"No music…"

Ann Smock

MLN, Volume 132, Number 5, December 2017 (Comparative Literature Issue),

pp. 1151-1169 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2017.0089

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/686873

Access provided by Cambridge University Library (2 Aug 2018 22:57 GMT)

 “No music...”
❦

Ann Smock

These words, “No music, not now!” appear in Phrase, Lacoue-Labarthe’s

book of poems and prose, published in 2000. They come toward the
end of “Phrase XVII,” which is called “Scène.” “Pas de musique!” may
well be the words that most attached me to this book when I first read
through it; they are the words I’ve remembered it by ever since. This
is probably because when I had the good fortune to know Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe, at least a little, I shared an interest in music with him.
He knew a great deal of music very well, of course. Once he mentioned
to me, in what by some stretch of the imagination one might have
taken for a mild, joking boast, that in the past he’d briefly played sax
in a jazz band, and that he would have liked most to be a drummer.
So I think he loved music. But maybe not the music in it.
I am thinking, when I say this, of a rather comical anecdote
recounted by Emmanuel Hocquard, the writer whose works I hap-
pened to be reading and puzzling over when Nidesh Lawtoo and Paola
Marrati kindly invited me to participate in this workshop. Hocquard
recounts that he had once been so taken by Paul Badura Skoda’s way
of playing the piano, he had seriously considered becoming a pianist
himself; but there had been a problem—he did not like music. “I
never could see,” Hocquard writes, “how to play the piano without
the music that went along with it” (“Histoire” 469).
So he gave up on the piano and went for poetry instead.
Since this anecdote was, as it happens, one of the first things that
caught my attention in Hocquard’s work and got me poring over his
writing, I associate it with Lacoue-Labarthe’s “No music.” It seems to

MLN 132 (2017): 1151–1169 © 2018 by Johns Hopkins University Press

1152 ANN SMOCK

suggest the same odd taste that I sense in Lacoue-Labarthe—a taste—

but can you really call it taste?—for music but without the music in it.1
I can think of a few other writers from Lacoue-Labarthe’s and
Hocquard’s generation, and the preceding one, who were or are
musicians, and take a very dim view of music. Pascal Quignard, for
example, claims to hate it (The Hatred of Music). I suspect he hates it
for the way it can make you love it—get you to mistake, I mean, what
is possible to love, and sometimes easy (the power, the splendor, the
music in music), for what deserves love, which, I imagine, is something
else altogether.
Louis-René des Forêts is another writer for whom music mattered
maybe more than anything and who, if I’m not mistaken, found it
highly dubious. To me it seems he loved it not in spite of his reserva-
tions, but with the full force of his doubts. He wrote a story called
“The Great Moments of a Singer” about an opera star whose wildly

1
I thank Nidesh Lawtoo for calling my attention to the possibility of an expansion of
this intuition of mine—about Lacoue-Labarthe and music minus the music in it—via the
small volume, Le Chant des Muses which contains a talk for children that Lacoue-Labarthe
once gave. A longer text, “L’Echo du sujet” (in Le Sujet de la philosophie. Typographies I),
presents, in closing, a thought similar to the one in Le Chant des Muses: the first music
anyone ever hears is the voice of her mother, “la voix de sa mère.” It reaches the fetus
in the womb; the unborn child hears the mother speaking. Of course, what it perceives
is not anything like individual words or any sort of signification, but rather the musical
dimension of language: intonation, modulation, rhythm. In Le Chant des muses Lacoue-
Labarthe says that if music were seeking to imitate something, as all art does, according
to the Greeks, then it would be “cette chose entendue absolument avant” (this thing
heard absolutely before [26; emphasis in the original]). Music would seek to retrieve
this absolutely anterior thing, and become its echo. At the end of “L’Echo du sujet,”
Lacoue-Labarthe’s emphasis is a little different. He says that the mother’s voice is the
one that comes back to us, the one whose echo resonates within us because its beat,
its measure, heard before, imposed in advance upon the subject to come its particular
rhythm. Printed it, that is, with its type (see esp. 296–98).
Let me also mention one of Jean-Luc Nancy’s recollections of his friend Lacoue-
Labarthe, recorded in an essay called “Un Commencement” (L’Allégorie suivi de, Un
Commencement par Jean-Luc Nancy). Literature, for Lacoue-Labarthe, thinks, Nancy wrote.
Literature thinks, but by singing. Literature is oral, then, and orality is the thought of
unimaginable, inaudible, prenatal existence; of the impossible origin; of life in and of
the mother perceived as her voice before there was anyone to perceive anything at all
(138). For my part, I would emphasize here the “impossible origin,” and the voice never
heard by anyone, something no one perceives. I would suggest that literature’s singing
thought is this music: this music without any music to it. I imagine it comes failing the
subject. The most that Lacoue-Labarthe hazards—at least, in Phrase—is that sometimes,
“at those moments of terrifying oblivion when the merest winter light falling on a wall,
or grass growing sparsely in a garden, or water flowing in a river, is a pure sign, like a
hiatus, that I am going to die, I might say (and this too would speak, in silence, and
be captured in the phrase): I will have been a phrase. Or rather, there will have been a
phrase, this one, which will have haunted me, and never crossed my lips. This abortive
utterance, this sense of being haunted, this decidedly I call literature” (12).
 M  L N 1153

enthusiastic public couldn’t actually tell whether his voice was ravish-
ing or a disappointment. They were transported when they heard
him sing, but afterwards they often suspected they had been tricked
somehow, and had not really heard what they had been led to think
they had. However, despite their obscure misgivings they remained
determined to rave about him, which made the proud artist impatient.
He said they praised him for what deserves no admiration and loved
him for what he was not (156; 162). It seems he preferred to be hated
for what he was; for eventually he crowned his brilliant career with a
single performance so vulgar it drove all his admirers to despise him.
Thinking about this story, quite a while ago now, I developed the
idea, unexpected to me and indeed quite implausible, that had the
singer’s fans really heard him (at the height of his career, when he
was everybody’s darling), and had they really loved his voice it would
have been the let-down in his performances, not the transport, that
carried them away. The disappointment, not the rapture. Something
a little artificial in his voice would have commanded their recogni-
tion of its genuine grandeur—not its grandeur. They would have
believed in him with the full force of their disbelief, and loved him
with their whole, vehement disappointment. For what is admirable
in art, I found myself thinking, is nothing admirable. What deserves
love is nothing to love.
What is proper to it is nothing proper; it is not its authenticity that
is genuine, but something else, like its embarrassing fakeness.
I had a few conversations with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe about this
story; it puzzled and worried me a lot, but he took it in his stride. For
art, or at least modern art is, in his view, as I came to understand,
necessarily disappointing: it occurs as its own defect.
In Poetry as Experience he dwells on this paradox: “Poetry comes by
default” [“La poésie advient par défaut”] (52; 78), he writes: it takes place
right at the weak point it harbors; it comes falling short. The essence
of art—of modern art, in any case—lies, he says in Musica Ficta, in its
incapacity to enact or embody its authenticity; it cannot bring about
that which alone makes it truly what it is. And this shortcoming alone
is what it is: not an art that is just unfortunately less convincing than
art used to be, but an art whose very being lies in its not managing
to be the genuine item. “This is ultimately what defines the essence
of art, at least of modern art: it is only itself in the impossibility of
effectuating that which founds its authenticity” (124).
The context of that statement is the part of Musica Ficta devoted
to Schoenberg’s Moses and Aron and its “failure,” which is to say the
1154 ANN SMOCK

antinomy inherent in art itself, which Schoenberg’s unfinished opera

brings out and makes apparent. The antinomy is this: only Great
Art—le grand art, its grand subjects and themes—can guarantee the
real seriousness, the authenticity of art today, but today this content,
these subjects can no longer do so. They appear in art as faded
vestiges. Lacoue-Labarthe emphasizes his own view that modern art
cannot simply soft-pedal the idea of Great Art, or do without it, as
if art had advanced to a different phase of its history. No, Great Art
and the grave, imposing subjects that sustained it remain today art’s
norm and its impossibility. So art, or in any case modern art is itself
only in falling short, being a little fake. Among its proper traits it
can count only the kind that Emmanuel Hocquard would call “fake
estates [fausses propriétés]” (Invention 27; 97). The kind that consist in
not belonging, in not being properties at all. They are, properties, but
in that they are not (they are, in their improperness).2
That expression, fausse propriété, is Hocquard’s French translation
of the title of a book by Gordon Matta-Clark, Fake Estates. Fake estates
are alley ways in between big-city buildings, which nobody can make
any use of. They aren’t anyone’s estate; they are the property of no
one. Hocquard adopts the expression fake estate or fausse propriété in
his 2003 book of poems and prose called The Invention of Glass, and
on his pages it suggests (to me, anyway) a blank or empty spot just
where you would expect to find the unique character belonging to
any thing that simply is what it is. The property that consists for any
being in its just being itself is, for Hocquard, a property that, like
Matta-Clark’s fake estate, does not belong. It comes to a thing—or

2
The paradoxical concept of impropriety as a proper trait, a defining property or
attribute, is crucial to Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking. He calls it not just a concept, but a
law: “une loi d’impropriété” It is the law of mimesis, and mimesis is a topic which he
pursued throughout his work. He presents the “law of the improper” very memorably in
an essay on Diderot’s Paradox of the Comedian titled, “Le Paradoxe et la mimésis.” There
he stresses the disturbing featurelessness of the great actor, who can imitate anyone
and anything because he is himself no one and nothing: he has no proper traits of
his own, he is deprived of all property, “toute propriété.” As Lacoue-Labarthe puts it:
The paradox consists in this: in order to do everything, (re)present or (re)produce everything,
one must be nothing on one’s own, have nothing of one’s own, except a general aptitude for all
sorts of things, roles, qualities, functions, characters, etc. The paradox sets forth a law of impropriety,
which is the law of mimesis: only “the man without qualities,” the being without properties or
specificity, the subject without subject (absent to himself, distracted from himself, deprived of
himself) is equal to presenting or producing at all. (“Paradoxe” 27; my transl.)
I will take up this idea of human being as property-less, sheer mask, imitation of
no model, no original or truth—a copy, but of nothing (what Hocquard would call “a
naked lie”)—toward the end of this essay. But the reader will sense all along that the
subject of Lacoue-Labarthe’s thought is properly no one. “Nous autres, morts-nés,” as
he says. We, the stillborn.
 M  L N 1155

a being, a living being—gone. Its lack is it. Thus, for example (as I
understand Hocquard), my being I is a fausse propriété, a fake estate.
And my life my own not-mine.
Hocquard remarks once, in his 1987 novel Aerea, on the special grace
that alights sometimes upon such impropriety—upon the being-itself
of something, or someone. He points to the rocky shore of an island,
a skyscraper, a smile, and says that when one of these or some other
thing or being is seen flying all its very own colors, being just what it
is, it alone, there emanates from it consolation and desolation both,
indifferently. Consolation because of the is, I suppose, and desolation
on account of the not—neither the same nor different, each for the
other a mirror. I think of the joy and the pain on page after page of
Lacoue-Labarthe’s Phrase: “grief and joy [deuil et joie] (107), “our joy
is this mourning [notre joie est ce deuil]” (106), “sweetness and suffering
alike [douceur et douleur, ensemble]” (25), “the extreme tension of pain
/ and joy [l’extrême tension de la douleur / et de la joie]” (68)… Anguish
and gladness, different and no different in the life of a being that
death gives birth to (“dying is what made us be born [mourir nous fait
naître],” he writes [69]...). Hocquard’s writing is such, I think, as to
harbor the dubious flickering of joy and distress, the mirror game of
love and disgust, and to foil the abusive, evaluating rhetoric that sets
up fake and real as separate and opposite, high and low. Hocquard’s
writing is literal. He makes quite a point of this.
It is between Lacoue-Labarthe and him, then, Emmanuel Hocquard,
not des Forêts or Quignard that I mean to make my way in this essay.
And this is mainly because I want to concentrate on literality. On the
prosaic, literalized, disfigured poetry that Lacoue-Labarthe favors—the
“extreme precision” he stresses, speaking, in The Politics of the Poem
of Hölderlin’s poems. He says their “disarmed simplicity” (42) alone
answers to the harsh injunction to write, the il faut écrire, which issues
from the défaut, the failure of a poetry sustained only by the lack of
what ought to support it—only by the loss of what it cannot do with-
out. Myth. This is not poetry beyond myth, or cleansed of myth, but
poetry sustained by myth’s leaving it unsustained. It demands writing,
and thinking that can rise to the full height of this let-down.
It was initially in quite a tentative mood that I set out to think about
disarmed, disarming simplicity—about literality—by weaving back
and forth between these two writers in particular, Lacoue-Labarthe
and Hocquard. For in a great many respects the two of them are
strikingly dissimilar. I knew, when I began, that during the 1970’s
each published an important essay by the other, and I had gathered
1156 ANN SMOCK

from a subsequent text or two by Hocquard3 that if his world was, by

the 1980s, not at all Lacoue-Labarthe’s, this was for him (Hocquard)
something of a change—whose causes I will mention just briefly later.
Still, even a fairly long look at, say, Hocquard’s Test of Solitude (1998)
and then at Phrase (2000), would cause practically anyone to think an
essay drawing these two writers together quite unlikely. So I was very
reassured and pleased when, during the workshop where I presented
this essay, Claire Nancy recalled warmly and with emphasis the close
alliance between Lacoue-Labarthe and Hocquard during the 70’s,
and notably the very strong interest they shared, with each other and
with other friends and allies, in the work of Maurice Blanchot. I thank
Claire Nancy again here for her lively comments, which encouraged
my sense of a kinship between the two writers, a kinship that might
well not have amounted merely to an episode in the course of two
diverging itineraries. It is not my intention to mount an argument
showing how similar to Lacoue-Labarthe Hocquard still is, despite
various factors which Hocquard himself is inclined to emphasize.
But I suspect that the differences between them since 1980 or so are
largely a matter of “intonation,” a crucial term in Hocquard. It means
tone of voice, emphasis, accent, yes, but something more, too. This
matter of intonation is a topic for a different essay.
Here I will simply go on letting Lacoue-Labarthe and Hocquard
remind me of each other; I will try to show how their two distinct
modes of thinking and writing keep turning, each at its own tempo,
in its own tonality, toward the accident, to use a word of Hocquard’s,
the accident that before there is anything overturns it all; toward
the amputation—this is Lacoue-Labarthe’s word—that cuts the music;
toward the disastrous operation that brings into the light of day beings,
human beings, excised from life. “We stillborns [Nous autres, mort-
nés]...,” Lacoue-Labarthe writes (Phrase 51). We humans, born of death.
“Dead is what we always already are, immemorially, without which we
might never come into the light, and neither the joy nor the pain of
the day [Morts, nous le sommes toujours déjà, immémorialement, sans quoi
jamais nous ne viendrions à la clarté, à la joie ni à la douleur du jour]...”
(105). This sentence is from “Scène” in Phrase (99–108), the scene
from which music is impatiently banished; its enigma does not cease
to return throughout Phrase. The child—we read, for example—the
child at evening, sounding out the words: “Let us cross to the other

3
See “La bibliothèque de Trieste,” in ma haie, esp. 25–27; and “Prenez-le vivant,” in
Un Privé 61–66.
 M  L N 1157

shore” knew, without knowing anything, just as I know, this evening,

seated at this table,
under the usual
lamp, I know, not knowing, I know
that what traverses us still, and trembles in us, is the abject,
proud tremor of which we are born,
endlessly dislocating us, throwing us to one side
where it is henceforth only faintly we
who shudder, having foundered well before,
battered and beaten, for having emerged into the clear light
of day.

sous la lampe
habituelle, je sais, l’ignorant, je sais
que nous traverse encore, tremble dans nous, l’abjecte,
la secousse superbe d’où nous sommes nés
nous disloquant, sans fin, nous rejetant au bord
où c’est à peine désormais
nous qui tressaillons, ayant sombré bien avant,
meurtris, d’être venus à la clarté
du jour. (Phrase 39)

This mortal coming-to-life—this seizure that tosses us aside so that it

is scarcely even we who shudder with it—this is what wants no music,
but a sober, prosaic record. In Hocquard an utterly “neutral medium”
(Méditations 39) suffices: the featureless element of a double revela-
tion: being’s by its not, and the other way round; joy’s illumination
by sorrow, and vice versa. Since, for Lacoue-Labarthe, no one is the
proper subject of the seizure (the experience which eliminates who-
ever might claim it as his own), a muffled sort of tuneless chant will
do, a murmur or growl corresponding more or less to the rhythm
of breathing or the heart’s beat—but not a song. The whole thing is
excruciating but does not really have anything to do with anyone. “I
have to admit, it was no longer of any concern to me [je le reconnais,
cela ne me concernait pas]” (Phrase 44).
Of course, he adds:
I could, as you now know, say things very differently. In my deadly mythic
style. However poignant the pain of King Marke or Golaud, it’s sung.
Declaimed. And I know these moments off by heart: the declamation is
something I could do over and over. But the pain, which touches worse
than the heart, makes it impossible [La douleur, qui touche pire que le coeur,
interdit]. (48)
1158 ANN SMOCK

Now, notwithstanding the confidence I derived from Claire Nancy’s

words, I should at least briefly acknowledge how very unlike each
other Hocquard and Lacoue-Labarthe also seem. That Hocquard
was influenced by Wittgenstein is just one indication of the distance
between them—although I remember, as I say this, a page of Phrase
where Lacoue-Labarthe notes both how worthless he finds the famous
advice to keep silent about what cannot be spoken of and another
formula of Wittgenstein’s which he had come upon unexpectedly,
quoted in some article. It moved him, before he had had time to get
his guard up, he says. “The inexpressible,” Wittgenstein had written,
“is contained—inexpressibly—in the expressed” (Phrase 71).
I think Hocquard’s writing is a sort of Wittgensteinian ear training:
a program for learning to hear in words the words they are not, and
that no words are. Listen for them in these lines; listen for the unsaid
in the said. Try to hear it in the central, inexpressible element. And
do not fail to take the first line that I am about to quote à la lettre:
literally, as a tautology, which says just what it says. I might also suggest,
without delaying here too much, that you think, while listening, of
the famous rhinoceros that Wittgenstein declined to agree was not in
the room where he and Bertrand Russell held their first conversation.
For Hocquard observes elsewhere that a rhinoceros is a tautology and
crosses the room (ma haie 407). He says any child can recognize this.
It is a perception, we might conclude, of “disarming simplicity.” For
now, however, I draw your attention mainly to the third, the central
element in the bridge crossing the room—the middle piece of the
tautology.
A hippopotamus is black
crosses a room

The room in the middle is quieter

is brighter

A bridge is made of three

the central element is inexpressible

The third is is not (Theory 22)

Of course, I am wrong to call Hocquard’s writing a program—for learn-
ing to hear what you do not hear (the inexpressible central element,
the is that isn’t, the isn’t that is). I am wrong to call it a program,
because the hearing in question only ever occurs by accident, when,
precisely, like Lacoue-Labarthe one day, you haven’t got your guard
 M  L N 1159

up. And when the words, in which you surprise the words they aren’t,
haven’t got theirs up either. Those words, that little tuft of letters (A
hippopotamus is black, say)—that little outcropping of language that takes
you by surprise is simultaneously caught unawares by your surprise.
Exposed, is Hocquard’s word for it. Laid bare.
The bare, the plain letter, the one that isn’t (the is)—the central
element, I mean, the inexpressible one—is the clearest. Here is the
second half of the hippopotamus poem:
The missing letter has no envelope
is the quietest
the brightest

The hippopotamus
passes a bridge of letters

The silk dress is a stamp. (Theory 22)4

So, you could well feel from time to time—rather startled—that a book
whose cover indicates it is by Hocquard comes into your hands like
a letter—bare, without an envelope, perfectly plain—sent to you by
some words, telling you just what they don’t.
The message contains the words that cannot be
heard.
(Test XXIVbis)

Notwithstanding all this—notwithstanding even these lines of Lacoue-

Labarthe’s in Phrase: “In truth, nothing resonates in us except for that
/ Which it is not given to us to hear and thus cannot be heard. […] /
And yet we recognize it: / Joy, distress, that terribly prior quiescence…”
(Phrase 98) —notwithstanding any of this, I cannot really claim unre-
servedly that Lacoue-Labarthe’s and Hocquard’s two modes of think-
ing are close. Not when Hocquard makes such a point of preferring
Raymond Chandler to Mallarmé. The two of them were certainly once
acquainted, though—more than just acquainted, Claire Nancy assures
me. 1976 was the year Hocquard published a text by Lacoue-Labarthe
in a chapbook; it was Dismay, Lacoue-Labarthe’s initial response to
the Blanchot fragment called A Primal Scene that preoccupied him all
the rest of his life.5 And the following year Lacoue-Labarthe in turn
4
“Stamp” is timbre in French, which in French also means sound quality. A reflection
on intonation would touch on this last line of the 22nd poem in Theory of Tables, for
it suggests that tone color—here, a satiny, shimmering one—is a sort of postmark.
5
Dismay is Hannes Opelz’s English translation of L’émoi, which is the French title of
this text by Lacoue-Labarthe. For Opelz’ very interesting comments about his choice
1160 ANN SMOCK

published a text by Hocquard, about the child he once was. So, in the
70’s they were reading each other, and reading Blanchot.
In Blanchot’s scene, “primal scene,” a child—is he seven years old,
the text asks, or eight perhaps?—standing by the window, drawing the
curtain and, through the pane, looking. What he sees: the garden,
wintry trees, the wall of a house, in short, his play space, and then, idly,
looks up toward the sky, the ordinary sky which suddenly opens up,
“absolutely black and absolutely empty, revealing (as though the pane
had broken) such an absence that all has since always and forevermore
been lost therein—so lost that therein is affirmed and dissolved the
vertiginous knowledge that nothing is what there is—rien est ce qu’il
y a—and first of all nothing beyond...” (Blanchot, Writing 72). This
child, looking, returns repeatedly in Phrase. It is he, I think, who speaks
in the Scene from which music is impatiently dismissed (we’ll eventu-
ally come to it); but here he is again, I believe, on a different page:
The child, supposing it to be him, looks. Or else,
perhaps, looked. What he sees, however, or saw,
nobody will ever know, not even him, who will have
forgotten it in advance but will never cease claiming he had kept it
in immemorial memory: the arrival of nothing
on this shoreline without boundary. Sweetness and suffering alike.

L’enfant, à supposer que ce soit lui, regarde. Ou bien,

peut-être, a regardé. Ce qu’il voit néanmoins, ce qu’il a vu,
nul ne le saura jamais, pas même lui qui l’aura
d’avance oublié mais ne cessera d’affirmer en avoir gardé
l’immémoriale mémoire: l’arrivée de rien
à ce rivage sans bord. Douceur et douleur, ensemble. (Phrase 25)

Lacoue-Labarthe may never have finished responding to Blanchot’s

scene, primal scene; in any case Hocquard published his first response

of the word dismay, and about Lacoue-Labarthe’s word, émoi, see his Translator’s Notes
in Lacoue-Labarthe, Ending xi–xii. I would draw the reader’s attention here to just one
of the features of the word émoi that Opelz mentions: it suggests self-dispossession:
outside (é) - me (moi).
Ending and Unending Agony is a translation of a collection of texts by Lacoue-Labarthe
on Maurice Blanchot, edited by Aristide Bianchi and Leonid Kharlamov. Bianchi and
Kharlamov brought together and introduced the texts that were to make up most of
a book by Lacoue-Labarthe on Blanchot—a book that remained unfinished when
Lacoue-Labarthe died. The texts presented in Ending and Unending Agony bear on
Blanchot’s two autobiographical texts, A Primal Scene and The Instant of my Death. In
their Introduction Bianchi and Kharlamov quote a letter from Lacoue-Labarthe to
Roger Laporte in which he says that he wrote the first version of Dismay “for a small
volume commissioned by Emmanuel Hocquard” (Ending 6).
 M  L N 1161

to it, as I said, and then, the following year, Lacoue-Labarthe in turn

published a text by Hocquard, in the small collection he edited with
Mathieu Bénézet called Misère de la littérature. Hocquard’s text is
about Hocquard himself as a school boy.6 I suspect, and Claire Nancy
quite emphatically confirms, that at the time (the 1970s) Hocquard
entertained a conception of literature and a mode of thinking akin to
Lacoue-Labarthe’s and to Blanchot’s. It is clear, however, that in the
early 80’s he took out against it. He says, in an account of his intellec-
tual itinerary called “La bibliothèque de Trieste” (Ma haie 15), that by
then, notions such as lack, loss, default, impossibility, which should be
taken à la lettre, had turned into rhetorical clichés; they were producing
their own brand of conformity and secreting their own lamentable
melancholy. Earlier these notions had accompanied a rich variety of
challenging experiments in poetry, Hocquard says—notably the work
published by Orange Export Ltd. between 1969 and 86 (Albiach,
Daive, Giroux, Quignard, Royet-Journoud). The poetry wasn’t based
on such the notions, as upon some Theory, and no particular effort
was made to apply them to poems. But eventually the poems, which
had recognized no models, started turning into models themselves.
Hocquard disliked this development, and dramatized his rejection of
it by turning off abruptly in a different direction and emphasizing, in
the autobiographical notes he would sometimes furnish, various down-
to-earth activities like type-setting, and his admiration for plain-spoken
American poets like Charles Reznikoff—whom he quotes describing a
sign he saw once in a window while walking around in New York City:
Mrs. Smith’s Cafeteria. No cute name, nothing pompous, just Here is
Mrs. Smith’s cafeteria, come in if you want. “For me,” says Hocquard,
“the art of poetry became Mrs. Smith’s cafeteria” (“Comment en suis-
je arrivé là?,” ma haie 448).
This means, I believe, that he determined to accentuate his impulse
to take things literally, à la lettre: things and also words and also notions,
and perhaps first of all notions such as lack, default, loss, impossibility
and so on. The better—this is my understanding—to lay bare in them
their having no model and providing none. The better to expose
in them, that is, an accident which nothing precedes and nothing
follows—a hole in the natural order of things, a sudden suspension
of time, “Le temps, hors du temps,” in Lacoue-Labarthe’s terms—“the
time outside of time, the suspended, ecstatic time of sheer existence,
in the innermost outside of oneself [le temps suspendu, extatique, de (...)

See “La Maison” in Lacoue-Labarthe and Bénézet eds. La Misère, and Un Privé 25–35.
6
1162 ANN SMOCK

l’existence pur, dans le hors-de-soi le plus intérieur...]” (Poétique 133). The

blank, in Hocquard’s idiom—the blank just where anything is what
it is, just where anyone is herself.
For aren’t défaut, lack, loss, impossibility precisely names—in Lacoue-
Labarthe (as well as for that matter Blanchot, Bataille, Derrida, Nancy)
for that accident, the disaster? Aren’t they names for the practically
impossible thought of death thrusting into the light a departure from
it, so that nothing is? I mean, aren’t those “notions” names for the
thought of an end that doesn’t wait for there to be anything to fin-
ish off; don’t they designate the thought of a lack that isn’t the lack
of anything; the thought of being, that is its own is not? Perhaps this
thought requires literality, or maybe you could say it literalizes thinking.
Lack, défaut and so on are precisely the notions to take à la lettre, to
treat like Mrs. Smith’s cafeteria, to hear as tautologies, which follow
from nothing, and from which nothing follows—which harbor at
their heart a strange space having no more entrance or exit, inside
or out than the tautologies themselves have before or after, back or
front—and which preserve right in the middle of being a vacant lot
neither wide nor narrow, just limitless. “This shoreline without bound-
ary [Rivage sans bord]” is how Lacoue-Labarthe describes it (Phrase
25): the beach we wash up on, as it were, when we “pass to the other
shore:” a borderless border, our life’s limitless edge.
Hocquard has often stressed that he wants to get the music out
of poetry, dump the expressivity, the enchantment. He is a literal
poet. Song, le chant, is a kind of chantage, he says: blackmail (“Tout le
monde se ressemble” [ma haie 237]). The singing kind of poetry makes
us sing: nous fait chanter; it puts all kinds of pressure on us in order
to get something out of us. It wants to make us pay, with tears. Make
us inhabit an elegiac narrative, that is, believing that if something has
ended and is no more, it must have been once, before, in the past.
We must mourn it, and look always back, toward a beginning barred
now for good, or a beloved lost forever, or innocence, and remember,
repeat and represent this first, now lacking but once present figure.
And all this instead of just looking straight ahead, contemplating
what is before our very eyes—a cricket, a word, a notion, a face...and
surprising therein what takes us by surprise: what we do not see, what
is not heard. What we recognize, though, Lacoue-Labarthe writes: it
is the sudden gap in time, the time there is no time for, la césure du
temps deep in the eyes of any one whose path we might cross, deep
in the eyes of every one, who is gone, already gone.
 M  L N 1163

Nothing, except for this caesura in time in the depths of the gaze
Of whoever has already left. Of each one. Yes, that’s what leaves us
dumbfounded.

Rien, sinon cette césure du temps tout au fond du regard

De qui nous a déjà quittés. Chacun. Cela, oui, nous laisse assourdis.
(Phrase 98)

You might call the life that blackmailers induce in us life in the Lyd-
ian mode, thinking of the slow movement of Beethoven’s late string
quartet, opus 132, marked “in der lydischen Tonart” by the composer. For
Lacoue-Labarthe, describing this music, dwells on the Lydian mode,
recalling its association, ever since Plato, with laments, with grief and
mourning, and also, later, with church music. Certainly, you would
think of the Bible, the book of Genesis, of Eden and the fall, were you
to read Hocquard’s novel, Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan. Around
the middle of it, Adam, the protagonist, spending a quiet morning
playing a board game with a friend, throws the dice and lands on
square 47, the forest. “Ah, too bad,” his friendly opponent observes.
“Now you’ll have to pay the standard price and turn back, to square
30. I would have thought you too vigilant to get lost in the forest”—
a comment which causes Adam to point out that when speaking of
getting lost in the woods one should not say, as the friend had: “se
perdre en forêt” (get lost in the forest) but rather “s’y être perdu” (be lost
there) (Aerea 37; 52 in the original). The distinction, as I understand
it, is between someone who would be going along more or less well
but then, unfortunately, would lose his way, and, on the other hand,
someone who would get lost without ever having been anywhere at
all yet. Such a person would come to be, lost. He’d arrive in the world,
gone. His disappearance would have brought him into the light of
day, death would have given him birth.
The forest would be the world where one arrives departed; it would
be the place—the person’s birthplace—where all at once, before he
knew it, he had been, no place. And no one. Adam explains: “To be
lost there is to be at the same time somewhere and nowhere. Inside a
forest and outside of everything” [s’y être perdu [c’est] être en même temps
quelque part et nulle part. Dans la forêt et hors de tout] (37; 52).
I dare say it would be dreadful, in that forest world, to see that a
thing, or a person—is born. Is simply there. Because you would also
see that he is not. No doubt it is this fright Adam has in mind when he
tells his friend, during the continuation of their board-game in Aerea,
that the forest is “engendered in fear.” The forest must be something
1164 ANN SMOCK

like a world engendered by the fear of finding oneself lost in it: or

better, it must be the story, the mournful narrative I evoked just now,
conceived in dread of being born—in dread of being, at all.
No doubt, I just said, it would be fearful to see, in the world of
Aerea, that some thing is—born—but for Hocquard to see something
is the whole point of poetry. This is a sort of motto that he adopted
from Louis Zukowfsky. And he adds: the point is suddenly to see what
you do not see. I think that for him the whole point is all at once
to see what is there, right before your eyes—perfectly obvious—and
also nowhere, and not seen. So much light, so much dark, both at
once—indistinguishable and utterly different, both. The joy of the
first day, the grief of the last. Each for the other a mirror. Last and
first, tears and a smile reveal each other via an in-between term,
Hocquard writes: “a middle term,” “a neutral medium” (Méditations
39). Via the “inexpressible central element” (Theory 22), I expect, that
we encountered in the hippopotamus poem: the is that is not in any
tautology. No story can hold this inexpressible element. Which is the
clearest one: its lack is so plain, so naked, so there. No story can con-
tain it, though all the chronological sequences do their best, all the
befores and afters try to bandage up the end that nothing precedes,
the beginning that nothing follows—the accident. But no story with
its assumption that grief and joy are just opposites, and likewise being
and being missing or lost, can make up for birth, that upheaval. It isn’t
anything a story can be about. “Eclipse instead of fable,” Hocquard
says (Conditions 78).
If in Hocquard the myth and the music are about loss, guilt and
regret, in Lacoue-Labarthe they are about deliverance. I am thinking
of the passage in Phrase where he describes the slow movement of
Beethoven’s opus 132, marked Lento assai e cantante tranquillo and
composed in the lamenting, mourning Lydian mode. But Beethoven
seems to have associated die lydische Tonart with the hymn and the
chorale, when he attached an inscription to the slow movement
calling it a hymn of thanks offered to God by a convalescent for the
new strength he feels at evening time. “Doch du gabst mir wieder Kräfte
mich des Abends zu finden... ” (But you gave me strength again, to find
myself come evening...) Lacoue-Labarthe, listening again and again
to this music, thought of the Kol Nidre as well, the prayer recited in
the synagogue at the beginning of the evening service on the Day of
Atonement, and especially the sung Kol Nidre... Beethoven’s inscrip-
tion, though, emphasizes the chorale. “The words are like those /
of a chorale [On dirait le texte d’un choral],” Lacoue-Labarthe writes:
 M  L N 1165

the words are like those

of a chorale or an enigmatic promise of salvation
despite the end of the day and the vast impending night
into which we go and fall apart).
on dirait le texte
d’un choral ou l’annonce énigmatique d’un salut
malgré la fin du jour et la nuit proche, immense,
où nous nous en allons, nous nous perdons. (Phrase 89)

He listened to this music for decades, it seems, always the same record-
ing; unbearably lovely; he says the evening sky can sometimes move
in the same way. It can be so nul, so nil, and so radiant that at the fall
of night, he writes, the fever abates and tears subside. “But no is the
word [Mais c’est non qu’il faut dire]:”
But no is the word, no to the unacceptable
calm, no to the dizziness

Mais c’est non qu’il faut dire, non à cet inadmissible

apaisement, à ce vertige... (Phrase 90)

No is what to say, I gather, to the sense of deliverance that comes as dark-

ness falls; it is no one must say to the music of release and purification.7
Whence, I think, Lacoue-Labarthe’s sober, measured no to Blanchot’s
L’instant de ma mort, and thereby even to the Blanchot fragment that
preoccupied him all his life, the one called scène primitive—even when,
in The Writing of the Disaster, Blanchot added a question mark to this
title and placed it in quotation marks and parentheses: “(Une scène
primitive?).” Any scene purporting, even in this severely attenuated
mode, to be primal must be renounced.

7
In “L’Echo du sujet,” Lacoue-Labarthe writes of the cathartic power of music: the
specifically theatrical experience of great emotional upheaval that music provokes,
but also calms (see esp. 275–76). Nietzsche is his main reference in this passage. He
describes the discharge of unbearable affect brought about by music as the release of
“originary pain or sorrow” (276; my emphasis). Music can both provoke and assuage
this inaugural suffering because it is the original, the immediate reproduction or repre-
sentation of the originary “One.” It presents the primal figure, or model. And because
it does so in the realm of the figural and individuated (in the Apollonian mode), the
subject can plunge deep into the originary suffering of the One without loosing itself
irrecoverably. I would say the subject can “experience” its “own” stillbirth and yet be
resurrected. Or, it can be the subject of this primal experience. As I take it, Lacoue-
Labarthe says no to this theater—this theatrical theater—just as he says no to the music
in music. I will refer briefly, at the end of my essay, to his reflections on a theater that
would not be “du théâtre.” In any event, I hardly need acknowledge that in “L’Echo
du sujet” alone, Lacoue-Labarthe sets what I initially called “the music in music” in a
far broader philosophical context than my essay can contain, one where theater and
mimesis are crucial. Should the reader wish to pursue these inter-related topics in
Lacoue-Labarthe’s work, “L’Echo du sujet” would be an interesting text to examine.
1166 ANN SMOCK

L’instant de ma mort is Blanchot’s account of having stood fifty years

earlier in front of a firing squad that at the last minute did not shoot
him. It and scène primitive are his only autobiographical texts. This
makes them akin to each other. But why scène primitive? Why primal
scene? As if such a birth from death could have anything primal
about it; as if it could occur in any present no matter how ancient,
could found or form the basis of anything—as if from the abject,
the superb jolt that toppling us over into darkness brings us into the
light of day we could possibly at last be—reborn; as if by this disaster
we could be delivered. Why the old dream of resurrection tacitly
recited in L’instant de ma mort: the legendary names and the mythic
schemas: Orpheus’s descent into Hades, and Odysseus’s encounter
with the dead, and Christ’s passion—and Montaigne’s revival after
falling from his horse, and Rousseau’s after being knocked senseless
by a dog, and Dostoyevsky’s when he survived his own execution, as
Malraux did during World War II and as Blanchot did himself—with
each time the same strange happiness afterward, the calm wonder,
the feeling of lightness—of deliverance in every sense of the word,
Lacoue-Labarthe writes. “I know this song by heart” (48) he says.
But pain worse than heartbreak forbids. For us, mort-nés, there is no
deliverance, no katharsis, just amputation.
Lacoue-Labarthe never could bear a scene. Whence his sympathy
for Rousseau and for the untheatrical theater Rousseau imagined,
modeled on the theater of the Greeks, which was not du théâtre—not
theatrical—for it was, supposedly, “avant la scène,” prior to the stage.
And whence the character of the scene in Phrase: the one from which
music is so abruptly cut: sober, not to say drab. No production values,
no spectacle. A scene at all, really, only in the sense that it is obviously
staged. Artificial. Rather awkward, lacking in spontaneity. As if natural
were the last thing a theater that would not be du théâtre would be; as
though avant la scène there were no avant.
The sole actor in this scene is a boy of ten, or possibly eleven; he
enters and takes up a position at the edge of the stage; his movements
are a little solemn, slightly clumsy; he consults his notes; maybe he
should have learned his speech by heart, but he hasn’t. He empha-
sizes that he isn’t speaking in his own name, but relaying a message
from someone he barely knows, “a character,” he observes, “with no
particular features [C’est un personnage, je crois, sans traits particuliers]”
(100) This featureless individual is old, but a lot like a child himself,
apparently—just as, we soon come to realize, this child is a lot like an
old man. He simply plays himself, then, he is an actor of himself—not
 M  L N 1167

that the actor and his role are by any means one, or even in general
agreement. They seem rather ill-suited to each other. Some of the
lines that the increasingly haggard child speaks obviously annoy him,
others he thinks must be quotations from some book he doesn’t know;
in the end, he gathers enough strength to say that he does not accept
any of it. But hopes to have acquitted himself more or less correctly
of his task. The whole business seems a sort of faded ritual, or better,
an exercise, an onerous school lesson assigned to a pupil to recite, or
a class taught by a professor, sitting at a desk in front of note-takers
and auditors the way Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe used to sit regularly,
week upon week, with his text on the table in front of him and his
head in his hands.
So, natural, untheatrical theater is not. Rather, it’s the element of
a being whose nature is, paradoxically, to have none.
Lacoue-Labarthe recognizes in Rousseau this thought, that whereas
animals are always furnished with some particular characteristic or
quality, some natural gift of their own, men have no natural attributes
at all. They are by nature unnatural. You might say, if you were Hoc-
quard, that their natural state is a fake estate. To possess no proper
trait at all is what is proper to them. They must be imitations, of no
model. Each a stand-in for no one. Copies of themselves. Mimesis de
personne. Denatured, Lacoue-Labarthe writes, and adds that denatured
just means a being who is alive but not. “Un vivant non vivant” (a
living non-living being) (Poétique 43). Un mort-né, then. “Nous autres,
morts-nés.... ” (We, the still-born). Theater, a plain theater would be
our element.
I am thinking of the inexpressible element in Hocquard’s poem, the
letter whose lack is so plain. It is the in-between element, the neutral
medium of being. I mean to suggest that theater is such a medium,
our medium—our element, the way water is that of fish—or at least
that in Lacoue-Labarthe’s writing and Hocquard’s, theater is a word
for the void too tiny and too huge to be measurable, through which
our beginning and end mirror each other, our being and our not, our
sorrow and our joy. I think you could imagine it as the scene of our
birth, a stage where we arrive in place of ourselves, as it were, since
we arrive departed. “Théâtralité,” Hocquard says, of this inauguration
(“Il rien” 55). By which I take him to mean not theatricality (drama,
declamation, expressivity and so on), but sheer mimesis: imitation,
of no one.
The gist of the weary child’s cumbersome message in Scène is this:
“Dead is what we always already are, immemorially, without which we
1168 ANN SMOCK

might never come into the light, neither the joy nor the pain of the
day [morts, nous le sommes toujours déjà, immémorialement, sans quoi jamais
nous ne viendrions à la clarté, à la joie ni à la douleur du jour]…” (Phrase
105). Before too long a voice comes over the sound system checking
if it’s time to introduce the music. “‘Shall we bring up the music here?
I think you wanted the first few bars: ‘Lento assai e cantante tranquillo,’
right? Where you marked—wait, I can’t quite read it, something like
‘Kol Nidre,’ is that it?
‘No!’ The boy gestures irritably to the stage hands. ‘No music! not
now!’” (Phrase 105–106)

He does allow a little, later, closer to the end of his laborious exer-
cise, a measure or two, just before the whole thing trails off into
silence, without the Amen one might have expected. Keep it plain,
the exhausted child summons the strength to say. Just a few measures
and then, cut. Just the double exposition of the initial theme. “Deuil et
joie,” mourning and joy, that’s more than sufficient. “Then cut it off,
sharply [Et vous coupez sec].” (Phrase 107)
I’ll stop at this curt cut, “césure du temps,” time’s caesura. No music,
no song, but this, this cut—recognizable in the eyes of every one, who
has already left us—this leaves us...stunned. “Assourdi.”

WORKS CITED

Blanchot, Maurice. L’instant de ma mort. Fata Morgana, 1994.

———. The Instant of My Death. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg, Stanford UP, 2000.
———. “ (Une scène primitive?).” L’écriture du désastre, Gallimard, 1980, pp. 117
———. The Writing of the Disaster. Translated by Ann Smock, U of Nebraska P, 1995.
Des Forêts, Louis-René. The Children’s Room. Translated by Jean Steward, Calder, 1963.
———. “Les Grands Moments d’un chanteur.” La Chambre des enfants, Gallimard, 1960,
pp. 11–62.
Hocquard, Emmanuel. Aerea dans les forêts de Manhattan. P.O.L, 1985.
———. Aerea in the Forests of Manhattan. Translated by Lydia Davis, The Marlboro P, 1992.
———. “Cette histoire est la mienne.” ma haie. P.O.L, 2001, pp. 461–89.
———. “Comment en suis-je arrivé là.” ma haie, pp. 443–59.
———. Conditions de lumière. Elégies. P.O.L, 2007.
———. Conditions of Light. Elegies. Translated by Jean-Jacques Poucel, La Presse, 2010.
———. “Il rien.” Un privé à Tanger. P.O.L, 1987, pp. 51–8.
———. L’invention du verre. P.O.L, 2003.
———. The Invention of Glass. Translated by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith, Canarium
Books, 2012.
———. ma haie. P.O.L, 2001.
 M  L N 1169

———. Méditations photographiques sur une idée simple de la nudité. P.O.L, 2009.
———. Un test de solitude. Sonnets. P.O.L, 1998.
———. A Test of Solitude. Sonnets. Translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, Burning Deck, 2000.
———. This Story is Mine. Translated by Norma Cole, Instress, 1999.
———. Théorie des tables. P.O.L, 1992.
———. Theory of Tables. Translated by Michael Palmer. o-blek editions, 1994.
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———. “L’Echo du sujet.” Le Sujet de la philosophie (Typographies I). Aubier-Flammarion,
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———. Ending and Unending Agony. On Maurice Blanchot. Fordham UP, 2015.
———. Heidegger, La Politique du poème. Galilée, 2002.
———. Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry. Translated by Jeff Fort, U of Illinois P, 2002.
———. Musica ficta (figures de Wagner). Christian Bourgois, 1991.
———. Musica Ficta: Figures of Wagner. Translated by Felicia McCarren, Stanford UP, 1994.
———. “Le Paradoxe et la mimésis.” L’Imitation des Modernes. Galilée, 1986, pp. 15–36.
———. Phrase. Christian Bourgois, 2000.
———. Phrase. Translated by Leslie Hill, SUNY P, forthcoming.
———. La Poésie comme expérience. Christian Bourgois,1986.
———. Poetry as Experience. Translated by Andrea Tarnowski, Stanford UP, 1999.
———. Poétique de l’histoire. Galilée, 2002.
———. The Subject of Philosophy. Translated by Thomas Trezise et al., U of Minnesota
P, 1993.
Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Mathieu Bénézet, eds. La Misère de la littérature. Chris-
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Nancy, Jean-Luc. “Un Commencement.” L’“Allégorie” par Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe suivi
de, Un Commencement par Jean-Luc Nancy. Galilée, 2006, pp. 125–66.
Quignard, Pascal. La Haine de la musique. Calmann-Lévy, 1996.
———. The Hatred of Music. Translated by Matthew Amos and Fredrik Rönnbäck, Yale
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