Angelaki

Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

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DEAD WRITE

James Dutton

To cite this article: James Dutton (2018) DEAD WRITE, Angelaki, 23:6, 78-92, DOI:
10.1080/0969725X.2018.1546993

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 ANGELAKI
journal of the theoretical humanities
volume 23 number 6 december 2018

james dutton
Imerzia by Zuzana Ridzoň ová.

DEAD WRITE
The glas also has to do with a war for the sig- mourning proust’s signature
nature, a war to the death – the only one poss-
ible – in view of the text, then (dingdong),
that finally, obsequently, remains no one’s.
Glas is written neither one way nor the
other, the one counting on the other to
resented by life, what is death? Imagined
relieve the double’s failure, the colossus the
column, the column the colossus. Glas
strikes between the two.
P always from life, can death ever escape the
life that gives it – not only in spirit, in “being,”
but in the thinking and giving of it (which is all
Objection: where do you get that there is text, we can “know” of death)? By thinking it only
and after all, remain(s), for example this text through living thought, death cannot be known.
here or this remain(s) here? However, if literature is thought absenting
There is does not mean (to say) exists,
thought (presence dying into absence), is litera-
remain(s) does not mean (to say) is. The
ture an attempt to “think” death on its own
objection belongs to ontology and is unans-
werable. But you can always let-fall-(to the terms, to assert death back into death – to
tomb) [laisser-tomber]. And at least not unthink and thus unlife it? Marcel Proust wrote
take into account this remain(s) here. This his À la recherche du temps perdu interminably
regards you from elsewhere. – a description, apropos Proust’s œuvre, that is
Derrida, Glas 71, 46 itself laden with interminable meaning. In that

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78

regard, what does his death (both properly, as it
terminates the novel at its expanding middle,
and a fictional one, as imagined by the novel’s
narrator – who is not Proust, staging another
death in turn) mean for the novel that does not
cease offering interpretations? Does signing for
literature, dying oneself into it, not give us
some sense of death in life – life presented by
death?
This is the question I would like to contend
with in this article: when literature becomes an
attempt to know death (to mourn) what is its
relationship with the death that literature
already is? This latter conception belongs stri-
dently to the signature of Jacques Derrida,
who argues that imagination “is at bottom the
relationship with death,” because both are
“representative and supplementary”: that is,
“the image is a death or (the) death is an
image. Imagination is the power, for life, to
affect itself with its own re-presentation” (Of
Grammatology 200). The work of “re-presen-
tation” is a spectral imagination of living pres-
ence cleaved from the self, from the signature,
whilst integrally bound to both. Because
writing is “[c]onstituting and dislocating at
the same time, writing is other than the
subject, in whatever sense it is understood.
Writing can never be thought under the cat-
egory of the subject” (74). For Derrida, litera-
ture as a representation of thought is a
ceaseless admixture between presence(s) and
absence(s), not only in the imagined intention
that is writing, but in its interpretations that
pick up (give life to) that writing’s Ideas, and
then absent them (pass over their deaths) in
going on reading. This blend of presence and
absence, of attention and the durational flow
of reading, inevitably constitutes some kind of
virtual remains that give the Ideal sense of
each reading. For Derrida, these kinds of
remains are essential to literature – they are
its trace, its unspeakable essence, of which
the very “speaking of” or synopsis “imagines”
the text – and thus seek to present something
like its death. As such, he refers to these
remains (the sensible life-death of literature’s
traces) as the “reduction – we shall call it the
restance – of a sort of writing that can neither
79
dutton
adapt nor adopt such a reduction” (Dissemina-
tion 7–8): that is, the transcendent text the
reader signs at each (re)reading that gives life
back to the text.
This kind of disseminating restance, or trans-
cendental remains, is typified by any text’s sig-
nature – the barest form of written
subjectivity. For this article, I will write about
Marcel Proust’s novel (the work given and
evoked by Marcel Proust’s signature). When I
do, I am educing a compressed, synthesized
Idea of this great novel that is not the novel in
its full, reading plenitude. The sense of each
reading we make of a text remains with us as a
trace, which cannot be explicated in language
without rewriting the text: hence the restance
of each reading that resists its textual reduction.
But as writing re-presents that death of
meaning, it opens up the possibility of each reca-
librated trace of re-reading from the text’s rep-
etition, or in Derrida’s language, its iterability.
I want to argue that Proust signs, knowingly,
the always-already-dying death of his literature,
its re-presentation signed by him, and the
imagination signed reader – and each weft in
the weaving chiasmus between those signatures
becoming traces. In that sense, Proust’s novel is
written between this irrevocable appropriation–
expropriation of selves: it is appropriate that it
is narrated by a small-n “narrator” who has no
signature to speak of. My argument is that
mourning is always a mourning for, or rather
of, the signature – that is, the Derridean abyss
of appropriation or le propre and all of its dif-
férance.1 And in turning a mourning into litera-
ture, or more interestingly, a literature into
mourning, Proust signs an appropriating expro-
priation of his own signature, whose reproduci-
bility reinstitutes the mourning for memory
that is the work of every reading.
It will be the work of this article to consider
how Proust depicts mourning in his novels
(that is, how his narrator writes life’s under-
standing of death), of what or how to call
death. I argue that the entirety of the “Albertine
novels” – those which Proust worked on and
inflated up until his death – is Proust working
through this aporia of death in life, and vice
versa. As early as his “The Image of Proust”
 dead write
(1929), Walter Benjamin identifies Proust’s
“physiology of style” as an integral instrument
to the latter’s creativity; Benjamin signals that
Proust weaves his novel into the horizon of his
own death that illness was bringing ever closer
– “he very systematically placed it in his
service” (“Image of Proust” 213–14). In the
chapter of The Culture of Redemption (1990)
devoted to Proust and Melanie Klein, Leo
Bersani argues that there are two contradictory
interpretations of death and mourning in the
Recherche: on the one hand, “the possession
of others is possible only when they are dead,”
but the beloved’s death can also produce “an
irremediable loss of self,” “a radical separation
of self from the world” (7). Responding to Ber-
sani’s reading, Scott Lerner has recently
suggested that, “if there is no successful mourn-
ing in the Recherche,” if its mourning should
instead be called “abnormal or unsuccessful,”
then “perhaps these very terms need to be re-
evaluated” (48).
Two other recent studies take up this task of
re-evaluation: Jennifer Rushworth’s Discourses
of Mourning in Dante, Petrarch, and Proust
(2016) and Anna Magdalena Elsner’s Mourning
and Creativity in Proust (2017). Both critics
undertake a Derridean reading of mourning in
the Recherche, using the concepts of “demi-
deuil” and “deuil impossible,” respectively.
For Rushworth, Derrida’s “demi-deuil”
enables a “more unstable relationship with the
deceased to be perpetuated […] than is poss-
ible” in “traditional psychoanalytical melancho-
lia” (98). Elsner argues that mourning is
essentially linked to Proustian creativity, and
that it “renders the impossibility of mourning”
palpable by “staging” the “infinite fragmenta-
tion of both the self and the other,” through
Albertine’s death (45). In making a connection
between Proust’s representation of mourning
and literary representation or creation itself,
Elsner touches on a common theme in discus-
sions of Proustian mourning. As Alexander
Garcı ́a Düttmann notes, “confronted with a
work such as the Recherche, the reader is in
much the same position as the narrator who
has lost his beloved” (89).2 Building on the
work of these and other critics, this article
aims to consider how the representation of
death and mourning in the Recherche bears
upon this question of textual or literary mourn-
ing: the kinds of loss that inhabits all literary
restance.
Dü ttmann points out that the status of the
Recherche as a work of art introduces a strange-
ness into the idea of mourning:
The dead awoken by the artist are neither the
living whom death has spared so far nor crea-
tures who have not existed before. There may
well be a response to the Recherche, but there
is no other Albertine behind the Albertine
the narrator introduces. (90)
A related question guides my enquiry in what
follows. Albertine’s death can only be signed
by “Proust,” by the artist who gives life to
these imaginations yet does not re-present
them: that is the reader’s work. In turn,
“Proust” is the artist who can no longer sign
for his death, but whose signature remains
throughout the text. Thus, the signature of
death is imagination, which is literature at its
full living, or representative, limits of life. As
Derrida writes,
[t]he presence of the represented is consti-
tuted thanks to the addition to itself of that
nothing which is the image, announcement
of its dispossession in its proper representa-
tive [représentant] and in its death. The prop-
erty [le propre] of the subject is nothing but
the movement of that representative expro-
priation. (Of Grammatology 200)
The propre of death, of literature, and of the self
is the expropriation of the signature, which
expires, always-already, in the act of giving
itself.
the spectre
Proust contends with the spectral “imagin-
ation” of re-presentation and death, or mourn-
ing, throughout his novel, and as early as its
first volume, Du côte ́ de chez Swann. Swann is
bound to Odette by a love that dominates his
imagination, or each representative movement
from his self. As such, he mourns himself –
the loss of his freedom, his joys, his former
80

love for Odette. He therefore imagines the extre-
mity that might give his freedom. “Sometimes
he hoped [Odette] would die in an accident
without suffering, she who was outside, in the
streets, on the roads, from morning to night”
(The Way by Swann’s 357). Swann’s painful
love has appropriated so much of his life that
he desires his beloved’s death; to recover his
independence, to renounce his pain, he hopes
for Odette’s absence, forever.
When considering this possibility, the narra-
tor notes that Swann
felt very close in his heart to Mohammed II,
whose portrait by Bellini he liked so much,
who, realizing that he had fallen madly in
love with one of his wives, stabbed her in
order, as his Venetian biography ingenuously
says, to recover his independence of mind.
(Ibid.)
In reality, though, this solution is illusory. The
removal of the beloved’s body, of their agency,
cannot remove their restance, as Swann dis-
covers: the narrator teases us with the possi-
bility that Swann might simply forget Odette,
noting that he “felt absolutely calm, and
almost happy” (375), because she had been
absent from Paris for nearly a year. However,
Swann meets a mutual friend on a bus, who
tells him that Odette adores him. This immedi-
ately forges Odette’s “transformation” back into
that version of her whom Swann “loved with a
peaceful attention” (378–79) – and a year’s
absence is collapsed by a single phrase. Swann
intimates, as perhaps Mohammed II was to
find out, that the removal of the beloved’s
body, of their agency, cannot remove their ima-
ginable restance. If anything, absence presents
to the grieving consciousness a ghostly pres-
ence, a simulacrum springing from even the
most anodyne of foreign bodies.
Swann discovers that the nature of knowing
or incorporating an absence is that it haunts, it
rests over (just as any “forgetting” might) all
presen[ce]ts. In Proust’s description of
absence, these multiplying relations are bound
to memory’s work through duration – Gian
Balsamo writes that the Recherche “promotes
a particular connection or interdependence
81
dutton
between the work of memory and the psychol-
ogy of mourning” (417). Mourning is coming
to terms with the “literary” restance of all of a
person’s absence(s). The remains of memory
render an absence traced into the present:
absence does not simply await a correspondence,
an “involuntary” memory, but rather it rests
amongst memories and is interdependent
between all of them. Here, Swann’s experience
illustrates for us how mourning is, for
Derrida, “a question, in truth, of the impossible
itself […] it would have to fail in order to
succeed” (The Work of Mourning 144). Mourn-
ing is pure aporia, which is why it is central to
Proust’s literary restance.
In this article, then, I want to suggest a
reading of mourning that emphasizes the
weaving of absent traces in Proust’s fiction.
The Recherche examines the traces of absence
in order to consider the aporia of mourning –
which, Derrida would argue, is the aporia of
writing. And even more than that: as Derrida
argues on numerous occasions, is “not all work
a work of mourning?” (Glas 86). Swann
cannot fully present the restance of his love to
himself in order to intellect or overcome it.
And yet it works him over in its haunting,
ready to recalibrate any perception into the mul-
tiplying order it sees fit. Therefore, Derrida is
correct in noting that mourning cannot be
spoken of as “work,” but speaks only after it
“comes to work over” the subject: “whoever
thus works at the work of mourning learns the
impossible – […] that mourning is intermin-
able. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable” (The Work
of Mourning 143). One can learn the impossible
without presenting it; like the trace, which
“does not exist” as a “present-entity” (Of Gram-
matology 182), this lesson rests across the irre-
concilable individuation of an absence – it is,
always without taking a form, or especially, a
body. This is why Derrida insists on le plus
d’un of mourning: it is the “more than one”
that exists simultaneously with the “no more
one” (Specters of Marx xx) – and yet never pre-
sents either. By determining the aporetic struc-
ture of writing as given by the deliquescence the
trace which forges sense but is never presented,
we can note the primacy of a reading which is
 dead write
traced by Proust and suggested by Derrida, but
is never presentable as a motif or category of its
own – without assuming, and rewriting, that
reading. Mourning demands a conclusion that
it cannot provide, because it presents and
absents itself as the constitution of its very
“being.” As Derrida highlights, “one should
not be able to say anything about the work of
mourning, anything about this subject, since it
cannot become a theme, only another experience
of mourning that comes to work over the one
who intends to speak” (The Work of Mourning
143). This work is itself spectral – it is a ghost.
The only way to explore such a difficult ontol-
ogy is to ask why, and how, these ghosts haunt,
and how one might describe living with them –
to determine their “hauntology.” When Derrida
goes about describing how one might “learn to
live,” he specifies that the learning element
“remains to be done,” and as such,
it can happen only between life and death.
Neither in life nor in death alone. What
happens between the two, and between all
the “two’s” one likes, such as between life
and death, can only maintain itself with
some ghost, can only talk with or about
some ghost. (Specters of Marx xviii)
This radical metaphysics of aporia deconstructs
an ontology focused on the presence (or presen-
tation) of property, and notes the haunting of its
in-between(s): a spectral trace of the Idea that is
not the presentation of the Idea.3 The “spectral
is not. Even and especially if this, which is
neither substance, nor essence, nor existence,
is never present as such” (ibid.). Therefore,
while it may come from a time previously lived
by the conjurer of the spectre, its very appari-
tion – to Derrida its revenant (re-coming, its
constant potential presence in that it is always
in the very act of returning, never to have
returned) – indicates an arrest of progressive,
chronological temporality, and a breakdown of
le propre. The other can never contribute any-
thing more to its spectrality, yet its spectrality
interacts with, it haunts, the continual flow of
the subject’s perceptions. The subject and
object interweave, already, or all-too-late.
Proust’s narrator hypothesizes that “since the
dead exist only in us, it is ourselves that we
strike unrelentingly when we persist in remem-
bering the blows we have dealt them” (Sodom
and Gomorrah 161): their otherness reinstalls
itself in our self, blurring the distinction
between us and them, over and again, every
time – every time that, in “recalling,” imagines
a fixed past time in which the other was other.
Like literature, the representation of the
spectre constitutes while it dislocates presence,
as an always concurrent trace. As the spectre’s
subject, enquiring as to the spectre’s spectrality,
we
are questioning in this instant, we are asking
ourselves about this instant that is not docile
to time, at least to what we call time. Furtive
and untimely, the apparition of the specter
does not belong to that time, it does not
give time, not that one. (Specters of Marx xx)
And yet, preserved as an imagined other within
the self, the spectre haunts the unfolding of
each new present. Always untimely, the
spectre that we mourn is only ever the trace
of an absence.
Hence the troubling “quality” spectral
mourning acquires in the Recherche, a novel
whose narrating voice is “nothing visible” –
and critically, always le plus d’un. In what
follows, I’d like to consider the literary conse-
quences that Proust signals towards by
working over so much of his later work with
mourning. In this regard, as Elsner reminds
us, it is important to note that
Proust left no final version of the Recherche
from Sodome et Gomorrhe onwards. The
last three volumes of what we call the
Recherche is really a patchwork taken from
the unfinished manuscript, whereby
Proust’s text itself questions its origin. It is
a work in progress staging the tragedy of
the early death of its author. (2)
Not only does Proust’s text always defer its
origin, but deferral is the endless work of the
text, so much so that working (writing, correct-
ing, staging) at mourning followed Proust to the
mourning of himself. In a popularly cited scene
from the novel, the author Bergotte considers
82

the posterity of his signature at his death (and,
in turn, the posterity of his signature at every
signing of it).4 Antoine Compagnon notes the
attention Proust paid to writing this scene, in
the “final period” of notebooks – “Cahiers 59
through 62” – and that, like Bergotte, Proust
himself visited an exhibition of Dutch painters
at the Jeu de Paume in 1921. “The novelistic
in the Recherche is often the trace of life, of
the present that happens after the fact”
(Proust between Two Centuries 109), or
perhaps, the present that can only be deferred.
In signing, marking oneself over and speaking
for the work throughout it, the author works
over – haunts – the flow of its parts. Derrida
notes that this constant “inclusion of the
whole in the part […] subscribes oneself to
mourning and even to mourning for oneself”
(Derrida in Hillis Miller 77). The iterability of
one’s literature, of one’s signature, and
oneself, leads to mourning: to write or say “I
have” or “I know” is to disseminate, to disman-
tle the singularity that utterance seeks to make
present. The signature that gives such appro-
priation is the ostensible signing of “proper
names, which are always surnames of classifi-
cation, violently imposed, operations of class,
which ring to call the work of mourning, to
expropriation” (Glas 86). The appropriation of
naming always implies its own (propre) expro-
priation; the “work of mourning is called –
glas. It is always for/of the proper name”
(ibid.). To call a mourning by a name is to
sound its funeral calling, the knell of the bell
that calls (it) mourning – that is, its glas.
Mourning wants to name (to call, just as we
persist in recalling the blows we have dealt to)
its dead, but whatever rings out will never
capture the trace of the mourning, the glas, or
the dead. One can only ever mourn between
the glas and the dead. Therefore, literature,
which names or iterates ceaselessly – for
calling, ringing, or naming (s’appeler), applying
language to the revenant, tracing traces, is its
most appropriate property – mourns its absent
presence, its absent creator whose proper signa-
ture is a spectre. And let us not forget, having
died without finishing these final novels, while
mourning (in) them, Proust never signed them.
83
dutton
writing death (nothing)
The complexities – the depths – of this abyss are
dizzying. But the relationship between spectral
mourning and literature opens up a temporality
which relies on that abyss, the infinity of calling
– an action that I’d like to argue Proust was con-
scious of throughout his work. Writing seeks to
impart a form onto traces – writing mourning
consists in, as Antoine Compagnon notes,
“recounting it, ‘talk[ing] about it’ [… which]
would involve ordering it, accepting the
passage of time, accomplishing the work of
mourning” (“Writing Mourning” 211). This is
exactly what mourning for the spectre that
“does not belong to time” cannot do. Compag-
non’s contention here is twofold, because even
if that recount can occur, once it is written the
narrative and the language that gives it dissemi-
nate, and open up the intense, spectral abyss
once more – and with it the glas, the dissemina-
tion of temporal ordering. Therefore, it is the
very writing of a complete mourning, its con-
clusion or answer, that is irreconcilable,
because, in “mourning, to reject narrative
means to forget time – time for living” (ibid.):
and also, a distinct, present time for writing,
and for reliving (the revenant of reading). The
one definitive opportunity the narrator has to
describe the resolution of a mourning –
Swann’s marriage to Odette – he doesn’t take,
because mourning, or its results, can never be
resolved by presenting them as a time that can
be ordered. The eventual degradation of
Swann’s mourning – the constant links to an
un-present-ably absent Odette – is the alteration
of Swann into a different Swann, which, like his
own love for Odette, cannot be noticed in one
present call, but rather in the gradual move-
ment – or deferral down the abyss – of restance.
Their temporal distance implies a difference,
which can never be totalized as the same identity
in chronology, or in signifying, reiterating
literature.
I would like to insist on this point – that grief
cannot be resolved in the iterable, imagined
presence of writing because it opens out the
abyss of (re-)presentation, and thus cannot be
totalized (or called) – by considering the
 dead write
narrator’s mourning of the spectral Albertine.
In La Prisonnière, the narrator desires mourn-
ing, just like Swann’s closeness of heart to
Mohammed II. He finds himself torn between
a boredom towards Albertine, indifferent to
her company and to her charms, and a rabid jea-
lousy with regard to her desires. He thus begins
manoeuvres to send her away, but only on the
condition that he should know where to, and
at all times.
But Albertine leaves him. Without his knowl-
edge, without his prior consent – without
calling him; critically, she leaves him of her
own volition (though, farcically, more or less
on the day, and to the place, that he was
seeking to send her). Thus, for the narrator,
having lost his prerogative over Albertine’s
absence, he is deprived of the solace of
knowing: of knowing where she is, and why,
for whom. He only knows where she is absent,
and only one of those places. The text of the
long section that follows seeks to aggregate in
writing the various Albertines incessantly ren-
dered by her spectre – compounded by her
death, which occurs in this absence. The narra-
tive superfluity of his jealousy disseminates – he
can no longer imagine Albertine’s absent place –
and amidst this, he notes, critically for the
development of his mourning: “[h]ow much
more sharply suffering probes the psyche than
does psychology!” (The Fugitive 387). Face to
face with the absolute narrative infinity of the
possibilities that Albertine’s absence creates,
of the knowledge that no knowledge he might
guess about her can possibly be verified except
that she is not there, his reasoning typifies the
essential revenant of the spectre, as Derrida
describes it. Albertine’s ghost haunts the narra-
tor’s psyche before he can ever be conscious of
it. This quality of the revenant – the restance
of the “present” tense – invades experience,
lying in wait to stow-away in any, and almost
every, intellection. The revenant is the restance
of the present/absent distinction: the presen-
tation of restance is traced down the abyss,
further than “psychology itself,” or its imagin-
ation. As Dü ttmann notes, “Albertine’s pres-
ence seems to be an effect of her absence. It is
doubtful whether her death does make a
difference. What would be a presence that is
not the effect of an absence?” (89). The
spectre is the precedence and the possibility of
absence – it possesses absence, and for that
reason, haunts every representation.
Critically, there is a literary element to the
spectre, and vice versa: they both come about
because of their present-less restance, opening
out towards the abyss, tracing their absent
origin by writing more literature, and in turn
conjuring more ghosts. Albertine’s death is
always-already signed. In so far as “events
extend further than the moments in which
they happen” (The Prisoner 371), the narrator
weaves the sensed premonition of Albertine’s
death, the event of his discovering it, and its dis-
seminating ramifications, into less than a page of
a novel thousands of pages long. He accepts
Albertine’s death as though it has already
occurred: he presages it by halting his flowing,
rococo sentences with one of his shortest –
“She never returned” – and then quotes,
without any other context, a letter from Alber-
tine’s aunt, Mme Bontemps, informing him
briefly and melodramatically of Albertine’s acci-
dental death.
How can one ever write an event of such
gravity? And if it can be done, how can it hold
– what is its restance within a text other than
bringing that person back to life? Proust defers
the answer to such questions: he weaves the
certain calling (glas) of Albertine’s death into a
speculative discourse of spectrality, of the con-
tingencies Albertine’s absence continues to
arouse – as though the definitive, irreversible
event of Albertine’s becoming dead (once, and
irreversibly) cannot resound. This is a claim
that is doubly underlined in the text. Firstly,
Albertine’s death can only be cited in the form
of quoted speech signed by Mme Bontemps
(which awkwardly trails off without her signa-
ture). Secondly, in the same paragraph (The
Fugitive 443–45) Proust rings the beginning of
his most complex glas: he receives and quotes
two telegrams from Albertine, one affecting
compliance with the narrator’s feigned desire
to marry their friend Andrée (a ruse designed
to compel Albertine’s return of her own,
jealous accord), and the other professing a
84

hasty, fretful desire to return (though the narra-
tor suspects these were written “possibly without
any interval” and that Albertine “must have
antedated the first” – though probably before
writing the second). The narrator’s anxiety
about the multiplicity of Albertine’s variant
desires remains in his text, while her text, that
is, these telegrams, further multiplies her other
possible desires (could she be writing more? To
whom? Or why not? And where are they?).
Amidst the multiplication of Albertine’s voli-
tions that her texts, but primarily her absences,
have engendered, one should ask: why does the
narrator accept, without interrogation, the
content of Mme Bontemps’ telegram? It is the
event of the novel, and yet it is washed over
by a paragraph that assumes its effects and
translates them without so much as a pause for
contemplation. Albertine’s death can eventually
be contemplated, but the singular event that
signs it can never be signed for (by Mme Bon-
temps, Albertine, the narrator, Proust, or even
the reader) because such a definitive death is
not something that the novel allows. Albertine’s
resemblance, clearly, goes on living throughout
the novel. It is real in the resemblance of the real
that is fiction (that is, resemblance). Or rather, it
rests in what rests. This is why Proust inserts
Albertine’s death within a flowing paragraph
that also cites her voice in the form of these
telegrams – as though the effect of her literary
voice problematizes the event of her literary
death. Mme Bontemps’ telegram is reproduced
in the text, and then, by the following para-
graph, the narrator’s grief for Albertine’s
“death” is being contemplated as a certain,
though unknowable, fact. The death of the
woman who was always in motion, always inspir-
ing an extra doubt between two doubts, is made
into an inarguable certainty by an unsigned
letter from an unreliable source. Albertine’s
death itself is signed, always-already. The
event of its deferral works through the glas-
call of its textual dissemination, its textual infin-
ity: it cannot overwrite itself while it is being
overwritten. The certainty of Albertine’s death
is signed by the text itself. The text is respon-
sible for her death because the text itself is the
verifying signature that guarantees its
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credibility, its certainty, its is: each contention
of absence resting in the text is the necessary,
non-forgeable weave of the signature that certi-
fies her death.
And as though more evidence were required
for the verification of this signature, to guard
against its forgery, Proust returns later in the
uncompleted, posthumous (that is, unsigned)
Albertine disparue, to Albertine’s signature.
The narrator is finally in Venice, aloof, though
sometimes sensing that the “Albertine of
former times, although invisible, was none the
less locked deep inside [him], as if in the lead-
lined cells of some inner Venice” (603). Return-
ing to the hotel, he receives a telegram, which
reads: “DEAR FRIEND YOU BELIEVE ME
DEAD, MY APOLOGIES, NEVER MORE
ALIVE, WOULD LIKE TO SEE YOU TO
DISCUSS MARRIAGE, WHEN DO YOU
RETURN? AFFECTIONATELY, ALBER-
TINE” (605–06). This spectral writing takes
the porous form of an abyssal propre – is it a
hoax, an anachronism, or the literature of a
ghost? This Unheimlichkeit streams forth
from the signature itself, which designates this
absolutely reproducible text (it is a telegram,
its signature is typed, and is thus only a repre-
sentative name, not a signature) as a restance
intensified by its iterability. And again, the nar-
ration treats the content of this signature as it is
always-already signed: the narrator does not
stop to contemplate Albertine’s death, or resur-
rection, because he has never presented either.
His narration passes directly into the effect of
her non-death. “Now that Albertine was no
longer alive in my thoughts, the news that she
was alive did not bring me the joy that I
would have expected” (606). The conjunction
that overwhelms this sentence is the critical
textual weaving of Proust’s signature mourning,
or rather, the mourning of Proust’s signature.
In the same telegram (that is, typed-out, absol-
utely reproducible, signature-less), Albertine is
dead and alive, signed into an absolute simula-
crum – the text of hers indicates to the narrator
her simultaneous living and being dead, and all
only because her signature exhumes her literary
being. But this complicit belief hinges on the
narrator’s understanding that “Albertine had
 dead write
been for [him] but a bundle of thoughts” (ibid.).
Can Albertine ever be alive or dead? Or rather,
is Albertine ever alive or dead? She is a bundle
of thoughts, generating from a mass of words, or
reiterable language – both in the literature that
we read and have read, and to the narrator,
who has only read of her death and resurrection.
The life of the narrator’s Albertine is, here, the
same as our Albertine’s – the “present cer-
tainty” of a text, the verification of a signature.
And yet there is a proper hold, a contiguity that
returns the differentiation of Albertine to the
narrator, and to us, as solid as stone or a
statue. She rests throughout the literature,
throughout memory, and throughout represen-
tation: the imagine-able work of her properties
is the verifying stroke of her imag(e)inable
(unsigned) signature.
This all hinges on that unlikely signature,
signed from beyond the grave. Or rather, the
undecidable signature. Its virtuality is the unde-
cidable, multiplying fold between what it is and
isn’t: it guarantees that she can never be present
ever again, and yet its propre is to designate only
her. The textual signs for the purest mourning,
that of a simultaneous is and isn’t. Some time
after reading it, the narrator, all of a sudden,
felt a transversal shift in his brain: this ghostly
telegram was not from Albertine at all, but
rather, it “was from Gilberte,” his prior love.
The “rather factitious originality” (619) of Gil-
berte’s signature, or its self-disqualifying verifi-
cation, enacts exactly what such a disqualifying
expression implies: it disseminates its propre as
it’s becoming propre. The signature is supposed
to single out its signatory, to identify that it is
verifiably that person (Gilberte), and no other.
And yet, for the narrator, it instantly identifies,
and belongs, to someone else (Albertine). Alber-
tine’s spectre is given and not taken away, while
being erased – recalled – because her bundle of
thoughts becomes revenant from the enveloping
signs of a differing signature. Gilberte’s sign has
disseminated what her signature appropriates:
the properly verifying property presented in
absence, always-already. This is logically
assembled as an abnormality, but this is
nothing new, any more than an absent origin
of literary interpretation:
Everything is played out, everything and all
the rest – that is to say, the game – is
played out in the entre […] When this un-
decidability is marked and re-marked in
writing, it has a greater power of formaliza-
tion, even if it is “literary” in appearance,
or appears to be attributable to a natural
language, than when it occurs as a prop-
osition in logicomathematical form, which
would not go as far as the former type of
mark. (Dissemination 222)
This textual death has a “greater power of for-
malization” than its form itself because of the
intensity of its undecidability. Accounting for
the disseminating work done by Gilberte’s sig-
nature, the narrator notes that “it was natural
enough [il était tout naturel] that a telegraph
clerk” should have misinterpreted it. But to
translate it exactly into “Albertine” – notwith-
standing the narrator’s equivocations that “her
G […] had the appearance of an A in gothic
script” – seems fanciful, or rather forced, artifi-
cial, unnatural. It is not natural, or not real, but
rather a resemblance of the real. As if to qualify
either the clerk’s or his real non-reality, the nar-
rator considers the sanctity of a “correct”
reading, and the literary complications of the
always deferred, absent origin of a meaning
that means what it means:
How many characters in each word does a
person read when his mind is on other
things and when he is already sure that he
knows who the letter is from? How many
words in each sentence? We guess as we
read, we invent; everything stems from one
initial error; those that follow (and this not
only in reading letters and telegrams, not
even only in all acts of reading), however
extraordinary they may seem to someone
who does not share the same starting-point,
are natural enough [sont toutes naturelles].
Thus it is that a great deal of what we
believe to be true, not to mention the ulti-
mate conclusions that, with equal persever-
ance and good faith, we draw from it,
results from an initial misconception of the
premiss. (The Fugitive 620)
This conceiving misconception is the work of
literature itself. To sign is simply to give up
86

the pretence of meaning, the original mistake
made by the signatory, to the différante mis-
takes made by the reader. Each “mistake” is
the work of reading, of writing, of creation –
of signing – and as such, we should not call
the work of creation a mistake, or even an
interpretation, but rather the becoming of
signing, of making resemblance of the real
more natural in its resemblance, which isn’t
real – it’s dead.
As Derrida notes, a key element of mourning
is “always attempting to ontologize remains, to
make them present, in the first place by identi-
fying the bodily remains and by localizing the
dead” (Specters of Marx 9). For the narrator,
Albertine’s death constitutes an absolute disse-
mination of any kind of stable ontology of her
“remains” – the traces and memories that
remain with the narrator. Her spectre is every-
where, breaking down both elements of that
copula’s noun (“every” various Albertine
cannot take or form a “where,” yet seemingly
does) from the spectral impossibility of its
verb (“is” – Albertine no longer is, yet her
spectre always is). For Derrida, the
specter appears to present itself during a vis-
itation. One represents itself to oneself, but it
is not present, itself, in flesh and blood. This
non-presence of the specter demands that one
take its times and its history into consider-
ation, the singularity of its temporality or
of its historicity. (101)
Spectral aporia, which constitutes the dissemi-
nating, folding-in of presence in Derrida’s
work, underlines the very real “singularity” of
this “consideration.” The revenant of the
spectre challenges the stability of ontology,
and of Being itself – yet takes them in, down
the abyss. The trace opens out the “misconcep-
tions” that conceive the signature, especially the
signature of the editing/mourning/writing/
dying Proust:
Ideality is death, to be sure, but to be dead –
this is the whole question of dissemination –
is that to be dead or to be dead? The ever so
slight difference of stress, conceptually
imperceptible, the inner fragility of each
attribute produces the oscillation between
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the presence of being as death and the
death of being as presence. (Glas 133)
Is writing the writing of the dead? Or for the
dead? And yet writing itself is dead – it is
finite, formed and fixed in language, whose iter-
ability haunts the possibility of its meaning.
Albertine, in being “fixed” as dead, is as
“fixed” as infinitely iterable language – that is,
not at all. Derrida’s “ever so slight difference
of stress” mirrors the contradiction of mourn-
ing, in which the loved one leaves and returns
in the same movement: how can one be dead,
be not being? This is the intensity of mourning,
and critically, the mourning of literature. How
can language be resemblance (not being – to
maximally reconsider the Stranger’s contention
in The Sophist)?5 Proust cannot rewrite his
novel, but in (re)reading (mourning) it, the
novel takes on new forms – it dies again. The
“conceptually imperceptible” difference(s)
between these forms of death, or the “being”
of death, is implied in the language that, in a
present-less restance, cannot fix it, but stresses
it, which is not the work of writing. As mourn-
ing is the mourning through the passing of time
and chronology, literature is the “presentation”
of this unpresentable death: the rêve-n[é]ant,
and all the possibilities that this différance
implies – the dream of nothingness, the spectral
re-coming of nothing, the abyss of a nothingness
that is always, spectrally, something having
been, returning-while-absent. Or, perhaps, it is
a rêven´ant – a dream of a nothingness that
haunts being, but which can never present the
quality that makes it no-thing (that quality
being the graphic é). This absence in turn
implies the “nothingness” of a dream – the
full spectr(e)um of sensible traces that have no
waking duration, and yet were – fully superim-
posed and real in the dream. Proust seizes the
rêven´ant in dying through/from/for his
book: and we oscillate between the imagined
presence of death – Albertine’s, Proust’s, writ-
ing’s, our own – as the glas-work of reading.6
dreaming death (writing nothing)
The spectral restance of grief in the novel hinges
on the question: how can the “being” of death
 dead write
(ostensibly not-being) be thought? Take this
example: the narrator affirms that while “Alber-
tine existed in [his] memory only in the states in
which she had appeared successively during her
life, that is, subdivided into a series of temporal
fractions, [his] thoughts, restoring her unity,
reconstituted her as a person [rétablissant en
elle l’unite,́ en refaisait un être]” (The Fugitive
480). Indeed, Albertine’s incorrigible absence
makes a sense of her stable unity seem possible.
But it is constituted of fragmented, differing
ghosts – traces, just like language. The narrator
notes that, of those whom we love well but see
infrequently, “the image we retain of them is
no more than a sort of vague composite of an
infinite number of subtly different images”
(Finding Time Again 156): this “infinite
number” haunts the timeless space of forgetting
and forms the sense of the trace, the sense of
sense. This “unity” or “person” is no person
who ever was, but rather is the compilation,
the “vague composite” of all of those selves
which the narrator perceived Albertine to be.
Because this Albertine exists across so many
times, she is chronologically timeless, expressed
fully only in the timelessness of haunting, which
is, Derrida writes, “historical, to be sure, but it
is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in
the chain of presents, day after day, in the insti-
tuted order of a calendar” (Specters of Marx 4).
This is the time of the narrator’s grief: he felt
himself “still reliving a past that was no more
than another man’s story”: reliving, but not
dated, the abyss of an iterable, transversal circu-
larity, “rekindled every time that a spark passed
the old current back through it, even when [his]
mind had long since ceased to think of Alber-
tine” (The Fugitive 498–99). This iterability
of corporeal (though absent) Albertines
mirrors the iterability of literary Albertines
signed-for (thus absent) – an iterability, or
“slight difference of stress” (Glas 133), that is
not the work of literature (yet gives it), just as
life is not the work of death (yet gives it).
Albertine will never be “an Albertine” ever
again, but rather “Albertine” inextricably com-
posed of Albertines (for the spectre can never be
“a” spectre, because its timelessness determines
that its revenant is never “a” place in “a” time).
Thus, the narrator resolves that to successfully
overcome his grief he would have to wrest this
composite Albertine apart. “Each Albertine
was attached to a moment, to a date where I
was transported when I visualized her again”
(The Fugitive 455). As he feels himself “trans-
ported” to a past in the spectral apparition of
Albertine, he realizes that “past moments do
not stay still; they maintain in our memory the
momentum which was driving them towards
the future – towards a future which itself has
already become the past – dragging us in their
wake” (ibid.). The spectre multiplies; it drags
our future in its wake. While the revenant of
“countless Albertines” each produces specific,
separate moments from the narrator’s past,
each is inextricably connected to the pasts and
futures that these Albertines may not ever
have known. Albertine’s death – the apparent
“no more Albertine” – in fact produces more
Albertines than if she were still alive: she is,
in death, a composite and timeless rêven´ant
Albertine – le plus d’Albertine. She is thought
of only as resemblance, as simulacra, and there-
fore as literature – iterable, always plural,
always deferring to a greater multiplicity. And
these versions, being each an Albertine that
has never existed, is the revenant of the
spectre: always arriving outside of knowledge,
inferring pasts and futures, but never capable
of presenting them in their fullness. At each
rêven´ant the conjurer is drawn along towards
the future – the conjurer writes, further into
and from that future – and every other
memory that has gone with it is drawn too,
into the spectre’s wake. The narrator has “long
since ceased to think of Albertine” (499; my
emphasis), and can never again: she is iteratively
timeless in every and any future. This Albertine
both “is dead” and “is dead,” in Derrida’s for-
mulation. She is no longer, and yet she no
longer “is.” This undecidable “difference of
stress” renders Albertine’s literary death a
written (that is, imagined) nothingness, a reani-
mating remains resting amongst the traces of the
signature.
The signature puts the thing into its nothing-
ness that, even after death, cannot be taken out
of it. Therefore, the absolution that Swann and
88

the narrator imagined their lover’s death would
bring them is a hypothesis that is doomed to an
eternal dreaming – it will bring them, but will
always bring them back (revenant). Considering
the possibility that an accident befalling Alber-
tine, leading to her death, might suppress his
suffering, the narrator asks what this might
possibly mean. “Can I really have believed it,”
he asks,
believed that death erases only what exists
and leaves everything else in the state it was
before, that it removes pain from the heart
of the man for whom the existence of his
partner is no longer anything but a cause of
pain, that it removes pain and leaves
nothing in its place? Suppression of pain!
(442–43)
The pain of mourning is installed in the heart,
but it is only ever coming back – the lover is
always mourning the beloved’s iterability, the
suppression of which is always deferred, like
its origin. The death of the beloved cannot
simply recover for the lover their independence
of mind, though Swann, “who was so refined
and thought he knew himself so well, had
believed it” (443). “How well,” the narrator
exclaims, “I could have taught him a little
later, had he still been alive, that his wish was
as absurd as it was criminal and that the death
of the woman he loved would have liberated
him from nothing!” (ibid.). The rêven´ant of
her death binds the narrator further to the
dream of absence, forgetting, and nothingness:
that Albertine is, dead.
Therefore, the narrator must make sense,
must arrive at knowing – or worse, writing – a
definite fact, which goes further than any
other in working to make itself unknown, or
challenges the possibility of that knowing:
Albertine was dead. It seemed that I had to
choose between two facts and decide which
was true, so blatantly did the death of Alber-
tine – which arose for me out of a reality
which I had not known, her life in Touraine
– contradict all the thoughts that linked me
to her, my desires, my regrets, my tender-
ness, my rage and my jealousy. Such a
wealth of memories borrowed from her
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life’s inventory, such a profusion of emotions
evoking or involving her life, seemed to make
it unbelievable that Albertine could be dead.
Such a profusion of feelings, for while my
memory preserved my affection it also pre-
served its whole variety. (456)
Its “whole variety”: Albertine’s death defers any
final determination of her personality, her
tastes, her desires, her lies – in short, her fic-
tions. To reach an end to jealousy, the narrator
would have to bring his “affections up to date.
But this was impossible, because they could
locate their object, Albertine, only in memories
where she still lived on” (457). These “mem-
ories” of an Albertine who always “still lived
on” seek to present her, to present her trace,
which even (especially) in death is absent, and
thus reinterpretable. In this sense, the forever-
absent beloved can never be totalized: the narra-
tor can never locate the Albertine because she is
comprised of various, often contradictory ver-
sions of separate times that are necessarily
latent on the perceptual horizon: le plus d’Al-
bertine. Her signature is forever being reread.
The spiral of his jealousy forces him to identify
the key aporia of mourning, and of conjuring a
spectral rêven´ant into literature.
Since at any moment when I thought of her, I
resuscitated her, her infidelities could never
be those of a dead woman, for the moment
when she had committed them became the
present moment, not only for Albertine but
also for whichever of my various selves was
suddenly enlisted to contemplate her. (Ibid.)
Albertine’s death has rendered for the narrator a
more terrifying possibility of uncertainty than
the extensive and entropic future, one myster-
ious and cruel because “it would unfold as far
as [his] life itself, without [his] companion
being there to alleviate the suffering that it
caused” (ibid.). Paradoxically, this life of
future suffering depends upon a revival of the
past, which is just as unknowable as the
future, because it contains a “reality that [he]
had not known” – Albertine’s “life.” He there-
fore questions the very quality of this past.
“Her Past? This is not the right term, since in
jealousy there is neither past nor future, for
 dead write
what it imagines is always the present” (ibid.). It
imagines the present, but can never present the
present. In fact, the most interesting element of
this passage is its literary desire, but eventual
failure, to reify any category of time – present,
future or past. It can only ever weave them
together, as a deferring, dead textuality – a
dream of nothingness, a dream of not having
read, written, or signed for it.
This is precisely the aporia which gives (or is
the rêven´ant of) the reading I have proposed of
Proustian mourning. The narrator outlines it
best: “This was yet another of the consequences
of our finding it impossible, when we have to
analyse death, to imagine it in terms other than
those of life” (486). Just as the essential quality
of thought or of le propre denies a possibility of
nothingness, it is impossible, the narrator posits
here, to make sense of death. How can it be poss-
ible to render dead, to render eternally absent,
not only ourselves – “[w]hen we try to figure
out what will happen after our death, are we not
mistakenly still projecting the image of our
living selves which we have at that moment?”
(ibid.) – but that of another whom we constantly
recall in our memories, about whom we imagine
in our most basic perceptions, of whom we have
always-already written, or signed? Death cannot
be presented; its imagination starts, like reading
literature, from an originary mistake that we
cannot but add to. In turn, neither can the
death of the signatory be presented in the literary
work – the work whose origin (the signatory) is
dead, even as the flow of its dissemination con-
tinues. Death, and literature as death, is the
rêven´ant: we can never “imagine it in terms
other than those of life” – and yet the image,
the re-presentation, is death “itself.”
It is in this context that the narrator raises the
impossibility of expropriating an appropriation
that is expropriated from the start:
For we exist only through what we possess,
and we possess only what is actually
present, since so many of our memories,
moods and ideas leave us and travel to
faraway places, where we lose sight of them!
Then we can no longer enter them into the
accounting system whose sum is our whole
being. But they find secret ways [chemins
secrets] of returning within us. And some
evenings, having fallen asleep hardly
missing Albertine any longer – we can miss
only what we remember – I awoke to find
that a whole fleet of memories had sailed
into my clearest consciousness and had
become marvellously distinct. Then I wept
for the things which I saw so well and
which for me the day before had been
utterly absent. Albertine’s name and her
death had changed their meaning; her
betrayals had suddenly resumed their old sig-
nificance. (454–55)
There will always be another betrayal from, or
as, the same betrayal; there will always be
another Recherche (glas) in the same Recherche
(dingdong). The apparent axioms the narrator
builds at the beginning of this passage are the
undecidable signature, or rather, the emphasis
or stress, of Proust’s mourning literature. The
trace that upturns the spectre of presentation
renders “what is actually present” equally spec-
tral – we can possess nothing of presence
because it is possessed, haunted by, the
“secret ways” or traces, of its absence. Alber-
tine’s name, her death, as considered in this
passage, cannot not reiterate their meanings –
else be nothing, an abyss which is nothing but
being. So is the narrator’s deduction that we
don’t exist? Perhaps; or perhaps more pre-
sently, it is that we cannot sign for such an exist-
ence, because to sign for any possession is to
sign for the rêven´ant that ceaselessly dissemi-
nates “what is actually present” as the “secret
ways” of absence: it brings the traces of these
“secret ways” back to life. Proust’s novel, in
staging the dissemination of the abyssal noth-
ingness of possession, writes, or imagines (or
dies as) the sense given by the trace, felt so
acutely in the signature, the always-already, of
mourning Proust.
How can we forget forever anything that we
have lived? By writing it? Mourning, in forcing
a subject to imagine a possibility which cannot
be perceived, opens up the final, inviolable
rupture between literature, subjectivity, and
their spectral conjugation – the signature. If
mourning is the very presence of absence
itself, then to appropriate, to write the
90

experience of mourning one must sign oneself
“in” what remain(s) between the spectre and
its present absence: the trace and/of the
sign(ing). In the passage quoted above, the nar-
rator teases us with objective facts regarding
psychological logic: “we can miss only what we
remember,” he inserts, definitively, into his
thesis, but then proceeds to unravel the cer-
tainty of any such claim. Or, far more impor-
tantly, he asks what it is to remember in the
first place. He does not “possess” these mem-
ories of Albertine; he does not remember
them, and therefore cannot regret them, or
suffer for them. But while he cannot remember
them – that is, he cannot sign for his memory –
he can sign his literature, and then forget, dis-
possess, and die into that too.
Literature is mourning, and mourning litera-
ture. There can be no other “secret way” about
it. While this dispossession traces as the primor-
dial already of the abyssal signature (“the
accounting system whose sum is our whole
being”), there can still possibly emerge from
it, as if new matter, as if being written into the
thoughts of another person, all of these forgot-
ten memories now rendered so “marvellously
distinct.” To appropriate memories is to
possess them, to sign them, to sign oneself,
one that wouldn’t disseminate.
This “sum” of our “whole
being” can never be whole,
because it disseminates at every
new signing: mourning Proust
[h]is mourning signature.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by
the author.
notes
1 Derrida’s work on le propre of the signature and
the différance it evokes is well known. In Glas, he
notes that the
glas’s, such as we shall have heard them, toll
the end of signification, of sense, and of the
signifier. Outside which, not to oppose the
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signature, still less to appose, affix it to that,
we remark the signature through its name,
in spite of what is thereby named, no longer
signifies […]
A text “exists,” resists, consists, represses,
lets itself be read or written only if it is
worked (over) by the illegibility of the
proper name. I have not – not yet – said
that the proper name exists, or that it
becomes illegible when it falls (to the tomb)
in the signature. (Glas 31, 33)
It is this différante movement that I seek to trace in
this article.
2 In the same manner, Jean-Michel Rabaté notes
that the “ghost of Albertine survives as a
perfume, a color, a birdsong, endlessly present
and absent, the penultimate trace of a writing
that is full of pain but ineluctably haunting and
haunted” (13). Malcolm Bowie attributes her per-
sistence to the “vigorous resurrectionist tendency
of the narrator’s imagination” (290).
3 For Derrida, it is appearance, or phainesthai,
“itself (before its determination as phenomenon
or phantasm, thus as phantom) [that] is the very
possibility of the specter” (Specters of Marx 169).
Roger Luckhurst refers to “something of a ‘spectral
turn’ in contemporary criticism” (527) in describ-
ing the critical enthusiasm which followed Specters
of Marx, and the application of this kind of intra-
phenomenological reading of absence in literary
theory (535).
4 The fractal work of this scene was discussed by
Derrida in an unpublished seminar (Hillis Miller
77).
5 A contention which haunts Derrida’s Plato’s
Pharmacy, and thus appears (Dissemination 164–
67) when considering the weaving of differences
(a “triton ti” outside of “classical ontology”) that is
common to both writing and Being.
6 And, especially and of course, the hardest work
of the multiplying re-s of rereading.
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