Nothing to Declare: J. Hillis Miller and Zero's Paradox

Abstract

J. Hillis Miller's fascination with zero stems in part from the irresolvable contradiction it presents to anyone who attempts to analyze it: it is both a number and outside all numbers. Miller's criticism is marked by a drive for clarity and precision—one of his favourite questions is “What can this mean?”—yet he is repeatedly drawn to literary texts and philosophical problems, such as the problem of zero, which allow of no simple or single analysis. His understanding of the “literary” is bound up with this inherent resistance to exhaustive explanation, no more so than when he addresses the question of the ethics of reading. Trying to make sense of Paul de Man's discussion of ethicity in writing, he elaborates a paradox that has a similar structure to the paradox of zero: the reader both is and is not free in the exercise of ethical responsibility. The generative possibilities of zero are particularly evident in a writer not discussed by Miller, Samuel Beckett.

Notes

When Miller says that Derrida's “intuition (though that is not quite the right word) of a certain unsayable or something unavailable to cognition is … the motivation of all his work” (Miller 2001, p. 76), he could be speaking of his own work. The passage continues, quoting an unidentified text of Derrida's: “‘The inaccessible incites from its place of hiding’. It incites speech or writing in an interminable, never successful, never satisfactory, never complete, attempt to ‘get it right’, or ‘do it right’.”

Although de Man is the writer in whose work a sense of implacable laws is strongest, Derrida has commented, in the course of an interview, on the importance of the term in his own thinking: “All of a sudden, the word implacable comes to me. That cannot be appeased, assuaged, quenched [désaltérer] (and with good reason), but, for the same reason (following the drift of the derivation) that one can in no sense abandon or give up [plaquer]. The trace of the implacable: that is what I am following and what leads me by the nose to write” (Derrida 1995, pp. 47–48).

I develop this account of the responsible response to literary works in Attridge 2004.

For an excellent discussion of the problems posed by Beckett for the critic and the philosopher, see Critchley 1997, pp. 141–180.