One

Abstract

“One” argues that the structural problem of the relation of zero to one has always been a presiding concern in Miller's work. It shows what is at stake in the problematic figure of the zero through a philosophical consideration of foundations for criticism, and relates this thinking to the issue of the foundational grounds for the historical event. Using the literary examples of Joyce and of Wyss, and the philosophy of Pascal, de Man and Frege, the paper argues that the real drive in Miller is towards a specific form of democratic criticism.

Notes

For Miller, the beginning in question is the title of J. L. Austin's How To Do Things With Words; and in this present piece, I shall also return to a consideration of both Miller's title and mine, “Zero” (appearing in this volume as “The History of 0”) and “One”, but will do so partly via Austin.

See Edward Said (1975). Where Said, there, is concerned with what we might think of as “authority”, Miller, I shall contend, is and has been concerned with “autonomy” and with the possibility of the “event”. For an explanation of the precise sense of the “event”, see Alain Badiou (1988); but cf. also the work of Jean‐François Lyotard, especially Peregrinations (1988) where he makes explicit the issues surrounding the event that shape and dominate almost all of his work, including the most celebrated work around the “postmodern”. For a fuller explanation, see Docherty (2000).

This clearly influenced one of Said's protégés, Lennard J. Davis, whose Factual Fictions (1983) is more or less explicitly indebted to Beginnings; and in many ways, the work of Davis here constitutes one of the most useful practical deployments of Said's initial thinking.

For a fuller philosophical explanation of this condition of the event, see Badiou (1988). In my own deployment of it here, I am more heavily influenced, however, by the characterization of the event such as it is found in Lyotard or Deleuze, where it refers to an “irruption” in the chain of happenstance in such a way as to require the modification not only of our understanding of that happenstance but also of our modes of living within it: in short, this event is nothing other than the historical as such. See Docherty (1996a).

Miller has frequently been at pains to stress this sheer difficulty of reading. A typical remark would be that in his The Ethics of Reading, where he writes that “Reading itself is extraordinarily hard work. It does not occur all that often. Clearheaded reflection on what really happens in an act of reading is even more difficult and rare. It is an event traces of which are found here and there in written form” (1987, pp. 3–4). For a fuller examination of these and related issues, see Docherty (2003).

At the root of this lies Hegel. In the Introduction to Aesthetics, Hegel stresses that such an invention is tied firmly to freedom; and I shall return to the politics of this later in the present piece. In passing here, suffice to say that if it is possible for the present writer to make a “One”, it is so because of the freedom granted by the fact of Miller's “Zero”.

On this in relation to the novel and character, see Docherty (1983). For an exploration of its consequences, see much of the work of Slavoj ˘Zi˘zek, where it is frequently pointed out that our much‐vaunted “multiculturalism” that would relativize points of view actually works by relativizing only those points of view that are not our own: “my” point of view remains a form of absolute knowing while all others are seen as merely relative and situated. This critique of multiculturalism and the pluralisms that allegedly go with it can be traced back to this problem in Descartes.

Kant might have thought of this as the difference between the synthetic and the analytic a priori. For a fuller explanation, see the introduction to Docherty (1993).

See Miller (1982); but see also the preface to Miller (1992, pp. ix–xi), where Miller, in acknowledging that the theme of Fiction and Repetition spawns many other texts, is explicit about how things “get out of hand” as he writes, especially as he writes his “beginnings” or introductions; or, how, in my own terms, his writing becomes an event.

I argue this in detail (though not in terms of the One and the Zero, of course) in Docherty (1996b, pp. 119–126).

It is worth noting, in passing, that the title of the lectures that shaped Austin's How To Do Things was “Words and Deeds” and also that there is a vital interest in this issue within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition, very different from that of Austin, as testified to by, for example, Hans‐Georg Gadamer's “Logos and Ergon in Plato's Lysis”, reprinted in Gadamer (1980, pp. 1–20).

Frege (1980). Frege's work, it should be recalled, was reviewed extremely negatively by Georg Cantor, though it is also usually agreed that Cantor had paid the work scant attention prior to reviewing it. Yet more significantly for the purposes of the argument later in the present paper, Frege was somewhat of a political reactionary, a monarchist who despised the very idea of socialism and even of democracy.

It is worth asking, of course, whether, in this version, Stephen is allowing the “whatness” of Aquinas to shine through, given his purely instrumental and egocentric use of the philosophy.

We should compare here the formulation of Jameson (1981, p. 102), that “History is what hurts”. Jameson arrives at this formulation by means of a reading of two other profoundly theological thinkers, Spinoza and Althusser; and, interestingly, History, in being “what hurts” is defined as that which “refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis, which its ‘ruses’ turn into grisly and ironic reversals of their overt intention” and it does this, leading intentions or beginnings awry, because it is “an ‘absent cause’”, rather like the zero as I formulate it through Pascal here.

The other philosopher shaping this thinking is Badiou. See, especially, the chapter “Philosophie et amour” in Badiou (1992); but cf. also Badiou (1998b) and (1998a). For Badiou, there would be an interesting parallel between Miller's “Zero” and the figure of Christ as mediated by St Paul: see Badiou (1997). I write of this in slightly more detail in Docherty (1996a), in the chapter on “Love, Truth, Alterity” (pp. 197–207).