il y a là cendre
(cinders there are)
(excerpts from Cinders by Jacques Derrida)
She, the phrase, had always lived alone.
But the accent, although readable to the eye, is not heard: cinder there is. To the ear, the definite article, la, risks effacing the place, and any mention or memory of the place, the adverb là . . . But read silently, it is the reverse: là effaces la herself, himself, twice rather than once.
But how can this fatally silent call that speaks before its own voice be made audible?
On the page it is as though each word were chosen, then placed in such a way that nothing uttered by any voice could gain access to it.
. . . it is the indetermination itself that makes the experience of the gramophonic act so perilous: too much freedom, a thousand ways, all just as legitimate, to accentuate, to set the rhythm, to make the tone change.
By entangling itself in impossible choices, the spoken “recorded” voice makes a reservoir of writing readable, its tonal and phonic drives, the waves which are knotted or unknotted in the unique vociferation, the singular range of another voice. This voice, to narrow the possibilities, is then left to pass away, it has passed away in advance, doubly present memory or doubly divided presence.
What is involved in this phonographic act?
At each syllable, even at each silence, a decision is imposed: it was not always deliberate, nor sometimes even the same from one repetition to the other.
Other interpretations remain possible – and doubtless necessary . . . because each time it gives a different reading, another gift, dealing out a new hand all over again – but on the other hand, simultaneously, and also for the first time, we have the tape recording of a singular interpretation, made one day, by so on and so forth, at a single stroke calculated and by chance.
. . . if the word “accent” says something about “song,” it is the experience of cinders and song that here seeks its name.
“Cinders there are.” It was so simple, and yet I knew that I was not there; without waiting for me the phrase withdrew into its secret.
. . . the phrase withdrew from itself. The phrase carried distance within itself, within herself . . . the phrase came from very far away to meet its supposed signatory, who did not even read it, who scarcely received it, dreamed it rather, like a legend or a saying, a whiff of tobacco smoke: these words that leave your mouth only to be lost in unrecognizability.
. . . silent ecstasy: the article missing before such cinders, in a word, the resemblance sketched by this homophonic là, “there,” made a feminine phantom tremble deep within the word, in the smoke, the proper name deep within the common noun. The cinder is not here, but Cinder there is.
Where is she? Where did she run off to at this hour?
. . . it was surely “there,” là; someone vanished but something preserved her trace and at the same time lost it . . .
And it is no longer the one who has disappeared who leaves cinders “there”; it is only her still unreadable name. And nothing prevents us from thinking that this may also be the nickname of the so-called signatory.
Cinders there are, the phrase thus says what it does, what it is. It immediately incinerates itself, in front of your eyes . . .
No, the phrase does not say what it is, but what it was, and . . . do not forget that it remains in memory of the departed . . .
The sentence says what it will have been, from the moment it gives itself up to itself, giving itself as its own proper name, the consumed art of the secret: of knowing how to keep itself from showing.
The sentence avows only the ongoing incineration, of which it remains the almost silent monument . . .
It remains from what is not, in order to recall at the delicate, charred bottom of itself only non-being or non-presence. Being without presence has not been and will no longer be there where there is cinder and where this other memory would speak.
Cinder as the house of being . . . While the phrase appears in a book bearing his signature, it does not belong to him. He admits having already read it before writing it, before writing her. She, this cinder, was given or lent to him by so many others, through so much forgetting . . .
We literally unveil nothing of her, nothing that in the final account does not leave her intact, virginal, undecipherable, impassively tacit, in a word, sheltered from the cinder that there is and that she is. For abandoned to its solitude, witness to whomever or whatever, the sentence does not even say the cinder. This thing of which one knows nothing, knows neither what past is still carried in these gray dusty words, nor what substance came to consume itself there before extinguishing itself there . . .
At present, here and now, there is something material – visible but scarcely readable – that, referring only to itself, no longer makes a trace, unless it traces only by losing the trace it scarcely leaves – that it just barely remains – but that is just what he calls the trace, this effacement (what remains without remaining).
There is doubtless no real secret at the bottom of this sentence, no determined proper name.
His proposition, that cinders there were, finally consists, in its extreme fragility and in the little time at its disposal, of this non-knowledge toward which writing and recognition, always a pair, are precipitated. One and the other, both of them, are compelled into the same crypt.
In this sentence I see the tomb of a tomb, the monument of an impossible tomb – forbidden, like the memory of a cenotaph . . .
An incineration celebrates perhaps the nothing of the all, its destruction without return but mad with its desire and with its cunning (all the better to preserve everything, my dear) . . .
“If you had listened to me, you would have burned everything, and nothing would have arrived. I mean on the contrary that something ineffaceable would have arrived, in the place of . . . “
“Nothing has arrived because you wanted to preserve (and therefore to lose), which in effect formed the sense of the order coming from behind my voice . . .”
The fire: what one cannot extinguish in this trace among others that is a cinder. Memory or oblivion, as you wish . . . but if cinder there is, it is because the fire remains in retreat. By its retreat it still feigns having abandoned the terrain. It still camouflages, it disguises itself, beneath the multiplicity, the dust, the makeup powder, the insistent pharmakon of a plural body that no longer belongs to itself . . .
She plays with words as one plays with fire . . .
Pyrotechnical writing feigns abandoning everything to what goes up in smoke, leaving there only cinder that does not remain.
“Language poisons for us the most secret of our secrets, one can no longer even burn at home, in peace, trace the circle of a hearth, one must even sacrifice one’s own sacrifice to it.”
Mallarmé: “The whole soul summed up however slightly . . . The overly precise meaning erases Your vague literature.”
It is obviously a figure, although no face lets itself be seen. The name “cinder” figures, and because there is no cinder here, not here (nothing to touch, no color, no body, only words), but above all because these words, which through the name are supposed to name not the word but the thing, they are what names one thing in the place of another, metonymy when the cinder is separated, one thing while figuring another from which nothing figurable remains.
A word, unfit even to name the cinder in the place of the memory of something else, and no longer referring back to it, how can a word ever present itself? The word, like the cinder, similar to her, comparable to the point of hallucination. Cinder, the word, is never found here, but there.
I understand that the cinder is nothing that can be in the world, nothing that remains as an entity. It is the being, rather, that there is – this is a name of the being that there is there but which, giving itself, is nothing, remains beyond everything that is, remains unpronounceable in order to make saying possible although it is nothing.
{ } VK Arkiv 