Hillis is an exceptionally generous host. He in fact allowed us to be hosts in his own house.

Some of the decisions regarding the choice of the filming shot close up for most of the time during the interviews, were motivated by the sense that Hillis has a great cinematic presence, and that the most interesting drama in the film is the one played out on his face, all else is secondary! I had a long discussion with my cameraman, Georg Koszulinsky, before we started, regarding what kind of shot format should be used. I wanted to capture that spirit, wit, humor, and a sense of serene wisdom which he emanates in real life, so we set on a close up, at rare times extreme close up, and pulling back to medium close when we wanted to underscore some point he was making, and show him in the environment of his library. I am glad that you think we managed to make those qualities come across.

Part 2

#### *Chapter 1*

#### Sarah Dillon

### "Talking about the same questions but at another rhythm": Deconstruction and Film

What is the relationship between deconstruction and film? How, where and when do they encounter each other? What is there intelligible to say about those encounters and how might we go about saying it? In *The Medium is the Maker* (2009), J. Hillis Miller describes Jacques Derrida's reading strategy—and thus, of course, his philosophical thought, since the two practices are simultaneous—as a process of "'micrological' attention" (70). Derrida, Miller says, "looks carefully at tiny, apparently insignificant, details of language or gesture. These are usually, in one way or another, tropes" (70). According to Miller, "it is a big mistake, Derrida believes, ever to rise above these particularities to some abstract conceptual level" (70). I want to go about answering my opening questions then, not on the level of the abstract or the theoretically general, but by focusing upon the particular: both a particular film, Dragan Kujundžić's *The First Sail* (2011); and a particular trope, that of rhythm. Rhythm serves here, as tropes so often uncannily do, in a doubled capacity: both as the foci for a particular analysis, here, of the relationship between deconstruction and film; and as the tropic signifier of the relationship between the general and the particular. Tropes invariably carry this self-referential function—in a rhythmic feedback loop the particular trope tropes the general trope of which it is, however, but one example.1 In *Echographies of Television* (2002), Derrida asserts that "between the most general logos (the greatest predictability) and the most unpredictable singularities

1 See, for instance, my work with the eponymous trope in *The Palimpsest*, in particular, Chapter 4 "On Poetry and Metaphor."

comes the intermediate schema of *rhythm*" (16)—rhythm allows us to move between the general and the particular, hence my specific attention to rhythm will act as a medium for more general observations.

### Shared Spectrality

Deconstruction's explicit statements on film, and teletechnologies in general—found in the writings of both Derrida and Miller—identify the shared embededness of deconstruction and film in the logic of spectrality. The most explicit statement of this takes place, appropriately, on film, during Derrida's cameo appearance in Ken McMullen's *Ghost Dance* (1983) in which Derrida plays himself playing himself. In an improvised response to the actress Pascale Ogier's question, "Do you believe in ghosts?" Derrida observes that "the cinema is the art of ghosts, a battle of phantoms … It's the art of allowing ghosts to come back." He gives voice to his belief that "ghosts are part of the future and that the modern technology of images, like cinematography and telecommunication, enhances the power of ghosts and their ability to haunt us. In fact, it's because I wished to tempt the ghosts out, that I agreed to appear in a film." We find similar observations throughout Derrida's work on technology, for example in "The Ghost Dance," an interview in *Public* in 1989, where Derrida reiterates that "the experience of ghosts … is accentuated, accelerated by modern technologies like film, television, the telephone. These technologies inhabit, as it were, a phantom structure. Cinema is the art of phantoms" (61).2 For deconstruction, the logic of spectrality—both the noncontemporaneity of the present with itself and the open possibility of the phantasmatic return of the past and arrival of the future—is an absolute necessity. As Derrida says in *Echographies of Television*, "without this possible coming-back, and if we refuse to acknowledge its irreducible originality, we are deprived of memory, heritage, justice, of everything that has value beyond life and by which the dignity of life is measured" (23). As the science of ghosts, as the medium of that spectral return, film bears an essential affinity with deconstruction. More than this, in fact, film takes its place alongside such terms as "*difference*," "parergon," "writing," "the

2 A further iteration of this theme can be found in *Echographies of Television* (see esp. pp. 117-20 in which he discusses the scene in *Ghost Dance* cited above).

supplement," "woman," as yet another figure or mechanism that performs Derrida's deconstruction of the phallogocentrism of Western thought. Derrida says as much to Steigler in *Echographies of Television* when he acknowledges that "the way in which I had tried to define writing implied that it was already, as you noted, a teletechnology, with all that this entails of an original expropriation" (37).

And yet, film is not writing, or at least not in the non-arche sense of speech and writing dependent on language. Rather, the uniqueness or singularity of film is that its essence is non-linguistic.3 As Derrida remarks in an interview with Brunette and Wills entitled "The Spatial Arts" (1994),

if there is a specificity to the cinematic medium, it is foreign to the word. That is to say that even the most talkative cinema supposes a reinscription of the word within a specific cinematic element not governed by the word. If there is something specific in cinema or video—without speaking of the differences between video and television—it is the form in which discourse is put into play, inscribed or situated, without in principle governing the work. (13)

If, as Derrida says, film puts discourse into play, but is not governed by it, what, then, is that "specific cinematic element not governed by the

3 This may in fact be why neither Derrida nor Miller has performed a deconstruction of a filmic text. No film has provoked these readers by its strangeness, by its otherness, by that impenetrability to which Hillis Miller refers in *The First Sail* when talking about reading literature. No film has placed that demand on them to respond, in the same way in which literary and philosophical texts have, to tease out its play and its alterity. Derrida may insist throughout his work that "the most effective deconstruction … is one that deals with the nondiscursive, or with discursive institutions that don't have the form of a written discourse" (Brunette and Wills, "The Spatial Arts" 14), but there is no doubt that Derrida and Miller work at their best, at their most productive and insightful, when riffing off a written text. The filmic text simply does not, as we now colloquially put it, "do it for them." That does not mean, of course, that one cannot perform a deconstructive reading of a film, but rather that that task falls to those who inherit deconstruction. I venture such a reading of *The First Sail* below. For further examples see my reading of *My Life Without Me* in "Cinematic Incorporation"; the performative chapters of Peter Brunette and David Wills' *Screen/Play* (1989) and Robert Smith's brief but excellent reading of *Jurassic Park* in "Deconstruction and Film" (2000).

word"? The answer is not the image, but rhythm. The image in stasis is photography; the image in movement is film. And that movement is rhythmic, whether it be regular, flowing, progressive, or jarring; whether the film is produced with mellifluous continuity editing or discordant crosscutting.

### Rhythm

Deconstruction and film bear a joint relationship to the non-discursive rhythm that is at once essential to, but wholly other than, language. As Brian Massumi says, "rhythm carries the force of the phrase, above and beyond its structure and meaning" ("Floating the Social" 42).4 In *Versions of Pygmalion* (1990), reading Heinreich von Kleist's essay "On the Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts While Speaking" (1805/6), Miller notes this paramount importance of rhythm to speech and writing:

A series of syllables without rhythmical emphasis and without the articulations signaled in written language by spaces and by marks of punctuation—dashes, commas, colons, semicolons, underlinings, capitalizations, quotation marks, the period at the end—is meaningless. A series of words in a foreign language pronounced with approximate correctness but with the wrong rhythmical emphasis often conveys nothing at all when addressed to a native speaker of that language. Moreover, alteration of the punctuation of a sentence, alteration of the signals that indicate the proper rhythmical cadence of the sentence, can change the meaning drastically. (109-10)

Rhythm—whether it be the cadence of spoken speech or the graphic rhythmic denotations of grammar and syntax—is essential to the

4 See Massumi for an extended discussion of the fascinating electronic art installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmers entitled *Amodal Suspension. Relational Architecture No. 8* (2003) in which text messages are translated into rhythmically pulsing beams of light: "The encoding of letter frequency into the beam attaches it genetically to culture-specific rhythms of speech. But the encoding is not visually decodable by the viewer any more than the meaning of the message can be seen in the pulse and flutter. What comes across is, simply, the rhythm. A language-like rhythm—without the actual language" ("Floating the Social" 42).

meaningfulness and comprehensibility of semantic content, whilst at the same time being entirely other to that content. As Miller further explains, "the rhythmical emphases of an oral sentence, like the marks of punctuation in a piece of written language, are without semantic meaning in themselves. A dash is without referential significance. You do not enunciate it when you read the sentence aloud. The rhythm of a spoken sentence does not alter the semantic content of the words taken separately" (110). Rather, "such elements indicate joints, hinges, articulations, spaces, or pauses, the nonsignifying and nonphenomenal syntactical aspects of language without which language could not make sense" (110). Rhythm, be it in the form of "pauses," "emphases," or "articulations" means nothing in itself but is "nevertheless necessary to the fabrication of the thought" (110).

Deconstruction, as a reading and writing practice, is peculiarly sensitive to these residual rhythms that structure language even as they do not inform its linguistic semantic content. Anyone who hears/heard Derrida lecture live knows this intuitively. Miller refers to it in his interview with Éamonn Dunne at the end of *J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading* (2010), when he talks about the "rhythm and tempo" of "Derrida's expansive inexhaustibly inventive developments—a wonderful two hour seminar I once heard on the phrase "je t'aime," for example" (134). Just like film, deconstruction is, as Miller says in "The Critic as Host," "always in movement" (170); both are governed by the nonlinguistic rhythm that haunts language. Moreover, deconstruction is, and will increasingly be, dependent on film (and other tele-technologies) for the preservation of its rhythms.

Film's spectrality preserves the rhythms that beat at the heart of deconstruction. We see this in Miller's comments in *The First Sail* after watching Derrida lecture on him. (Here incidentally we have the technologic of spectrality *en abyme*, since we are watching a film of Miller talking about Derrida after watching him watch a film of Derrida talking about Miller.) Watching Derrida on screen, after his death, Miller makes the now expected observation regarding the uncanny return that film facilitates: "It is like the return of a ghost. It makes you think about the possibilities of new technologies which allow the survival, in such a strikingly immediate kind of way, of somebody who's now dead." But he is also careful to note that film does not bring Jacques Derrida back, in the flesh—the corporeal resurrection is a deception, a hoax, artifactual not actual.5 What it does bring back is his speech and its rhythms, preserved "live" despite the absence of the body that gave voice to them. Derrida's command, his originality, depended, Miller says, so much on "timing," on "hesitation," that is, on rhythm. "This," he says, "is the thing that would be lost in the transcription." This is the thing that film preserves. And this is what we witness, with regard to Miller himself, in *The First Sail*.

### The Gradual Fabrication of Thoughts

*The First Sail* consists, in the main part, of material from thirty hours of interviews with Miller during March and June 2010. The interview is a paradigmatic example of, in Kleist's terminology, the gradual fabrication of thoughts whilst speaking. Miller and Kleist's comments in relation to this act, then, are directly relevant to the content of the Miller interviews. But they are also relevant to the editorial act which produces this 85 minute film from thirty hours of interview material. Cutting is the filmic equivalent of the rhythmical emphases of spoken speech or the punctuation of written notation. And the rhythm of cutting and splicing to create the interviews we witness in *The First Sail* works precisely in the dual capacity that Miller identifies in relation to the potential interruptions to Kleist's exemplary speakers. Rhythm provides the cadence that makes meaning possible, especially in an improvisatory setting such as an interview or a cutting room, but these rhythms—or their equivalent, the visibility of the digital splices in the final film—also mark the trace of the discontinuous, anacoluthic process that has created the final thought. As Miller says,

they give the sequence of words the cadence necessary to meaning, [but] at the same time they are antirhythmical caesuras, breaks, or suspensions. These disarticulations are the

5 Referring to this section of the film in interview, Kujundžić calls film and television a "sham simulacra" which "confronts him [Miller] with the finitude of his friend's demise, but is also somewhat soothing": "nothing replaces the singular live being, but it also gives the memory of life a chance to live on in this spectral manner. And that spectrality is at work in life itself " (5).

traces within the linguistically generated thought, when it is complete, of the contingencies and discontinuities that are hidden and forgotten when the achieved "period" is turned back on retrospectively, given a logical meaning, and assimilated into one or another historical narrative. (110)

The film's editing makes of many hours of interviews with Miller an achieved "period," in his own terminology, which retrospectively gives a logical meaning to his hours of discourse and which assimilates it into a historical narrative. But the rhythmic visibility of that editing in the film serves as an intratextual reminder of the process by which that retrospective "period" has been achieved.

Earlier in his discussion of Kleist, Miller explains his theory of a "specifically linguistic time," one that is generated "within the suspended and extended moment of the gradual fabrication of thoughts while speaking" (*Versions of Pygmalion* 108). According to Miller:

This temporality reaches out toward a not yet foreseen future to come back to the beginning in the moment of a triumphant completion of the thought. The period takes time to complete. During that time the forward march of historical or narrative time is suspended. Only when the "period" is finished, only when the string of words generated by the gradual fabrication of thoughts has come to an end and makes sense, can it be turned back on retrospectively. (108)

Film adds another movement to this process. The gradual fabrication of thoughts that occurs whilst Miller speaks in interview occurs first; this is followed by the gradual fabrication of thoughts that is the editing of that material to create the ostensibly "continuous" interviews that constitute the body of the film. In that second movement of fabrication, the "forward march of historical and narrative time" is again suspended, as the editor decides which content to include and which content to exclude.6

6 See Walter Benjamin's resonant comments in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) that the illusory nature of film is "that of the second degree, the result of cutting" (226): "That is to say, in the studio the mechanical equipment has penetrated so deeply into reality that its pure aspect freed from the foreign substance of equipment is the result of a special procedure, namely, the shooting by the specially adjusted camera and the

Here, in the cutting room, we have the filmic equivalent of Miller's "linguistic time," a suspended temporality. Only when the final cut has been made, the "period" here being the final version of the film, can one then view it retrospectively and thus reinsert it into time, into history, in this instance as an artifact: "Only then has the thought been expressed in a code that allows it to be repeated, iterated, say by being printed [or screened] therefore capable of entertaining history again each time it is read [or viewed]" (Miller, *Versions of Pygmalion* 108).7 Every act of reading, here of viewing the film, "constitutes the reassimilation of the linguistically codified thought into historical and narrative time" (108). But each screening or viewing of *The First Sail* is a unique assimilation into a specific historical time and a singular narrative, of which the essays in this collection provide just a few examples. At this moment, *The First Sail* has only recently been launched. Who knows as yet what waves it will cause as it moves through space and time, what readings it will encounter and provoke.

#### Ecotechnics

Does film preserve the rhythms of deconstruction as they would be if the camera were not there? At the end of *The First Sail*, Miller notes that he is aware of the presence of the impassive, unblinking eye of the camera and that "that's anxious making." Derrida too was uncomfortable in front of the camera, not because of its impersonality, but because it forced him into rhythms that were not natural to him, that he both learnt to accommodate and saw it as an intellectual obligation to challenge. This is clear in the rhythmic subtext of comments about rhythm that sound throughout

mounting of the shot together with other similar ones. The equipment-free aspect of reality here has become the height of artifice; the sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology" (226).

7 One might ask, of course, how this process is complicated by contemporary extra-filmic projects such as Kujundžić's decision to publish all the interview material online; or, for example, by deleted scenes and director's cuts included on DVD issues. These innovations reify Miller's observation that "the completed period is a strange kind of anacoluthon … The period appears perfectly grammatical, but it is an encrypted anacoluthon. It has barely discernible fissures where the contingencies of its original process of formation may be discerned by a sharp-eyed observer" (*Versions of Pygmalion* 111).

*Echographies*, punctuating that text's louder conversation about technology and spectrality. "Already, I have the impression that our control is very limited," Derrida says:

I am *at home* [chez moi], but with all these machines and all these prostheses watching, surrounding, seducing us, the quote "natural" conditions of expression, discussion, reflection, deliberation are to a large extent breached, falsified, warped. One's first impulse would therefore be to at least try to reconstitute the conditions in which one would be able to say what one wants to say at the rhythm at which and in the conditions in which one wants to say it. And has a right to say it. And in the ways that would be least inappropriate. This is always difficult. It is *never* purely and simply possible, but it is *particularly* difficult in front of the camera. (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 32-33)

In both *The First Sail* and *Echographies* (a transcription of a series of filmed interviews), the camera enters the home: it intrudes into the literal home of these two men, but it also challenging the at-homeness of their discourse and its "natural" rhythms. The demand is both to attempt to preserve the "natural" in the face of, and, as we have seen, via, the technological, and, at the same time, to explore the provocation that teletechnologies make for different styles and rhythms of thought, speech and writing, of communication and exchange:

We must consequently try both to mark the fact that we aren't able to speak here in the way that we are used to speaking and writing about these subjects, we must try not to efface this constraint, and at the same time, to respect the specificity of this situation in order to address these questions, in the moment, with another rhythm and in another style. (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 38)

In the scene entitled "Inheritances—and Rhythm," Derrida continues to explore the tension between the "natural" and the technological, between the rhythms of unrecorded speech and the rhythms of teletechnologies:

I don't speak, I don't think, I don't respond in the same way anymore, at the same rhythm as when I'm alone, daydreaming or reflecting at the wheel of my car or in front of my computer or a blank page, or as when I'm with one of you, as was the case a little while ago, as will be the case again in a moment, talking about the same questions but at another rhythm, with another relation to time and to urgency. This does not mean, at that moment, one has enough time—one never has enough time—but the relation to urgency and to rhythm would be different and now it has suddenly been transformed by this system of scenographic and technical devices. As soon as someone says "Roll tape!" a race begins, one starts not to speak, not to think in the same way anymore, almost not to think at all anymore…One's relation to words, to their way of coming or of not coming, is different… (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 70)

Film, television, radio, all teletechnologies, bring with them "a new temporality of technics…another rhythmics" (72). This new rhythmics is indissociable from the most pressing political, economic, and ethical questions of our times, but at the same time it is one from which intellectuals retreat. And "the more they are removed from this experience, the less they are accustomed to it, the less they are able to forget the artifice of the scenario" (71). Being on camera does not just alter Derrida's rhythms—he goes so far here as to say that it halts him entirely: "When the process of recording begins, I am inhibited, paralyzed, arrested, I don't "get anywhere" [*je "fais du sur-place"*] and I don't think, I don't speak in the way I do when I'm not in this situation" (71).

How, then, might deconstruction meet the challenge of the new technological rhythmics? How might it move beyond, as it must do, this paralysis? The editorial choices behind the filming and composition of *The First Sail* provide a number of answers to these questions. In the first instance, the film helps the viewer to, as Derrida says above, "forget the artifice of the situation." *The First Sail* "naturalises" the technological through extensive continuity or invisible editing. Whilst the film includes scenes of Miller sailing, footage from a lecture at the University of Florida, images of photographs, websites, and so on, the body of the film is made up of fixed tripod camera footage of Miller sitting in one of his residences, talking to the interviewer. The camera occasionally zooms in and out, but its position and Miller's remain static. This type of cinematography creates the illusion of reality, it attempts to place you as viewer in unmediated conversation with Miller as speaker. The presence of the camera, the artifactuality of the recording, is diminished. One answer the film offers, then, is that to preserve the "natural" in opposition to the rhythms of these new technologies, one has to eliminate as much as possible the intrusion of, or at least an awareness of the presence of, these technologies.

At the same time, however, the film does not allow this sustained illusion of reality—it deconstructs it, as a film about a key figure of deconstruction must. For, as Derrida says in his film *Derrida*, "one of the gestures of deconstruction is not to naturalize what isn't natural." The film performs this deconstruction in a number of ways, affirming and exacerbating, as Nicholas Royle says of *Derrida* in "Blind Cinema" (2005), "the sense that film is never natural" (14). To give just a few examples: in the long interview scenes, regular, if slight, flickers in the image indicate that far from continuity editing, these scenes have in fact been edited. The appearance of temporal continuity has only been achieved through careful digital cutting and splicing. These rhythmic flickers, unobtrusive but apparent, remind the viewer that what we have here is not one uninterrupted linear interview but a montage of clips from many many hours of interviews. The material we are presented with may not even be in chronological order; the sentences which Miller speaks, may not even be his, as the film splices together not only his images but also his words.8 The film, then, does not allow us to forget that what we are watching is a recording, even at its most "naturalistic" moments. As Derrida insists any encounterbetween deconstruction and film must, it archives "the re-marking of

8 Frequently, the soundtrack of Miller speaking continues seamlessly across the visual cuts (the aural splices are not "visible"), literally putting sentences, if not words, in Miller's mouth. In response to the delivery of an earlier version of this paper at *J. Hillis Miller: The Theory to Come, An International Symposium*, University of Lancaster, June 2012, Miller confirmed that he had a strong sense when watching the film that his meaning had been violated by the imposition of different rhythms on his actions and speech.

this fact that we are recording" (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 70).9

In this sense, the film is a performative example of *ecotechnics*, a phrase Miller takes from Jean-Luc Nancy's *Corpus* (2008) and plays with in "Ecotechnics: Ecotechnological Odradek" (2012) in a remarkable reading of Kafka's short piece, "The Worry of the Father of the Family" (1919). For Miller, the ecotechnical provides a model for understanding the world and our place in it that replaces the organic unity model which has dominated the history of Western thought. In the latter, "*Techné* is opposed to *Physis*, just as subject is opposed to object. *Techné* is a skill manipulated by subjectivities and their bodies. Technology adds something to a nature thought of as already externally out there and as organic" (Miller, "Ecotechnics"). In contrast, the ecotechnical provides a name for the deconstruction of the opposition between the natural and the artificial.10 In the characteristic deconstructive move, the natural and the artificial, *physis* and *techné*, are not separate entities, one with a purer and hierarchical value in relation to the other. Rather, each inhabits the other with a parasitic productivity to the extent that neither can be thought irrespective of the other.

A paradigmatic example of the ecotechnical would be sailing, that activity so beloved of Miller, which is only possible due to the connected ecotechnical functioning of the technical (the boat), the natural (the wind) and the human (the body and mind of the sailor). In the first of a number of sailing scenes that recur throughout *The First Sail*, Miller observes that he loves sailing because it is a "harnessing of the wind," hence also his interest in gliders. Sailing is at once technical, yet not obtrusively so; it does not subordinate the human or the natural to the brute technological, in the same way in which, for instance, motor boating does. And yet, the threat of brute technology hangs over these

9 See Peggy Kamuf 's analysis of similar techniques and effects in *D'ailleurs, Derrida* (1999): "word and image are both held in relation and divorced from each other, they are, in other words, articulated, held together/apart. In this and other ways, the listener/viewer is kept constantly alert not only to the texture and dimension of film, but also to its artifacture as Derrida might have called it. Or simply, to its writing" ("Stunned" 110).

10 See, for instance, Derrida's discussion of the technological condition in *Points* (1995), esp. pp. 244-5. For further discussion of this see Clark's "Deconstruction and Technology" (2000).

ecotechnical scenes both in the ugly outboard motor affixed to the back of Miller's beautiful traditional sail boat, and in the noise of the motor that plays over these scenes, the motor, it is assumed, of the motorboat from which Miller's sail boat is being filmed. *The First Sail* both performs the ecotechnical but also contains within itself, not least by its very fact of being a film, stark reminders of its precarious balance, of the constant threat, in the twenty-first century, that the technical and the human might at any moment outdo, overrun, eventually destroy, the ecological.

A final example of the film's deconstructive ecotechnics is to be found in a comparative analysis of the film's opening and closing scenes. The film opens with a blank dark screen, with the soundtrack of waves lapping rhythmically on the shore, punctuated by the warning horn of a lighthouse. The image of a coast-line in daylight then fades in and the lighthouse and the sea from which the soundtrack originates become visible. We hear the lighthouse horn twice more, and then the image fades out and the film begins. At the end of the film, we find the reverse of the opening: the same coastal shot, the same lighthouse warning sound, the same soundtrack of waves, and then a fade out. But of course this iteration is a repetition that is not quite the same, for centre right on the blackout screen, even as the credits roll, the light from the lighthouse flashes intermittently. The light warns us that this is not merely a technological fade out to a blank screen. Rather, this is still active filming, but of the same scene at night time, hence the continuation also of the wave and horn soundtrack. The film preserves this coastal image even in the dark, via the night-time visual rhythm of the flashing light and the aural rhythm of the warning horn. In doing so, the film reminds the viewer of its own spectral operations since, as Derrida says, "what happens with spectrality, with phantomality … is that something becomes almost visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood. It is a night visibility. As soon as there is a technology of the image, visibility brings night. It incarnates in a night body, it radiates a night light" (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 115). The nightlight impresses on the viewer, as the credits roll, that what they have seen is not J. Hillis Miller the man, is not the natural landscape, but the technological reproduction of him and it. At the same time, as a figure of the ecotechnical, the lighthouse reminds the viewer that the natural and the technological, Miller the man, and Miller the man-on-screen, are irreducible from one another. In the twenty first century, we can no longer distinguish one from the other absolutely, but must find ever new ways of negotiating their interrelation, of understanding how the technological guides our relation with the ecological and with each other, whilst also heeding the ecotechnological warnings of the dangers of the seas on which we sail.

#### Ghost Dance: A Coda

 "All artifactuality," Derrida says, "take[s] place through intervention at the level of what is called framing, rhythm, borders, form, contextualization" (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 52). We visit those rhythms and borders again, rhythmic exchanges between sound and image, between the natural and the technological, between deconstruction and film at the end of the film *Ghost Dance*. 11 The opening credits of this film run against an image and sound track of waves crashing against the shore, and the tide sucking them back out. Running in and out of the water in time with the waves, a woman attempts to set sail what appears to be a large piece of paper. The waves continually wash it back in again. The scene is punctuated aurally by another lighthouse warning horn. Similar to the framing of *The First Sail*, *Ghost Dance* ends with the same woman (who we know now is one of the two actresses who play the film's doubled female lead) returning to that coastline carrying stills from the film in which she is starring. The sound of the waves on the shore returns, running over the image track of the actress framing the stills in mud on the coastal cliffs and in the shingle on the beach—images of Derrida, and of her co-stars. In the final sequence she drags a raft containing one of the film stills along the beach to the water. The punctuation of the warning horn returns and the film ends with the mesmerising, rhythmical tidal ebb and flow as another film still is eventually carried out to sea. The final sequence of *Ghost Dance* reifies Derrida's ecotechnical observation that "everything we are talking about is engaged in a transformation the very rhythm of which is determining and increasingly incalculable. For it is

11 A full ecotechnical reading of *Ghost Dance* which pays close attention to that film's negotiation of the relationship between the "natural" and the "technical" is yet to come.

*breaking*, it is rolling up on itself like a wave, which accumulates strength and mass as it accelerates" (Derrida and Stiegler, *Echographies* 71). Deconstruction and film. Film and deconstruction. Deconstructive film. Filmic deconstructions. The rhythms of these exchanges punctuate the ceaseless flow of discourse in our contemporary ecotechnical moment; they allow us to meet the incalculable impact of teletechnologies, to ride the wave, embracing, albeit with caution, its massive acceleration; moving forwards, moving on, always at a certain pace, whatever that might be; "talking about the same questions but at another rhythm."

### *Works Cited*

*Chapter 2*

### Just a Miracle

#### Charlie Gere

In this essay I engage with *The First Sail*, Dragan Kujundžić's film about the life and work of J. Hillis Miller, as a means to think through the question of the cinematic image, and what it might mean for critical thinking. I start with a kind of exemplary scene. Those present at the screening of *The First Sail* at Lancaster University in the spring of 2012, would have witnessed Miller, present in the auditorium, watching himself on the screen watching himself on another screen next to Jacques Derrida, who was in the process of giving a talk about Miller. Thus an almost parodic representation of the relation between presence and absence, between the living, the spectral and the literally dead, was staged. The scene nested at the heart of this Russian doll of a staging was Derrida's presentation of a paper about Miller, in which he describes his solecism, in their early acquaintance, of addressing Miller as "John," believing that to be the name concealed by the initial "J." He recounts how Miller, in a letter, gently pointed out both that his first name is actually Joseph, not John, and, also, that he never used his first name. At this point the actual letter from Miller to Derrida is projected behind Derrida, with this admonition diplomatically placed in a post-script beneath Miller's signature.

With the release of *The First Sail* Miller joins the short list of critical thinkers who have been the subject of a film documentary, which includes Derrida (twice), and Slavoj Žižek. Derrida has also appeared in a feature film, Ken McMullen's *Ghost Dance*, which I discuss at the end of the paper. Given both Miller's and Derrida's refusal to engage with film, and Derrida's frequent disavowals of any expertise in matters other than philosophy and literature, the question arises of whether it is legitimate to make films about them, or indeed any critical thinker. Attempts to render the ideas of such thinkers accessible through the moving image are indeed always questionable, given that their medium is text. Can films of this sort do their work justice? Can *The First Sail* do Miller's work justice? In this context the use of the term "justice" has a particular, and deliberate resonance. "Justices" is the name of the essay Jacques Derrida wrote about J. Hillis Miller and in particular his reading of Gerard Hopkins in his early work *The Disappearance of God*, Derrida's presentation of which is the very scene from *The First Sail*, described above.

The title of Derrida's essay comes from Hopkins' use of the word justice as a verb, as in "the just man justices." As Derrida defines it,

To justice would be to produce justice, cause it to prevail, make it come about, as an event, but without instrumentalizing it in a transitive fashion, without objectifying it, but rather making it proceed from itself even as one keeps it close itself, to what one is, namely *just,* closest to what one thinks, says, does, shows, and manifests. The one who thus justices does not refer in the first or the last place to the calculable rules and norms of law. He is just by essence, just as he breathes. He does what is just, he accomplishes the just in a spontaneous manner. ("Justices" 692)

In the essay Derrida declares that he is giving the nickname "the Just" to Hillis Miller. Miller's discussion of Hopkin's notion of "selftaste" and his notions of singularity and the absence of God become the basis for Derrida's extended discussion of the univocal aloneness of both God and humans. Derrida quotes Miller quoting Hopkins,

And [my isolation] is much more true when we consider the mind; when I consider my selfbeing, my consciousness and feeling of myself, that taste of myself, of *I* and *me* above and in all things, which is more distinctive than the taste of ale or alum, more distinctive than the smell of walnutleaf or camphor, and is incommunicable by any means to another man (as when I was a child I used to ask myself: what must it be to be someone else?). Nothing else in nature comes near to this unspeakable stress of pitch, distinctiveness, and selving, this selfbeing of my own. Nothing explains it or resembles it . . . searching nature I taste *self* but at one tankard, that of my own being. The development, refinement, condensation of nothing shews any sign of being able to match this to me or give me another taste of it, a taste even resembling it. (Miller, *Disappearance* 271)

Playing on Miller's use of the initial J, which sounds like "je" in French, Derrida writes that,

*Je me suis si souvent demande´,* I have so often asked myself, perhaps for more than thirty-five years, from the depths of my friendship and admiration for him, how one could be J. Hillis Miller. *Quel est son "je" a` lui?* What is his own *je,* his I? ("Justices" 690)

He continues,

The taste I have for him or the taste he has for others and for me, is it the same? Is it the same as the one he has for himself? One may very well doubt that it is. This doubt likewise takes on a very perceptible flavor in me, an obscurely immediate sense. We are moving here in that strange geometry where the nearest and the most distant are but one and the same. The most similar and the infinitely other return in a circle to each other. How does J. Hillis Miller *himself* feel when he says "je," "I" or when he has the feeling of "himself "? These borders of the I are vertiginous, but inevitable. We all rub up against them, make contact without contact, in particular as concerns our dearest friends. This is even what is astonishing about friendship, when it is somewhat alert. It is also vigilant friendship that startles us awake to this strange question: what does it mean, for an I *to feel itself?* "How does he *himself* feel, J. Hillis Miller? J. Hillis Miller *himself,* the other, the wholly other that he remains for me?" ("Justices" 690)

That we cannot ever know how the other feels is the basis of the "ethics of reading," the title of a book by J. Hillis Miller, published in 1987. In "Passions Performative: Derrida, Wittgenstein, Austin," Miller describes the notion, taken from Husserl, that there is "in principle no direct access to and verifiable indirect access either to the ego of another person, to his or her thoughts, memories, hopes, sensations, passions" (*Speech* 159)

This unknowability, this secrecy that determines our experience of the other, is what gives literature its force. In his essay "Passions," Derrida links democracy to literature and suggests that there is "no democracy without literature; no literature without democracy." Literature is the right to say anything, which ties it to "a certain noncensure, to the space of democratic freedom" (*On the Name* 28). But this also means that the author is not responsible to anyone for what he has written, and thus has the right of nonresponse. Thus, Derrida declares, what literature allows is that "there is a secret" (both "Il y a du secret," "there is a secret," and "Il y a là du secret," "there is a secret") (*On the Name* 28):

There is in literature, in the exemplary secret of literature, a chance of saying everything without touching upon the secret. When all hypotheses are permitted, groundless and ad infinitum, about the meaning of a text, or the final intentions of an author, whose person is no more represented than nonrepresented by a character or by a narrator, by a poetic or fictional sentence, which detaches itself from its presumed source and thus remains locked away [*au secret*], when there is no longer even any sense in making decisions about some secret behind the surface of a textual manifestation (and it is this situation which I would call text or trace), when it is the call [*appel*] of this secret, however, which point back to the other or to something else, when it is this itself which keeps our passions aroused, and holds us to the other, then the secret impassions us. (*On the Name* 29)

This is also perhaps the problem when philosophers co-opt works of literature in pursuit of their philosophical arguments. Such readings often fail to do justice to the excess of any text, and the excess of reading a text. As Miller puts it in *Black Holes*:

The phrase "excess of reading" names the way reading exceeds initial theoretical presuppositions, the use of literary works as examples of a conceptual argument, and any attempt to encompass a work by its historical or cultural contexts. Each work gives knowledge (or nonknowledge—an experience of the limits of knowledge) that is singular and unique, attainable in no other way. If this were not the case, if the work could be accounted for by its context, then there would be no reason beyond aesthetic titillation to go to all the hard work necessary to read it. Everything it tells us could be known by studying its context. The work would be an empty placeholder for its circumambient culture. Reading the "of " in the second way, moreover, so that the "excess of reading" names what exceeds reading, gives yet another sense. It deploys the phrase to designate the "elusive something" that is the motivation of reading, its forever unattainable horizon. I have called that elusive "center on the horizon" the realm of the wholly others. This realm is always in excess of reading. (487)

To do justice to a work of literature is to do justice to its secret, to its singularity, and to acknowledge that the work of interpretation can never be final. In a sense this is also to acknowledge a miraculousness at the heart of literature.

In "Demeure," his essay written in response to "The Instant of my Death," Maurice Blanchot's short story or autobiographical testimony (which it is, is deliberately kept ambiguous), Derrida makes the following claim; "any testimony testified in essence to the miraculous and the extraordinary from the moment it must, by definition, appeal to an act of faith beyond any proof. When one testifies, even on the subject of the most ordinary and the most 'normal' event, one asks the other to believe one at one's word as if it were a matter of a miracle" ("Demeure" 75). Derrida suggests that this is why the privileged example of testimony is that concerning miracles, which is "the essential line between testimony and fiction." This is a passion that "goes hand in hand with the miraculous, the fantastic, the phantasmatic, the spectral, vision, apparition, the touch of the untouchable, the experience of the extraordinary, history without nature, the anomalous" ("Demeure" 75).

Which brings us back to film. In "Le Cinema et ses Fantomes," an interview in *Cahiers du Cinema* from 2001, Derrida describes cinema explicitly in terms of belief. "When I write about the cinema what interests me above all is its mode and regime of believing. There is in cinema a mode of belief altogether singular: For the century since its invention it has offered an unprecedented experience of believing" ("Le Cinema" 78). Even though, Derrida suggests, such an experience can be found in the theatre, in painting and in novels it is the cinema that allows one "to believe without believing, though this belief without belief is still a belief " ("Le Cinema" 78). He compares the experience of the cinema screen, with or without dialogue, to that of Plato's cave, offering a spectral dimension that is neither living nor dead, neither perception, nor hallucination, but offering an absolutely original modality of belief, a particular phenomenology impossible before the cinema came into existence ("Le Cinema" 78).

Interestingly, in the same interview, Derrida repudiates the idea that some kind of pure cinema was supplemented by sound. For Derrida the "grandeur of cinema" is the ability to integrate sound, and in particular speech, with images, and it is this that allows it to return to its origins, and to fulfill its original vocation in terms of belief. This is because speech is far more credible, believable, than the image. (Derrida cites Lanzmann's "Shoah," in which there are no documentary images of the Holocaust, only filmed interviews of the survivors giving their testimonies, as exemplary of this ["Le Cinema" 81]).

Here then one can return to the question with which this paper started, can *The First Sail*, do justice to the work of J Hillis Miller, and, by extension, can the moving image do justice to critical thinking, to the work of those who do such thinking. The answer is, miraculously, yes. In fact such films do more than merely succeed beyond expectation. They reveal something about cinema itself, and about its occulted vocation, as a vehicle for the miraculous testimony of the witness, to whom and for whom justice must be done. Despite the spectacular nature of much contemporary film the enduring focus of the cinematic gaze is the face, even in a debased genre such as pornography.

In a strange way cinema's portrayal of the face and of the talking subject is a kind of deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence. We are confronted by the presence of the speaker, apparently, miraculously alive and in front of us. But this is a specter even if the subject is still living, a specter furthermore that we cannot question. We must "take their word." The screen on which the images are projected, whether cinematic, televisual or digital (an increasingly meaningless distinction) also act as a barrier to any illusions that we can have a privileged access to what they are thinking.

In *On Grammatology* Derrida points out how what was once described in terms of "language," is now increasingly characterized as "writing."

Now we tend to say "writing" … to designate not only the physical gestures of literal pictographic or ideographic inscription, but also the totality of what makes it possible; and also, beyond the signifying face the signified face itself. (9)

Among those phenomena now thought of in terms of writing Derrida cites choreography, and cinematography. Yet it would be a mistake to understand this merely as the application of the concept of writing as a means of understanding cinema. It is, rather, that cinema(tography) as well as photography, telegraphy, phonography, and all the other new media, the "tele-technologies," that emerged in the mid to late nineteenth century made possible the expanded understanding of "writing" that underpins Derrida's work.

Yet one might say that the origins of such media go back to the very beginnings of the metaphysics that Derrida sought to engage with, especially in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy" (*Dissemination*). It is not just the observation that Plato's famous metaphor of the cave in some ways resembles the cinema, but also that his entire *oeuvre* takes the form of a number of recordings of the experience of being taught by Socrates. Thus, as much as cinema can be construed as a kind of writing, long before the invention of cinema as we understand it, writing is also always haunted by a desire to be cinematic, to preserve and make available the fullness of lived experience and presence, particularly of the other, the face of the other. Of course, as Plato intuited and Derrida analysed, such a desire is not to be satisfied, which is perhaps ultimately its great strength, rather than a failing.

Finally, to return to the scene with which this paper started, that of Miller watching himself watching himself watching himself watching Derrida. This spectral mis-en-scene is strongly reminiscent of another such moment, described by Derrida in one of his interviews with Bernard Stiegler, in the book *Echographies of Television*. Derrida recounts the experience of watching the film *Ghost Dance* in the United States with some students, two or three years after the death of the actress Pascale Ogier, with whom he had appeared in the film. Derrida is unnerved by watching a dead woman, apparently still alive on screen state that she "believes in ghosts." He points out that even when she first said this, a "spectrality was at work" and that one day it would be a dead woman up on that screen, haunting the living (*Echographies* 120).

Derrida then suggests that this is an example of what in *Specters of Marx* he calls the "visor effect," the feeling that we are watched by the specter, as if "before the law." The dead person is the wholly other, with whom there can be no symmetry of regard (*Echographies* 121). This then is what Derrida, writing about Louis Marin, calls the "force of an image," which is "hauntological," rather than ontological (*Work* 145). The image, whether in the form of a painted portrait, a photograph, a piece of film or video, does not re-present the other, make them present again. The image is always a trace and looks at us from the point of view of death, of the dead. Even if the subject of the image is living, spectrality is at work in the image. The other in the image is wholly other, and also looks at me as an image, and as wholly other, and each bears infinite responsibility for the other.

This is what one might call the "force of cinema," and the reason why it can add something to our understanding and experience of a thinker's work, why, in other words, it can do justice to Derrida or Miller or whomever else might be so portrayed. Watching Miller watching himself (watching himself watching himself) and also watching Derrida, was to see someone encounter both his dead friend and himself as spectral, and wholly other. We too are confronted by these specters, and accordingly are responsible to them and, in particular, to the memory of their work.

#### *Works Cited*

Derrida, Jacques. "Demeure." *The Instant of My Death*. Maurice Blanchot. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

—. *Dissemination.* London: Athlone, 1981.

*Chapter 3*

### Up

#### Nicholas Royle

Embarrassed and embrangled I want to look up because I love him but at the same time, being very slow, I have to concentrate hard on reading quick enough in order to try to countersign him (he has read so much, just see, in *The First Sail*, all those books he has at home, and I know he says that "good reading… demands slow reading" [Miller, "How" 255] but I picture him reading—this is one of my abiding convictions—always at speed, with the wind constantly in his sails) and also to deal with feeling somewhat weighed down by the somatic memory of what happened last time I was invited to speak here in Dublin, in this very building, as those of you who were present might recall. I was not sure whether to laugh or cry. I arrived prepared to deliver a paper of around fifty minutes but was requested, just before I started, to do it in twenty-five, leading me to practise an art of oral kerning I never realised existed. So this time I have confined myself to a few remarks that really ought to take no more than twenty-five minutes and I shall do my utmost, while trying not to look up, though wanting to do so, to read neither too quickly nor too slowly despite being as I am so slow on the uptake, *on slow* in virtually every aspect of life. I pause here, for just a second, and look up, to wonder if I have not perhaps by now covered everything, a miniature triptych of questions, namely (1) the meaning of "up," (2) the time of a reading (doesn't Pascal's formulation, "When one reads too quickly or too slowly one understands nothing," undergo peculiar contortions in the context of film?1 If the book gives you time, film screens itself off, keeps you to its

1 Pascal's aphorism provides the epigraph for Paul de Man's *Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust* (New

own regime. How can film give time? How most productively is "writing on film," in this case writing on *The First Sail*, to respect that regime, as if in accordance with the rights of inspection imposed by the linear unfolding of a single viewing, and betray it, lead it astray, show it veer?) and (3) the nature of somatic memory (what is somatic memory in oneself but, also, in the context of a film or, no doubt again very differently, poem or critical essay?)

I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to Eamonn Dunne and Michael O'Rourke for inviting me to speak. It is an honour to be here for the Irish premiere of Dragan Kujundžić's *The First Sail*, and above all to be able to celebrate this occasion with J. Hillis Miller himself.

But then I must confess to another source of embarrassment, which has to do with the topic of this brief talk, since it appears to coincide with what my hosts will be speaking of, namely "Tears, Idle Tears," the twentyline song or lyric extracted from Tennyson's long poem *The Princess* (1847). Their title, as you will have seen, is "Miller"s Idle Tears." If I were at liberty to do so, an elaboration of coincidence *chez* Hillis Miller would, I imagine, quickly and easily fill fifty minutes: suffice to note that my friendship with him is, at least from one perspective, an intimate history of coincidences, of which the "telepathy effect" (I am never sure how many quotation marks to put around that phrase) is just one example.2 I never read him, nor can I watch him on film, without this feeling, without a sense of what might be called, with a Stevensian inflection, *transport to coincidence*. And perhaps Eamonn Dunne and Michael O'Rourke would testify to something similar. At any rate, in my case, watching *The First Sail* I felt a strong connection with that passage in which he talks about Tennyson's poem, as well as a supposition, quite mistaken alas, that no one else would talk about it.

Perhaps the coincidence is not so remarkable, however, given the centrality that this short poem transpires to have had for Miller: it was his experience of this lyric, or more precisely his sense of bafflement and

Haven: Yale University Press, 1979). See Blaise Pascal, *Pens*é*es*, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 251.

2 See "The "Telepathy Effect": Notes toward a Reconsideration of Narrative Fiction," in *The Uncanny* (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 256-76, esp. 276, n43.

curiosity in the face of it, that solicited, at least according to what he says in the film, a kind of epiphany, a high moment in which he realizes he wants to change the course of his life, switching from being a Physics major to studying literature.

I have no idea what others are going to say about "Tears, Idle Tears," but in the presence of a scholar in whose work notions of origin, priority and secondariness are consistently queried and displaced, I claim no originality when I observe what is for me the weirder thing about all this. The instant I heard about the existence of this film called *The First Sail* I thought of "Tears, Idle Tears." I did not imagine the poem would figure in the film. After all, the phrase "the first sail" is not exactly a quotation from Tennyson. When I was watching it for the first time (my first sight of *The First Sail*) and came to the bit where Miller talks about the poem, I supposed that he would certainly make reference to "the first beam glittering on a sail." But he doesn't. I wrote to Dragan Kujundžić asking if he could tell me why the film was called *The First Sail* and he replied: "When we went to the Benjamin River to film it turned out it was literally Hillis' first sail of the year" (E-mail). Can this really be the origin of the title of the film? After all, the cover image of the DVD shows a young Hillis Miller, with his father, and a model sail-boat. Wouldn't that be the first sail? But then would the phrase "first sail" not be, in some sense at least, anchored in the nineteenth century, in that strange and beautiful line from "Tears, Idle Tears"? Would Hillis Miller, in agreeing to this title *The First Sail* (as I suppose he must have been invited to do), not have in mind its Tennysonic character? Or was it resonating merely in an unconscious fashion? But perhaps these questions are mistaken or wrongheaded. If there is somatic memory on film, in a film, it must be at once absolutely cryptic, unfathomable, resistant to knowledge and meaning, like Tennyson's tears ("I know not what they mean"), and spectral—what I would be tempted to call *a case of film memory*. 3

It is an extraordinary moment where Hillis Miller reminisces about his initial encounter with this Tennyson poem: there he is, speaking from

3 For more on the "case" in Hillis Miller, especially with regard to crypts and cryptonymy, and to deconstruction as "the case," permit me to refer to "Ghostly Preoccupations: Response to J. Hillis Miller, "The Ethics of Topography: Stevens" in *The J. Hillis Miller Reader*, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 227-31.

"this ghostly cinematic realm" as he later describes it, wonderfully animated, his face in a sort of feigned amazement that is also real amazement, like the acting out of a hysteric suffering from reminiscences, reminiscing about this poem at which it remains difficult to know what adjectives to cast: poignant, plangent, anguished, ecstatic, bizarre, uncanny, disconnecting, disconnected, blinding.

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy Autumn-fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, That brings our friends up from the underworld, Sad as the last which reddens over one That sinks with all we love below the verge; So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds To dying ears, when unto dying eyes The casement slowly grows a glimmering square; So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

You will readily note, I fear, how slowly I read this, in comparison with the rattling performance of Yeats's "The Cold Heaven" given by Miller himself in *The First Sail*. 4 At any event, this is for me one of the loveliest passages of the film, as he laughs over the baffling language of the opening of Tennyson's lyric, a lyric that is at once poem and song, "Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean," he mixes the laughter and tears in a way that brings to my mind, and perhaps also to his, the words of Jacques Derrida: the time of tears, laughter and song is neither calculable nor repeatable.5 And it may seem that he has nothing to say, that he is rehearsing a sort of somatic memory of Tennyson's poem, a poem about the experience of a remembering body, a body remembered, the welling of the past into tears as a very embodiment of somatic memory, "[d]ear as remembered kisses after death." The poem might appear to have the same effect on him now, at this moment in the film, as it had when he first sailed into it, or it first sailed into him, as if indeed it leaves him in a state of speechlessness that coincides with the implicit absence of speech that is perhaps also the subject of Tennyson's poem. For while it is conventional to refer to the *speaker* of this poem (whether this be the maid mentioned in the immediately preceding lines in *The Princess* or, of course, Tennyson himself), in a significant and even eerie sense *there is no speech*: it is a poem about being deprived of speech, of a supervening of tears that, while eluding meaning ("I know not what they mean"), nonetheless say it all.

We might suppose that Hillis Miller has nothing to add, no further commentary or critical reflection, but of course this is not the case. J Hillis Miller loves to talk. That is clear even to his son Matthew at the age of four (that reminiscence constituting another of the most moving and funny moments in the film). This is in part what makes *The First Sail* so precious: here for our eyes and ears—but also for the eyes and ears of what Tennyson calls, in another arresting phrase (this time from *In*

4 For a fine close reading of Yeats's poem, see J. Hillis Miller, "Deconstruction and a Poem," in *Deconstructions: A User's Guide*, ed. Nicholas Royle (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 171-86.

5 See Jacques Derrida, "Envois," in *The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond*, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), 14-15, and "Passages – from Traumatism to Promise," trans. Peggy Kamuf, in *Points... Interviews, 1974-1994*, ed. Elisabeth Weber (London: Routledge, 1995), 388.

*Memoriam*), "the stranger's child"—is a record of Hillis Miller talking.6 The "ghostly cinematic realm" of *The First Sail* may very likely transpire, in decades to come, to offer the clearest sense of what this great critic was like, of how he was, and even (in Jacques Derrida's phrase) of "how one could be J. Hillis Miller" ("Justices" 229).

J. Hillis Miller loves to talk, but he also loves to write. And so it would hardly be a surprise to learn that he has written about Tennyson's poem. But I must confess that, when I decided to try to write something about *The First Sail*, I had not read this text, entitled "Temporal Topographies: Tennyson's Tears," in the book *Topographies*. The essay is classic Miller so lucid, probing, exacting, patient and exhilarating, calm and apocalyptic at the same time. "Tears are apocalyptic" (144), he remarks, in a memorable three-word sentence. "Temporal Topographies" is also marvelously illuminating of what seems to concern him in *The First Sail*, above all in foregrounding what is at the heart of this "powerful and moving poem" (135), namely a "poetic thinking" (135) of temporality that entails a sort of experience of the impossible, a sense of loss and longing that is also affirmation, an evocation of what is as much futural as past, the ghostly time, as he suggests, of a prosopopoiea that neither fails nor succeeds, that succeeds only insofar as it fails and fails insofar it succeeds. And still, as he makes clear, something happens.

Reading Miller's essay (originally delivered as a lecture in Taiwan in 1991) I discovered, as I invariably do when reading him, a wealth of ideas, new possibilities and directions that had not previously occurred to me. But I also encountered—as if by "telepathy effect" or the secret sharing of some "mental telegraphy" (in Mark Twain's phrase)—various formulations and motifs that left me thinking that Hillis Miller must have read what I had proposed to write before I had written it. In particular this had to do with how "Temporal Topographies" appeared to anticipate the image and figure that I had already specified as title for this talk, "Up." I wanted to gather these remarks under the heading of that little two-letter word for several reasons, but also for what is (as Miller might

6 "Till from the garden and the wild / A fresh association blow, / And year by year the landscape grow / Familiar to the stranger's child." See "In Memoriam," in *The Poems of Tennyson*, 954. Alan Hollinghurst adopts this phrase, "The Stranger's Child," for the title of his most recent novel.

say, following Yeats) "out of all sense and reason." I realize that I have chosen one of the most complex, as well as one of the shortest, words in the English language. I sense that it is a word that is waiting to trip me up. ( Just try this at home yourself: write a paragraph about the word "up" without producing a single innuendo or double entendre.) I approach it here with as much wariness as the brevity of my talk and rush of thought conspire to make up.

I want simply to single out a few of the ways in which this tiny word comports with my sense of Hillis Miller, and responds to the impression of him evoked in Dragan Kujundžić's film. First and (as I might say quite literally) *above all*, Hillis Miller has always been a kind of upper in my life: whenever I read him or spend time with him he leaves me with a feeling of being up. I am inclined to connect this with what Derrida describes as Miller's "incomparable serenity" ("Justices" 229). Hillis Miller's writing has a clarity and good humour, a candidness and intelligence, a sense of graciousness and responsibility that is definitively elevating and uplifting. Seeing him in *The First Sail* sitting at home surrounded by his books or approaching the house or setting off in the rowboat or giving a lecture in Florida leaves you up. What Hillis Miller says, the way he says it, to see him saying it, leaves you up.

Second, I think "up" for Hillis Miller because he is an upkeeper and he keeps up. He is, to my mind, one of the great keepers of keeping up. From our very first meeting (one icy cold weekend in Finland in April 1991, when I had invited him to speak at a conference at the University of Tampere on "The Ends of America") one of the most powerful impressions I recall was of the intense interest he took in what postgraduates and younger colleagues at Tampere were doing. More than twenty years later this sense of vigor and engagement persists. "It's amazing," one of my postgraduates at Sussex said to me the other day, "the only person who has really written about deconstruction and the internet seems to be J. Hillis Miller"—and that's not to mention his recent books on climate change or the conflagration of community or how reading George Eliot is connected with thinking about the current global financial meltdown. Miller's work keeps up and insists that *we* keep up with what is happening—culturally, intellectually, politically, socially, environmentally. In this sense, *The First Sail* is a forcefully topical and political film: whether he is talking about the "diabolical" change of Texan education policy on history textbooks, or the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill, or the continuing financial crisis engulfing the US and the world beyond, Hillis Miller is up with what is happening and sharply incisive about what is wrong, unjust, even disastrous, as well as about how, in critical ways, the folly at issue was foreseeable.

Finally, I wanted to try to say something about the word "up" in its singular appearance in Tennyson's poem: "Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, / That brings our friends up from the underworld…." The first thing I have to reckon with, regarding this encounter with the first sail, or with the first beam of morning glittering on it, is that Miller is already there; the first sail is his. For in "Temporal Topographies," with a sort of eerie foreshadowing of what I had hoped to try to explore here, I discovered that he had already isolated the fundamental importance of what he names the "up/down axis" (137) of this poem. I had been struck simply by the "up," but he quite rightly notes the pervasive significance of the word "down," not literally in the lyric itself but rather in the broader context of *The Princess*. 7 This enables him to arrive at the argument that, in "Tears, Idle Tears," "up is this present life and moment, while down is death" (138).

My time is, as the saying goes, almost up. I can only gesture towards what haunts and fascinates me here. Miller teaches us to read afresh, every time. Discreetly, tacitly, he borrows Tennyson's word "fresh" here to say that his concern in the essay is precisely to "try to read the poem afresh" (136). "Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail, / That brings our friends up from the underworld…": these lines amaze me in a manner similar to the way in which Hillis Miller talks, in *The First Sail*, specifically about the opening lines of Tennyson's lyric. What would appear to be a standard reading of these lines is (to quote Miller) "friends returning by boat but not yet here" (140). Indeed, the *OED* specifically references these lines from Tennyson as an example of the use of the word "underworld" as "The Antipodes; also, the part of the earth beyond the horizon" (*OED*, "underworld," sense 3). I must say this makes me want to laugh, the *Oxford English Dictionary* in a bizarre underworld moment, as if one

7 See, for example, "Deconstruction and a Poem," 181.

could simply transliterate here: "Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail that brings our friends up from Australia…."

Ironically perhaps, to follow the "straight" reading here would entail a certain veering in the sense of "up" as intimated by Miller in his classifying it as "this present life and moment." "Up" thus appears to be both "now" and "not yet." But of course what "up" here also and perhaps most powerfully does is evoke the return of the dead: the underworld here is not simply or literally the "the part of the earth beyond the horizon" but also, as Miller makes clear, the mythological underworld. Tennyson's poem can "raise a ghost" (146). As Miller puts it, linking this image of what the first beam brings with the tears that well up and constitute the unfathomable *raison d'être* of the poem: "Tennyson's tears of mourning are brought back up like Eurydice from the underworld, but their function as communicating messengers is lost along the way" (142). Tennyson's "up" is perhaps the most succinct figure of the uncanny temporality of the poem.

When will I see my friend again? When does the friend return? "Dead men tell no tales," as Miller likes to say, and this is the truth.8 Yet there is also that sad, fresh thing called prosopopoeia—that rhetorical figure that he, with de Man and Derrida, has made and continues to make so *telling*, so strange and so enlightening for thinking about the world, about literature and the future. Given more time here I would like to have said more about how Tennyson's poem brings up the spirit of love and friendship, especially the ghostly presence of Arthur Henry Hallam (who, as Miller notes, is "buried not far from the ruins of Tintern Abbey," where "Tears, Idle Tears" was written: see 139). I would like to have elaborated on what the extraordinary intertextual waters of this poem bring up, not only with respect to Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" or Keats's "Ode to Autumn" or indeed, in more weirdly futural mode, Elizabeth Bowen's remarkable short stories "Tears, Idle Tears" and "The Happy Autumn Fields," but also regarding the demonic presence of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner": *glittering*, *reddening*, *a sail*, from *life-in-death* to "Death in Life." The first beam glittering on a sail, the first sail, then, might bring our friends up in a sense not a thousand miles away perhaps from what is signified in the phrase "bringing up demons." (I always associate this phrase with an essay about crypts and cryptonymy, which I read with

8 See, for example, "Deconstruction and a Poem," 181.

great interest when it was published in 1988. I still recall the strangeness of the moment, some years afterwards, when Hillis informed me that "Bringing Up Demons" was written by his daughter [Sarah Miller, "Bringing"].)

Bill Readings (1960-94) begins his book *Introducing Lyotard: Art and Politics—*still, I think, the best critical exposition of Lyotard—with a modest acknowledgement: "I began to understand … [this] book's necessity in taking a seminar led by Hillis Miller" (p. xiv). Miller's work is a teaching and a reading, a teaching of reading. This is also the subject of *The First Sail*. What he allows us to see, sailing out of the film into his essay on "Tears, Idle Tears" and sailing back from the essay into the film, is an apprehension of the event as Readings glosses it: "The event thus marks a gap in historical time in the sense that it seems to inhabit at least two temporalities at once: an unthinkable future history and a past become uncannily present" (60). "Sing this poem and you will cry," Miller suggests in "Temporal Topographies" (143). But how and why? What is the point of this or any poem? How is it to be read? As he says in *The First Sail*: it's up to you.

### *Works Cited*

#### *Chapter 4*

### Miller's Idle Tears

#### Éamonn Dunne and Michael O'Rourke

"Frippery" is an odd word. It is the name Hillis Miller has given to his Cape Dory Typhoon, the one we see him sailing out into the distance in Dragan Kujundžić's extraordinary film. That boat is of course a central metaphor in the film in many ways, as are the faint echoes of burbling waters punctuating and haunting its surroundings, pervading the serene quietude of the Miller summer home on Deer Isle, Maine, like the beeloud glade in Innisfree, oddly and contradictorily peaceful and bustling at once. Miller's fantasy life is beautifully articulated in the recurring visual motif of him gliding through waters, and, verbally, in the opening recounts of his early interests in designing planes that likewise harness wind currents for free flight.

Though water and meditation may be wedded forever in human minds, as Melville's first-person narrator Ishmael famously suggests, those same waters are often obscure, illimitable, inviolable too (*Moby* 2). "The sea," Miller will say, "is terrifyingly inhuman ... no idea can wholly reduce this dark monster to order" (*Topographies* 273). But water has deeply moved him from an early age, a fact frequently evident in the inimitable style of his writings, themselves a seemingly effortless gliding, harnessing multifarious voices in great Victorian and modern literary works, a skill it has taken a lifetime's learning to achieve. Reading Miller is like an exercise in the free flight of the imagination, described in the film, a way of lifting off from the page and meandering through thoughts that are oddly directionless and pointed at the same time. Reading Miller reading, that is, is one way of seeing how "good reading" (by which is meant close rhetorical reading) invariably leads one away from a destination. Fundamentally, reading Miller is the experience of *adestination*, of sailing into the unknown, an ad-venture in the strong sense of willing the arrival of some in-coming other about which one can really, positively, decisively, know nothing. Sailing out and sailing back again, past, passing and to come, coming about again, starting over again, afresh, afresh, afresh, as those monstrous waters never fully form to mind or voice.

But why be interested in the word "frippery"? Odd as it is. Surely, it is incidental. I want to argue here that that word somehow ironically, uncannily, encapsulates a central question (perhaps the central question) of the film. For, despite the laughter that pervades *The First Sail*, its lightheartedness and tenderness, a tangible poignancy surrounds it. Asked what fascinates him now, Miller responds "I am fascinated now, to be serious for a moment, by this question of the utility of reading literature any more in the period of critical climate change." Why read literature? It's not a simple question by any means, especially in our present moment of unprecedented digitized hyper-connectedness. And what is so striking is Miller's intelligent avoidance of trite, platitudinous responses. There is no reversion to I. A. Richards, F. R. Leavis, Kantian "purposiveness without purpose" or Arnoldian "sweetness and light"; nor is there, for that matter, a tidy agreement with Harold Bloom's latest focus on the enrichment of literature for our everyday lives.1 There is only the question: "why should others read literature?" and the weakest of weak responses, "it's up to you." Why this must be the case can be glimpsed in "frippery."

The word is from Old French, stemming from the root "frepe" meaning old rags, rubbish, worn out, torn or useless old clothes. Somewhere along the way, though, through an odd metaphorical reversal, it came to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant. In a strange semantic tale of rags to riches frippery became finery, tarnished clothing became *haute couture*. In William Congreve's *The Way of the World* (1700), for instance, Lady Wishfort is affronted by Mirabell's use of the word to describe her socially: "Frippery? Superannuated frippery? I'll frippery the villain; I'll reduce him to frippery and rags" (45). Whereas 70 years later Oliver Goldsmith's *She Stoops to Conquer* has Hardcastle reverse the valence by describing his daughter thus: "There's my pretty darling Kate!

1 See Harold Bloom's recent book *The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life* (Yale: Yale University Press, 2011).

the fashions of the times have almost infected her too. By living a year or two in town, she is as fond of gauze and French frippery as the best of them" (3). Strange to think that in one lifetime the word becomes fully semantically inverted.

In more recent years, "frippery" is attended to in Mel Stuart's film adaptation of Roald Dahl's *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory* (1971). "Frippery" is employed here as a synonym for irresponsible behaviour that might lead to vandalism, mischievous or destructive actions. The golden ticket winners sign a contract before they enter Willy Wonka's wonderland. The contract is ludicrously long-winded and literally unreadable (reading like a Snellen eye test, trickling down to finer and finer print until finally there's nothing left, only pinpoints on the page). As far as one can make out the opening sentences of the contract read as follows: "WHEREAS For damage caused by lightning, earthquakes, floods, fire, frost or frippery of any sort, kind or condition, consequently the undersigned take responsibility."2

The rest is a wonderful example of "legalese," impenetrable jargon employed to confound even the most valiant attempts at decryption. Part of the joke, which will turn out to be quite serious for Charlie, is that the signatories of this document cannot possibly ever take responsibility for "lightning, earthquakes, floods, fire, frost or frippery of any sort, kind or condition." How could they? And yet, by signing the document, they do just that. These signatures are, to paraphrase Derrida, examples of a deep irresponsibility, hyperbolic examples of an everyday occurrence, the responsibilities of the name under the exorbitant duress of the language of the law, Wonka's wonky law (Derrida and Ferraris, *Taste* 85).

What Miller cherishes about literature is its linguistic concentration and complexity, the way language works to undo cold, comfortable complacencies. As far back as 1985, Miller was referring to the way in which language foregrounds itself in literature as a "linguistic moment." Something beyond language heralds it, calls attention to itself at precisely that moment when language inevitably fails to represent this "unknown X" at the very limits of the sayable/unsayable: "Beyond this boundary, though encountered only through words, the linguistic moment

2 See the following website for the transcription of the contract: http://home. comcast.net/~tom.brodhead/wonka.htm

dissolves before the *it*. The unknown X is beyond language, though it is what all language 'names,' in the gap which may not be closed between all words and any fixed identifiable referent, subjective, objective, natural, or supernatural" (Miller, *Linguistic* 339).

Black holes, catachreses for chaos, the unknown X, the wholly other, are all placeholders for that *it*, trembling at the borders of sense and reason. They all name without naming the altogether unknowable, insensible, unforeseeable at the secret heart of the literary. Those moments are the impossible made possible. They are frippery, radiant constructions and exuberant performative speech acts, excessive, ornate, overbearing, always missing the mark in astonishing arabesques and aerolites or falling far short in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. That double sense of frippery, both beyond taste and below it, highlights the fleeting gap between right and wrong, response and responsibility, the good and bad reading. Indeed it is that very gap between finery and rags that unravels the question of utility: neither useful nor not useful but both at the same time; never quite one or the other, never filling the median gap of taste, self-taste or taste for the other. This is part of Wonka's wonky law, that the weight of language is never quite equal to the work it undertakes. The contract of reading never entirely binds, nor does it bind two different people in quite the same way. Miller's choice of Yeats and Tennyson is a case in point. The vicissitudes of circumstance – frost, fire or frippery – exceeds expectations (natural or supernatural), making the contract, like the sea, terrifyingly inhuman, monstrous. Why this must be the case for Wonka as well as Miller I will emphasise in three important threads.

**First thread**: Miller's sense of the good reader: someone upon whom nothing is lost. Genuine acts of reading in the Millerian universe are singular, *sui generis*, and occur as unforeseeable events, disqualifying, reshaping, undoing or dismantling any theoretical presuppositions we have brought with us to the text. That's why, in a very real sense, it is ludicrous to say J. Hillis Miller is a literary theorist. Nothing could really be further from the truth when you come to think about it; as if theory was something one could practice on its own: no theory without reading, no

~

reading without theory.3 Theory now and then, not for all time, not for one time, for one time only, but when it happens, out of the blue, so to speak; falling like a benediction in multiple voices.

Indeed, this is one of Miller's laws, by his own admission. Miller's law: "The greatest critics are those whose readings exceed their theoretical presuppositions" (Miller, "Why Literature?" 414). In the event of reading, if it is an event worthy of the name, something happens to undo precritical assumptions, consensus with fellow readers (Stanley Fish's "interpretive communities" for example), predictions, conjectures. Reading the same works, works we think we already intimately know, might be the best way into seeing why the event and act of a genuine act of reading can never be predictable beforehand. Those readings in *The First Sail*, are second, third, fourth readings of works Miller has read in numerous books and essays already, notably *Others* for Yeats's "Cold Heaven" and *Topographies* for "Tennyson's Tears," but they are also always, always already, first readings, performative new starts, countersignatures. Derrida's word "iterability" incorporates even more succinctly the mutability, monstrosity, and otherness of this *contract* with reading, every other time it happens, signing, sealing, sailing.

"My law," says Derrida echoing Miller, "the one to which I try to devote myself or to respond, is the text of the other, its very singularity, its idiom, its appeal which precedes me. But I can only respond to it in a responsible way (and this goes for the law in general, ethics in particular) if I put in play, and in guarantee [*en gage*], my singularity, by signing, with another signature; for the countersignature signs by confirming the signature of the other, but also by signing in an absolutely new and inaugural way, both at once, like each time I confirm my own signature by signing once more: each time in the same way and each time differently, one more time, at another date" (Derrida, "Strange" 66).

 Reading and theory are not opposed, so to speak, so much as asymmetrical, touching at a respectful distance; theory touching itself touching another in a kind of auto-hetero-affection, *se toucher toi*. A reading can

3 See also Chapter 12 of J. Hillis Miller's *Topographies* (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 323: "To put this another way, literary theory is always a reading of some specific work or works. The relation of theory to reading is itself a difficult theoretical question. Though there is no theory without reading, theory and reading are asymmetrical."

be touching in ways that can never be fully expressed in words or seen (as the etymology of the word "theory" implies); it can exceed the reader's, any reader's ability to say *why* it is touching, like Tennyson's "Tears idle tears" repeating the same word over in order, perhaps, to capture something of its innumerable meanings (tears, tears/ weeping, wrenching), or the catalogue of similes that are both like and unlike tears: "fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail."4 Literature has no *why*, no theoretical formulation can justify the materiality of literature, its force without force, its phenomenality without phenomenality (Miller, *Topographies* 310). But the words themselves, heightened, pulled, forced open, disseminated, dehiscent, are part of that peculiarity which Miller claims took him to literature in the first place: "it is worth a lifetime to study it."

**Second Thread**: There is no way only wandering. *Methode ist Umweg* [method is detour] (Benjamin); which is why good reading is always a risk, the fortuitous outcome of a leap of faith in the text, what Frank Kermode called "divination."5 Nietzsche is close to it in *Ecce Homo*: "When I picture a perfect reader, I always picture a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer" (264). Intrinsic to Nietzsche's conception of the strong reader is the notion of movement, wandering, climbing, gliding, yes, even sailing, notable in several sentences from *Zarathustra* appearing as the conclusion of this section of *Ecce Homo*: "To you, the bold searchers, researchers, and whoever embarks with cunning sails on terrible seas – to you drunk with riddles, glad of the twilight.... because you do not want to grope along a thread with cowardly hand; and where you can *guess*, you hate to *deduce*" (264). Bold searching and monstrous devotion to a riddle, glad of the twilight, at home in the liminal space between knowledge and non-knowledge, sailing into terrible seas, the courage to err, that is Nietzsche's imperative, his demand of the philosopher of

4 Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Tears idle tears, I know not what they mean" in *Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selected Poems* ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Penguin, 2007), 92.

5 Benjamin's phrase appears as the first epigraph to Miller's *For Derrida* (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), p. xv. Frank Kermode discusses this leap in interpretation in Chapter 7 of *An Appetite for Poetry: Essays in Literary Interpretation* (London: Collins, 1989), 152-171: "For every act of reading calls for some (perhaps minute) act of divination."

the future. All of these are significant for the kind of reader Miller sees in Derrida and Derrida, in turn, sees in Miller: "the intellectual adventure," as Derrida says in *The First Sail*, "that signs and seals our lives."

*Destinerrance*, we could say, is not only a key word in Derrida's vast protean lexicon; it is also *the* major initiative in Miller's. Nietzsche, patron philosopher of sailing, is the father of nomadic reading practices, of the (im)possibilities of reading. Miller's writings are yet one more example of why reading must be at once responsible and irresponsible to the call of some other or others, why it must always be at risk. It is also a plea with the "audacity of hope" that just reading might just make us Ariadnes awakening.6

**Third Thread**: The final thread is not a law, as such, but a movement beyond the law towards the possibility of justice, breaking the law in the name of a justice to-come. "Miller's exemplary justice," says Derrida, "consists of paying essential attention to the irreplaceability of the example" ("Justices" 234). In response to the question of the utility of reading, as I have said, Miller doesn't have an answer. He reverts to an example – Yeats's "The Cold Heaven." Why should we read that? How should we teach it? Shrugging his shoulders, Miller says "It's up to you." That's cold comfort, especially for those who've chosen to teach literature as their vocation, who've been *called* by it in the strongest sense of that term.

As Miller reiterates in one of two very recent essays he's written about the poem, and as I've suggested earlier, there is no *why*, apart from an obligation he feels to talk about what happens when he reads it. In the most rudimentary, humble, gracious manner, Miller wants you to hear what he thinks about the poem because it affects him in a way that, in a very real sense, is inexplicable. "Ah!" "Who but Yeats could have added that Ah!" says Miller in a wonderful moment in the film, a moment that catches sight of the incomparable humility and grace he has been bringing to his work, untiringly, for over six decades now. Though here again

6 Miller's argument in *Reading for Our Time* (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012) is that reading George Eliot's novels might, just might, with patience and rigorous attention to tropological detail, lead us to a better understanding of ideological lies and folly, and of how these follies might be unmasked.

Miller's laughter is at odds with the import of that great poem; laughing as his eyes moisten with tears.7

In his latest essay on the poem Miller lists 15 different points that the reader coming to the poem for the first time ought to know.8 And that, he tells us, is just for starters. Miller's concern, I posit, is that this may all seem like frippery in the double sense of that term pointed out earlier – and what a disaster. On the one hand, literature's time is almost up, as he has been saying since 2001.9 The new regime of teletechnological communications has changed literary study in such a way that close readings of literature seem outdated, outmoded, old school. That literature's role in society has diminished as a result of this in the last few decades is obvious: "it's gotta be," says Miller.

Books are now the frippery of a digital age, an age when the medium has made it so that kindles are outselling the printed page. Reading habits are changing, attention is diverting, torn. Miller's frippery, his idle tears/tears find themselves in the midst of a critical climate change and the waters are surely reaching up to our noses. In this latter sense, literary study is trivia, unnecessary, superfluous, frivolous. It divorces us from real, pressing needs. We should be "doing" something to instigate change in the world around us. It is in no way certain that literary study can help in this regard at all, despite claims (Miller's included) that it might make us better equipped at unmasking ideological follies. It is only with a faith in the task of reading, with a hope without hope that slow, patient, rigorous reading and the teaching of that as an art and a vocation worthy of its name, that we might come to realise its benefits in our lives. But it's up to

7 Viewers taken with this scene and who want to follow the reasoning behind Miller's statement, "it's up to you," should also read Chapter 7 of *Others* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) "Yeats: 'The Cold Heaven'":

"'The Cold Heaven' violently empties itself out. It wastes itself, spends itself, cancels itself out in the final question and in the impossibility of deciding whether natural image or supernatural emblem takes precedence as the literal referent of which the other is the figure. This self-cancelling leaves the reader empty-handed, riddled with light, driven out of all sense and reason by an effort of reading," 181.

8 See J. Hillis Miller, "Globalization and World Literature" in *Neohelicon* 38. 2 (2011), 251-265.

9 See the opening pages of J. Hillis Miller's, *On Literature* (London: Routledge, 2002).

you. You alone. There comes a point when we all have to take responsibility for our own readings, a point when we must countersign our own contracts with the text. Sailing, sealing, signing, we must take responsibility for our own unknowable futures and for the (mis)readings we've already performed: "WHEREAS For damage caused by lightning, earthquakes, floods, fire, frost or frippery of any sort, kind or condition, consequently the undersigned take responsibility."

### **ED**

\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*

Tears across the dotted line. Tears or tears are the thread(s) I would like to follow here. In *Specters of Marx* Derrida played on the idea of "wears" and "tears" (77), tears as ruptures, "abrupt breaches of syntax" (Derrida, "'Le Parjure'" 195-234), which render everything out of joint. The abrupt anacoluthonic tear in the text of the film of *The First Sail*, that which stops me in my tracks, puts everything out of kilter, is Miller's sadness. There are no actual tears of course and the film is punctuated by much laughter whether it is Hillis' or Dragan's. Even at those moments when Hillis is describing that which makes him sad or frightened he is laughing, albeit haltingly, as if, in these bad times, it is bad to laugh, or he is scared to even do that. Scared and scarred.

 It is very difficult not to read the scar above Hillis' eye (incurred after a fall on the University of California Irvine campus) as a tear in the skin of the film, a punctum or rupture in its integument. This tear in the cloth of the film is "a neat cut, very deep" as he describes it (one is reminded of Hillis' reading of Freud's scar on the chin in *The Medium is the Maker*  [66]) but one that nevertheless leaves a trace, a highly visible mark, even after it has been stitched up: the scar above the eye. In his essay "Telepathy," Derrida discusses the primal scene of Freud's falling from a stool and cutting his face in terms of "symbolic castration."10 Freud bears a scar hidden beneath his beard which when he parts it reveals the wound:

10 Ibid., 66. It is interesting that Freud's scar is caused by a fall from a "stool" and that tears can be assimilated to excrement.  31) but does not, so far as I recall, talk about the outflow of tears.

The word *Narbe [scar]* comes twice from my pen, I know that the English had already used the word 'scar' to translate *Spur* much earlier on. This translation may have put some people on the trail [*piste*]. I like these words *Narbe*, 'scar', *Spur*, trace, *cicatrice* in French as well … Nietzsche already spoke about the scar under Plato's beard. One can stroke and part the bristles so as to pretend to show, that is the whole of my lecture" (Derrida, "Telepathy" 251).

Miller's scar is not under his beard and there is no obvious allusion to symbolic castration (although later I will refer to his circumcised eyes, eyes swollen, torn and cut from weeping). However, we might reach a similar conclusion to Derrida that this scar which has healed over above the eye is one that is dehiscent. Miller's scar "don't you think, opens the text, holds it open" (Derrida, "Telepathy" 246).

But, how deep does this scar go? Later in the film Hillis recalls the love of a five year old boy for *Alice in Wonderland*. What drew that little boy to Carroll's novel was the word play (the same thing that would later move him toward Derrida), the linguistic choreography which he illustrates with a reference to the homophonic puns on tale/tail and not/knot. But this leads down the rabbit hole to a deeper question. The light-hearted love of word play is haunted on its underside by something that needs explaining, by the weirdness or strangeness of literature. *Alice in Wonderland* doesn't just make Hillis laugh; it always moves him (as all literature does when it calls, makes its insistent demand on him) in some way. Literature, he tells us, is something that he has "always found immensely *moving*." Why should I care, he asks, about fictional characters, about the creations of Eliot or Morrison or Kafka, about what happens to them. But "I do care" he insists. So there is this double side to Miller reading: on the bright side we have this interest in puns, jokes and wordplay, in the anasemic twists and turns of language. And, on the other hand, on the other side of the tear, we have this darkness, we have Miller's dark side (a seam which is often troubled or hinged by a mischievous wink, when he is asked if he has ever been jealous of Derrida or de Man for example). But why does he care so much about these fictional characters whom he telepathically inhabits? When he attempts to understand Tennyson's poem "Tears Idle Tears" it is because he himself is perplexed by the meaning of these strange tears. What ever could they mean? Why are they "idle" since they rise up and are in some way "motivated"? Tennyson's tears require some explanation. But so too do Miller's. If Freud's scar "pretends" to show us an absence then Miller's tears also reveal or re-veil an absence, not a presence. Why, after all, do they "rise up" from his heart but never gather to the eyes? I will try to explain what I think Miller's absent tears might mean. But we need to follow two teartracks through the film in order to do just that.

### Tear #1:

As Hillis watches the archival footage of Derrida reading the "Justices" essay about him, about the (self)taste of J. Hillis Miller (the taste of his tears maybe?), he twice repeats that it is "very moving."11 Surely the repetition is worth remarking. He is not moved once but twice. But he goes on to say, somewhat defensively, that he has indeed been moved but "*not* to tears" (recall the mouse's pun on not/knot in *Alice*). This is because, given the machinal nature of the new "eco-tele-technologies" which make the ghostly figure of Derrida speaking available to us, to him, Derrida "doesn't come through to me as the return of Jacques Derrida." No real tears then, or what Žižek would call "the fright of real tears."

But Miller is frightened by something. And again, he tells us this *twice*. In *For Derrida*, his twelve essays for his friend Derrida, his works of unworkable mourning for him, he tries, he claims, to be-tray him.12

11 Jacques Derrida, "Justices." Of course, the self-taste of tears is always the taste/tears of the other. In his notes on Derrida's (as yet unpublished) cannibalism seminars David Farrell Krell ventriloquizes Derrida: "Thus our own tears are always the tears of an other. We weep the other, who weeps us. This internal and inherent alterity is what enables Klein to speak of tears as excretions—not because they flow from us but because they flow from another within us, a phantasmatic other that could not be entirely consumed." David Farrell Krell, "All You Can't Eat: Derrida's Course, '*Rhétorique Du Cannibalisme*' (1990-1991)," *Research in Phenomenology* 36.1 (2006), 169. The final lecture "Eating the Sun and Stars" (January 30, 1991) has much to say about tears, mourning, weeping, touching and taste.

12 We might compare Derrida claiming that "I liked words *in order to be-tray*  (to treat, triturate, trice, in-trigue, trace, track)" (cited as an epigraph in Julian Wolfreys, "Responsibilities of *J*, or, Aphorism's Other: Criticism's

In this book with its wandering method, his aim, for all the aimlessness, is he says, to bring out a dark side to Derrida and he does so "not necessarily to agree with it."13 It is not clear on which side of this tear in Derrida's work—the heterogeneity of which he is attempting to bring forth—Miller wants to be. He is frightened by something and he lets us know what that something is: Derrida's "late" turn to the figure of "autoimmunity" and in "Faith and Knowledge" to auto-co-immunity. If Miller himself confides that he is not so "socially adroit" then Derrida is someone who refrains from all community, enisles himself away from all groups, schools, families and this because, for Derrida, the "community" has an inexorable tendency to suicide itself.14 Autoimmunity is a figure Miller finds "frightening" because it is not "very hopeful" (and he goes on shortly after to say that he is "frightened" by his own government). One recalls here the final interview between Derrida and Cixous where he reiterates that she is always on the side of life and he on the side of death. Cixous responds impatiently that Derrida has always been on the side of life, just more complicatedly so15. Miller too, is someone I have always thought of as being "for life." In his interview with Éamonn in *J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading* he cheerily describes himself as a happy go lucky character: "As you can see, I'm essentially a cheerful person, like the hero of *Mad Magazine*: 'What, me worry?" (Dunne 125). This is perhaps why *The First Sail* and the "serious frivolity" of *For Derrida* pull me up short (but nowhere near as abruptly as the discussion in the film of his death and the graveyard plots). How, after all, can we think about tears without the taste of death, mourning, negativity, the frightening?

Transformation" in *Literature, in Theory: Tropes, Subjectivities, Responses and Responsibilities* [London: Continuum, 2010] p. 267) with Freud on the words scar, spur, cicatrice above.

The "last word" of *For Derrida*—which appears as text on the screen during the film—is that "if these essays are works of mourning, they haven't worked" (326). In his eulogy for Jean-Marie Benoist in *The Work of Mourning* Derrida gives us a clue as to why Miller does not cry in this part of the film, why he is moved but not to tears:

He [Benoist] does not teach us that we must not cry; he reminds us that we must not *taste* a tear: 'The act of tasting the tear is a desire to reannex the other'; one must not 'drink the tear and wonder about the strangeness of its taste compared to one's own'. Therefore: not to cry over oneself. (But does one ever do this? Does one ever do anything but this? That is the question that quivers in every tear, deploration or imploration itself). One should not develop a taste for mourning, and yet mourn we *must*. We *must*, but we must not like it—mourning, that is, mourning *itself*, if such a thing exists: not to like or love through one's own tear but only through the other, and every tear is from the other, the friend, the living, as long as we ourselves are living, reminding us, in holding life, to hold on to it. (110)

Miller holds on to his tears (but one notices the film soundtrack at certain moments like these where a sombre tonality intrudes and one note is held just like a tear). If he lets his tears flow then Miller will have consumed the other. If his tears are tears of mourning, then they haven't worked.

### **Tear #2**:

Miller worries in the film, in his recent essay on de Man and the "remains "of the archive" (Miller, "Paul" 55-88) and in his latest book on George Eliot's *Adam Bede* and *Middlemarch* about these "bad days" (Miller, *Reading* 166-171). More so, he is concerned, even frightened for, the "utility" of reading and his profession in these dark times. "Why read literature?" he asks and then repeats the question again "why *should* we read literature?" today. The answer, part playfully, half seriously, is that we read "because it will save us" but the onus is on us as readers: "it's up to you." So, in these times where the role of reading has become depleted, Miller warns us that the future of reading, its capacity to save us, is in our own hands.

What use is reading in these "bad times," this era of ominous critical climate change, which threatens us with species extinction, heralding what Claire Colebrook, Tom Cohen and Hillis Miller refer to as "the disappearing future" (even presaging the disappearance of theory and reading themselves). In the "*C*oda" to *Reading for Our Time*, Hillis revisits this recurring concern of his with the looming threats to the human species, to the educational system, with financial meltdown, and a healthcare system in crisis. No less than the question of acts of reading is at stake in this and Miller sees value in re-reading George Eliot's *Adam Bede* and *Middlemarch* in:

these days of climate change, global financial meltdown, the universal diffusion of computer technology, the rapid transformation of developed countries' like the United States into third world countries, with a few super-rich and the rest living in misery and poverty, and finally, collective 'auto-coimmune' (as Jacques Derrida calls it) self-destruction of the human species through fossil fuel use, environment destruction, and Co2 emissions. (Miller, *Reading* 166.)

 As always with Miller he accords a strange power to language, literary language in particular, and in Eliot, in his "rhetorical readings" of Eliot (whose fictional characters we ought to care about), he finds potential for veering (Nicholas Royle's word) away from the ideologies of politicians and economists who don't want us to read in the era of critical climate change.

But, we might ask again, why should we care about reading now in these bleak times? And, more crucially, why should we care about reading J. Hillis Miller? Because, in his own words, at the conclusion of *Reading for our Time*, insight into the way auto-co-immunity, trying to understand why we act self-destructively can help us (it won't stop climate change or financial implosion but it will help us to understand them and why we believe what we hear and read even though the truth is right in front of our noses). He writes:

Such insight can help us today, has helped me at least, to glimpse some explanation for why we (I mean the global 'we', all 6.946 billions of us and counting) have done practically nothing globally, too little and too late, to confront the reality of climate change (human use of fossil fuels) or the causes of the global financial meltdown (unregulated greed of bankers and financiers) and to do anything about them. I doubt if understanding will lead to action in time, but quasi-understanding would never the less be of benefit as the ocean waters rise. (Miller, *Reading* 169)

 It bears repeating again: in these catastrophic times, times of downturn, you can learn a lot about reading from J. Hillis Miller. But as the waters rise, as the utility of reading falters in the face of the four pronged threat of health care reforms, financial meltdown, climate change and the decline in the educational system, why do actual tears not rise up to Miller's eyes? It is made very clear in the film that Miller thinks we are all in "big trouble." This is a "suicidal situation" as we engage in autodestructive behaviour on so many fronts. As Claire Colebrook argues the more we know about impending ecocatastrophe and species extinction the less we seem to care, the less inclined we are to act (45). For Miller, this hypo-affective disorder is due, in large measure, to a failure to read. For "fifteen years" we have realized that climate change is going to get us into big trouble and that "sooner or later something catastrophic is going to happen." So, the disaster is foreseeable, Miller argues, but not anticipated. We know very well that something bad is going to happen but yet nothing is being done. This affect fatigue again explains, in a way, Miller's lack of *real* tears. But yet again, in making the link between the utility of reading and inactivity in the face of global crisis palpable, Miller repeats that "it is in our hands."16

16 The double-sidedness of Miller is revealed here too: "it would be laughable if it wasn't so sad" he tells Dragan and the real sadness for him, about rising water levels, is that his house at Deer Isle might end up submerged ("this is a great sadness to me"). We might think further about the way Hillis tells Éamonn that "the poem just happens to fall under your eye, but it feels like a happy accident, and you make the best of what befalls you" (*J. Hillis Miller and The Possibilities of Reading*, 125). The text is a benediction and the obligations of reading are "happy" ones. The taste of tears, as Derrida would tell us, can run from the bitter to the sweet.

Despite the despondent situation, *Reading for Our Time* boldly argues that reading "in these bad times" is justified, even urgent, in the face of critical climate change. Our auto-destructive behaviour , "throwing ourselves over the cliff," could lead to hopelessness and despair (or the anxiety and discomfort Miller feels before the camera "eye"). Tears might blur the eyes, might blind our attempts to see the truth. But as John Caputo argues in *The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida*, "our eyes are always, structurally veiled, and above all veiled with tears" (313). Tears are always already there then and blindness is inescapable (Caputo here quotes Marvell's poem "Eyes and Tears" where he alludes to "these weeping eyes, those seeing tears" [310]). Miller does not, as I have repeatedly said, cry in *The First Sail* but perhaps those tears are *always already* there and he, like Derrida, prays through those tears. Miller's limitless, blind yes, yes to reading in and for our time has a jussive structuration (Éamonn would call it one of Miller's laws) as he implores what is tocome and prays and hopes for the justice to-come. As Caputo might put it, Miller's look is

cast not toward heaven but toward the future. He looks to what is coming but coming precisely as unforeseeable, unprovisional, unpro-vidential, unable to see a thing, lacking divine foresight, divested of the foreknowledge of some omniscient, all-foreseeing God or *savoir absolue*. So he looks to what is coming but without the eyes to see, with circumcised eyes. He looks to what is coming through his tears, with eyes swollen and sore from weeping, with imploring and beseeching eyes, with prophetic tears, tears of hope and love. (328-329)

Such loving tears, borne of a faith in something in-coming that will save us, tears that place all their hope in sailing on the crest of the future tocome, such tears that rise from our hearts and fall from our eyes into our hands, are hardly idle.

### **MOR**

### *Works Cited*

Congreve, William. *The Way of the World.* Greensboro: Empire Books, 2012.

*Chapter 5*

### En*voiles* (Post It)

#### Dragan Kujundžić

That the relationship between J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida occupies a unique place in the landscape of contemporary criticism is no secret. They have played as well a significant role in my intellectual building, having encountered them some thirty years ago. I have written about that in my "Journey With J on the Jour J," an introduction to Derrida's essay "'Justices'" on J. Hillis Miller, and Miller's "Isabelle's Kiss" published in *Critical Inquiry* in 2005. There, I have likened these two essays to letters on the way "to further destinations of as yet uncharted parts. Like letters, sealed with a kiss" (Kujundžić, "Journey" 688). Derrida's essay "'Justices'" includes a description of the scene in which he receives a letter from Miller ("Hillis" when referring to the film character, "J. Hillis Miller" or "Miller" when referring to Miller as author in further text), regarding the real name behind the "J" which has received extensive treatment in my film *The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller*.

In my film, *The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller*, the first thing Hillis comments upon when discussing the scene at the lecture when Derrida shows the letter, is Derrida's death, already presaged by his not looking too healthy to Hillis' eye in the filmed footage screened by Hillis in the film. The counter-time of mourning Derrida is inscribed in my own desire to film J. Hillis Miller. Derrida's specter haunts me and it haunts the film, as much as it haunts J. Hillis Miller. But not necessarily in ways that are visible or re-presentable. The ways the spectral divides the frame of the cinematic representation, what I call the effects of division and d*e*vision (a *destinerrance* of the cinematic image in fact), pose interesting and urgent questions about the modes and ethic of representation. They go from the phenomenological to the political in a heartbeat. Thus, the question of the frame, or the letter (be it a single letter, the initial of the first name, "J."), the letter which does or does not arrive, to the cinematic which does or does nor "represent" the Other, imposes itself as the burning issue pertaining to the very core of what is a tradition, history, and what our response and responsibility to it are or should be. Who writes what and who writes whom, how or whether we allow the Other to leave an imprint, what or who arrives, those are the issues which haunt the text below, in the film on J. Hillis Miller, and in Derrida's "Justices" episode reproduced in the film.

The reflections below are also marked, truly haunted, by a telepathic encounter with the Other. Someone else, Julian Wolfreys (his text follows mine in this volume), dictated this text telepathically to me, as it were. I read Wolfrey's essay after I finished mine. Thus, I realize, from an infinitely distant telepathic proximity, his own essay taught me, unbeknownst to me, how to write my own essay even before it had been written, as well as taught me how to watch my film. What is really uncanny, is that at the same time I decided to write on the scene from the film where Jacques Derrida discusses the letters he mis-addressed, in relation to *La Carte Postale* (in an email I sent to Michael O'Rourke on Wednesday, 14 March, 2012, 3:14), Julian Wolfreys wrote about the same scene in *The First Sail*, starting with the description of his visit, on the day of his lecture about *The First Sail*, to the Bodleian library at Oxford University, in search for, as he says, "that" post card which is on the cover of *La Carte Postale* (Plato teaches Socrates how to write, shown initially to Jacques Derrida by Cynthia Chase and Jonathan Culler). And thus Wolfreys' relating the whole analysis of the letters sent to Miller with an erroneous appellation ( John for Joseph), and Miller's response that Derrida quotes in the film, to the analysis of *destinerrance* in *La Carte Postale*. Which I proposed to do in my email as well! But the uncanny ghosts haunting these essays proliferate, with Julian Wolfreys' conclusion of his conference presentation (delivered at Oxford University on April 13, 2012 as one of the keynotes at the conference on "Giving up the Ghost: the Haunting of Modern Culture") with a reference and analysis of *Ulysses' Gaze* by Theo Angelopoulos, which is exactly the ending of my own essay which I had already planned to relate to sailing in all senses of the term, to *Ulysses* and *Ulysses Gaze,* the destinerrant sailing of the tradition itself. In advance, I have followed Wolfrey's text blow for blow, my writing from the very start already sealed by this distant proximity and affinity which taught me how to write, in a scene of writing where I cannot tell anymore who or what came first. On occasion, our analyses reverberate with a gentle dissonance, like a counterpunctual musical motif, thus all the more underscoring the mutual affinity. "It is impossible not to believe that each of us has an internal television screen by means of which we have visions of what distant friends and relations are thinking, or not to believe that whatever we think is broadcast to the internal television screen of others," says Miller in *The Medium is the Maker* (15). This essay is exactly a product of such tele-vised encounter with Julian Wolfreys (whom I never met in person, except online, even though we overlapped for a while in the same University of Florida where we had arranged but missed encounters, tormented, like letters, with an "internal drifting").

Derrida's death has also entailed the darkening of register of some of Miller's recent writing, the dark Derrida a darkening in Miller of a wound that does not heal. I tried to exemplify this relationship in the scene where Hillis watches Derrida read a letter he had received from Miller. Relating the scene in the film about the *destinerrance* of the postal regarding J. Hillis Miller and Derrida with Joyce is justified on many levels, not least of all because of the entry in *La Carte Postale* on "20 June, 1978. I had not come back to Zurich since spring 1972.  Hillis, who was waiting for me at the airport (the de Mans arrive only this afternoon,) drove me to the cemetery, near to Joyce's tomb, I should say funerary monument…" (Derrida, *Post Card* 148). In his *The Medium is the Maker* Miller (just after his description of how he took Derrida sailing on his boat, *The Frippery*, featured extensively in *The First Sail*, on a day when there was a "small craft warnings" and "look what happened to Shelley when he went sailing on a day when there was too much wind!" [49-50]), claims that he has no memory of that ever happening, not "having a car in Zurich." However, "Derrida and I did go together, as the "Envois" report, on another occasion, to visit Joyce's tomb in the Zurich cemetery near the zoo. The animal cries from that zoo appear in *Finnegans Wake*. We did stand laughing before the tomb of Egon Zoller, "*Erfinder des Telephonographe*," with its engraved ticker tape machine and its carved Alpha and Omega. Derrida, as we stood looking at the tomb, connected it to his then current project about telecommunication networks, that is, the 'Envois'" (Miller *Medium*, 50). From this scene I'd just like to retain the inscription of *La Carte Postale* in the neighborhood of the telegraph, tele-technology, the uncanny repetitions of uncertain memories, the sailing on Miller's boat ("6. October 1978. … Tomorrow, return to Yale, day after tomorrow excursion in Hillis's sailboat" [*Post Card*, 166]) and Joyce, in the cemetery, thus the relation of the letter with death.

In *The First Sail*, Derrida describes in the episode how he had once (or many times in the past) written to J. Hillis Miller addressing him, erroneously, as "*John* Hillis Miller." To which Miller responded in a letter, and that is the film scene, "My name is 'Joseph,' not 'John.' Not that it matters in the least, since I've never used that name in any case."

In the film, Hillis minimizes the video tape of Derrida, as not "really the return of Jacques Derrida," something that I sense is also at work in Hillis' description of Derrida's book on touching and J.L. Nancy as "a book I find wonderful but exceedingly difficult" (Dunne, 134) as he said in an interview to Eamonn Dunne in Dunne's *J. Hillis Miller and the Possibilities of Reading*, and I wonder if it also means difficult to touch, to behold?

This subtle tone of positioning vis-à-vis Derrida comes across, at least to me, as an attempt to ward off Derrida's return, precisely as the return of the ghost. If he came back as a ghost, it would mean that Derrida died. That is, as J. Hillis Miller says in *The Medium* is the maker, he cannot listen to Derrida's lectures on tape, because that would mean that he is really dead. But Miller knows better! We always return as ghosts, even in real life. As soon as there is a return, there is a ghost, I learned that form *The Medium is the Maker*. And from Miller's analysis of *On Touching*. And from his writing about "Absolute Mourning." And from all those other writings on zero, on the empty core of literature, on living on, etc.

What I sense in these subtle strategies of evasion to see Derrida as a ghost is a certain tenderness for Derrida which Hillis is trying to protect from opening or precisely from bringing into present or presence, like a wound which refuses to heal and which cannot or should not be touched. But not just because Hillis is protecting himself from the exposure to the death of the other, which would be understandable, anxiety ridden, an anxiety quite human and easy to explain. In this way, I would claim, Hillis is protecting Derrida's passing away from being worked though, obliterated, diminished, "properly mourned" and thus done away with. Geoffrey Bennington recently wrote about this as "militant melancholia," which I think describes Hillis in the film scene: "Who or what, in these still dark days of an ongoing melancholia I began by declaring 'militant,' militantly melancholic, something that wanted to affirm, with Jacques himself, a certain refusal of the 'normal' work of mourning and its 'normal' dealings with the death of the other—a proudly militant melancholia that soon however settled into something much less glorious, much less proud, much *more* melancholic, in fact—who or what, then, might come to open something again that might lay some claim, however modest, to the sometimes very minimal dignity of what often bears the probably misleading name of 'thought'?" (Bennington 2008, 191-2). The music in the film, composed and performed by Natalia Pschenichnikova, to whom I left complete discretion as to the placement of chords, punctuates this countertemporality of a loss splitting the scene but refusing representation, as explicitly avowed by Hillis, and so subtending the whole set of representational, framing divisions and d*e*visions.

Hillis is protecting, in a sense, the wound or the loss from healing, by not allowing it to be touched, exposed, revealed, talked about, worked through, by not allowing Derrida to come back as a visible ghost in short…. To do that would probably be admitting to the visibility of appropriation, an apparatic appropriation of an apparition, which I sense Hillis wants to avoid or ward off. In a sense, this subtle refusal of the programmed mediatic return is precisely the work of ethics in mourning which does not appropriate, which refuses a "revealed" and visualized ghost tele-programmed by manipulation, controlled videographic and prosthetic repetition. And thus is more faithful to Derrida and his "return," predicated on the possibility of a missed encounter and a nonreturn, thus allowing a return not only of an Other, but of every other, wholly other as well.

What does it mean to be "really dead," which listening to Derrida's tapes would reveal or bring?