![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
Abstract
Within the critical humanities there has been a recent return to Marxist and communist thought, which has meant a reckoning with post-structuralism. Thinkers, such as José Muñoz and Jodi Dean, who have been critical of parts of the post-structural legacy, have also held onto certain aspects of that tradition, in particular non-coincidence as a stay against identity, administration, and/or determination. However, they have done so in ways that have left unquestioned a contemporary commonsense around teleology. In this essay I argue this has led to an inability to think or maintain connections between the subject and representation – crucial categories for any materialism. Through a discussion of the work of Cuban poet José Lezama Lima, I cultivate a critical vocabulary for building and sustaining non-coincident relations between the subject and representation, ones which neither collapse these two planes nor render them abyssal.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
Thanks are due to Jaime Rodríguez Matos for his comments on several early versions of this essay and to the anonymous reviewer who gave multiple rounds of excellent feedback on this piece.
1 Some authors such as Chantal Mouffe, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, have argued for a turn away from “openness” and that democracy necessitates closure. I am not interested in hegemony; my approach here tries to hold onto non-coincidence.
2 Readers of systems theory and contemporary biology might be (justifiably) wondering at this stage whether the biological concept of telenomy does not solve the problems I am raising. My argument would be that it does not. I see telenomy, whether in an account like Terrence Deacon’s Incomplete Nature or William E. Connolly’s The Fragility of Things, as a way of avoiding the issues raised by trying to think subject and representation in a non-coincident manner. There has not been room in this essay to delve into these matters with the care they deserve but my general argument would be that notions of autopoiesis and biological telenomy are accounts that locate non-coincidence on the side of the subject (much like Dean’s work) as opposed to between the subject and representation.
3 See, for instance, Jeffery C. Issac’s review in Dissent, “The Mirage of Neo-communism.”
4 One of the interesting dynamics of Dean’s book is that the first two chapters are devoted to arguing against this metonymic chain constructed by liberal democratic histories of communism. While Dean, I think, successfully attacks the historiography of communism in an attempt to rehabilitate the term (the “lost horizon” as she writes), the commonsense of non-coincidence returns when it comes time to discuss the political subject (the party/the people) in more detail.
5 A similar argument about the location of non-coincidence could be made through an examination of contemporary texts located explicitly in the Marxist tradition. See Massimiliano Tomba’s Marx’s Temporalities or Harry Harootunian’s Marx after Marx which develop incredibly sensitive methodologies for analyzing the uneven, palimpsestic, non-coincident temporalities of the past and present.
6 The work of Rafael Rojas, Tumbas sin sosiego: revolución, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano, and Duanel Díaz, Palabras del trasfondo: intelectuales, literatura, e ideología en la Revolución Cubana, provides examples that would fall primarily into the first category. Juan Duchesne Winter’s Comunismo literario and Brett Levinson’s Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expression” would be examples of the latter tendency. Jaime Rodríguez Matos’s important Writing of the Formless: José Lezama Lima and the End of Time opens up a different space for thinking Lezama as a writer of the informe.
7 Throughout this essay, when translating Lezama’s work, I will use pre-existing translations whenever available, indicating where necessary vocabulary or phrases in the original Spanish.
8 Lezama’s poetry is famous for its hermeticism, for the way that it proceeds by producing arresting, unexpected, and impossible images. Take, for example, this stanza from his 1941 volume Enemigo Rumor: “¿Comprendes la mano alzada / –flor de hilo y de venas / la propia pertenencia real– / y el diapasón sin eco?” (Do you understand the insurgent hand / flower of thread and veins / the very real belonging / and the tuning fork without echo) (Poesia Completa 37). The creating of connections between unconnected objects (tuning forks without echoes, insurgent hands, etc.) would be examples of what Lezama describes as advancing “through infinite analogies” or “creating infinite connections.”
9 My aim here is not to follow closely a particular philosophical line of interpretation of representation; rather, I want to bring out Lezama’s unique quasi-philosophical approach to the relation between language, ideas, and bodies/subjects. However, throughout this reading I am thinking of representation capaciously as anything that falls under the category of Vorstellung or as a realm of language and thought other than intuition.
10 In addition to Levinson, two central works on Lezama’s theories of the image are Gustavo Pellón’s José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision: A Study of Paradiso and Other Prose Works and Emilio Bejel’s José Lezama Lima, Poet of the Image. My work here is in dialogue with all three, while placing the emphasis of interpretation on the relation between image and metaphor.
11 We can see a similar relation posited in the colorful first passage analyzed above. In it Lezama describes the relation between image and metaphor, using one of his classic paradoxical images and complications of Aristotelian notions of species and genus, as “a horse that can both fly and swim.” Images in Lezama are impossible possibilities and, as such, cannot be encountered through causal logic; rather, while they pre-exist writing and language, dwelling in the realm of possibility, they are discovered only by chance, through the infinite proliferation of metaphor.
12 It might be helpful to specify one possible basis for some of Lezama’s terminology here, in the hopes that it might clarify some of the horizons of Lezama’s multifaceted articulations of the relation between the image and subject or body. In a famous line of Paradiso, the novel’s central character, Cemi (who is often read as a stand-in for Lezama himself), declares himself in favor of a “heterodox Thomism.” The 1930s–50s witnessed a mini-revolution in the interpretation of Aquinas, where, under the influence of Etienne Gilson’s re-reading, two conceptual issues came to the fore: Aquinas as a theorist of the split between existence/essence and the Platonic themes of participation in Aquinas’s work. Without getting too deep into the philosophical debates, we can quickly pull out enough particulars from this new Thomism to help us ground the conceptual matrix of Lezama’s thinking around the image and the body.
Gilson, in Being and Some Philosophers, argued that philosophy (particularly modern philosophy) has foundered on the inability to think the two senses of the word being, as a noun or as existence (i.e., these particular beings) and as a verb or essence (i.e., what all beings have in common). Gilson proposes that Aquinas is the philosopher who has best solved this puzzle as he is neither like the modern existentialists who focus only on beings or existence nor like the Greeks, particularly Plato, who focus only on being or essence. Aquinas bridges this gap between essence and existence by seeing beings as participating in being or existence as participating or partaking of essence (see Wippel for a summary of work on participation in Aquinas). We can see how Lezama’s poetic system as sketched above can be read as Thomist in the way it figures the relation between the image and bodies as one of participation or recoding. This is Lezama’s intervention into the Thomism of his day and to which he adds his own specific conceptual twists and turns which we are tracing in this essay.
13 Both William Rowlandson, in Reading Lezama’s Paradiso, and Emilio Bejel, in Gay Cuban Nation, have examined the relationship between Paradiso, sexuality, and Lezama’s poetic system. My reading draws in particular on Bejel’s reading, while placing greater emphasis on the potential significance of hypertely and its link to a new species.
14 One of the novel’s key sex scenes and examples of the functioning of the image of androgyny is told by Foción. He is interested in a young woman, Daisy, who rebuffs him. A doorman, witnessing Foción’s rejection, helpfully mentions that the way to the young women is through her brother, George. Foción seduces the young man and in a scene in which Foción and the young man are “reaching the summit of Mont Blanc, the orgasm [ … ] attaining that point in which the ants converge on one another and then are consumed in the foam,” Daisy appears leaping onto the bed and “completely surrounded her brother, their two bodies joined by George’s phallic tension” (346). Foción relates how they continued to meet, in pairs but “with expected frequency we returned to the ternary, to unite, sun, earth and moon” (347). Several pages later the novel’s fathers will begin their attempt to restore control as Fronesis’s father confronts Foción in a café and tries to force him to stop seeing his son. Androgyny here is the image, towards which the sexual practices of the novel’s characters move.