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Derrida and the fiction of forceClare Connors aa The Queen's College, Oxford, OX1 4AW, UK E-mail:clare.connors@queens.oxford.ac.uk

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ANGELAKIjournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 12 number 2 august 2007

I could as soon present force to you, as I couldconfine between these pages two mightymonarchies, or cram into this journal the vasty

fields of France.

Thats a figure of speech called adynaton

which means forceless, or impossible. It presents

an inadequacy, inability or lack of power through

the comparison with a hyperbolic impossibility.

But theres nothing modest or thwarted about

this figure: glorying in what it claims not to be

able to do, it pushes or leaps out of it, perhaps

even a little cavalier in its intolerance of the

merely feasible. Heroic in its ardour, lusty in its

appetites, it gleefully courts bathos and relishes

the risks it takes. It doubles up forcelessness to

make imaginary puissance which is to say both

that it makes of force a fiction, and that its force

is that of fiction, conjuring its own efficacy,

making itself up as it goes along. It is the fiction

of force in this double sense that fascinates

Derrida for whom it has, I think, a serio-comic,

philosophico-literary potential.1 And it is on

Derridas fascination with the fiction of force

that this article will focus.

Very early in his work, in the essay Force and

Signification, Derrida seems to champion

something called force, in the face of

structuralist critical practices that want to

reduce and petrify it, or simply to ignore it

altogether. Force, Derrida says, is precisely what

structuralism leaves out, and what it has to leave

out. Structuralist critics think of meaning as

form, as something diagrammatically produced

or presented. They can therefore view texts only

as static structures or, at most, guaranteed

movements, rather than as dynamic and puissant

adventures. There can be no surprises within the

structuralist account, because perceiving a text

structurally means bringing everything into view

simultaneously. Time is flattened into space and

force stupefied in form. A preformationist or

teleological aesthetic ensues in which a texts

conclusion is given at the start, merely at a

different place within the two- or three-dimen-

sional model: Preformationism, teleologism,

reduction of force, value and duration these

are as one with geometrism, creating structure.2

Force, then, would seem to name precisely what

is irreducible to structure but is always in danger

of being obscured or diminished by it. Because of

this, though, it would also name something that

cannot simply be made to appear in the present

moment of a philosophical reflection.

The creating of structure, and hence the

reduction of force, is not, then, an activity

clare connors

DERRIDA AND THEFICTIONOF FORCE

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN1469-2899 online/07/020009^7 2007 Taylor & Francis and the Editors of AngelakiDOI:10.1080/09697250701754889

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confined to twentieth-century structuralists.

From a local discussion of a moment within

literary-critical history, we move out to one

which hyperbolically curves around all philoso-

phizing about force. Derrida argues that just as

separation from the work is the condition of

structuralist criticism, so too its what consti-

tutes consciousness, as a reflection of the

accomplished, the constituted, the constructed

(WD 5). This leads us to conclude that

presenting force as such is impossible. Force

cant appear in the present. Indeed, it cant

appear at all since, inasmuch as it appeared, it

would have a form, however fleetingly or

ephemerally, and therefore not be a force (any

more). A conscious reflection on force will

always have frozen or phenomenalized it; trying

to make force appear, to present it, to place

it, is thus a doomed endeavour.

Of course, this bind or one like it besets

too the metaphysical thinking of time.

Philosophys problem with time is that the only

bit of time that exists is the now. Nothing else

of time is. And yet by grasping this now we do

not grasp time at all, since time is made up of the

no-longer and the not-yet. The homology between

a certain problem with force and a well-known

and ancient paradox about time is perhaps no

accident. Derrida writes that:

Force and potentiality, dynamics, have always

been thought, in the name of time [sous le

nom de temps], as an incomplete gramme

within the horizon of an eschatology or

a teleology that refers, according to the

circle, to an archeology.3

The circle is the most perfect figure of forces

fulfilment indeed of fulfilment tout court.

Its how Aristotle thinks of the relationship

between force and time in his Physics.

There he suggests that we should imagine time

as a completed movement, thought on the basis

of its extremities (ta eskahata) and not of its

parts.4 Thus the now is understood as the

actualization of a virtuality, dynamis converted to

energeia. We are to see time as a virtual

movement, which arrives now, fulfilling its

own potential as it comes to being. It is doubly

circular, this thinking of force in the name of

time. Force itself is thought in terms of

a coming into its own. Theres ostensibly

replete self-fulfilment in the present becoming

what it was always destined to be, a circuit

of self-affirmation. The present is like itself

like the best self it always was potentially.

But then, and furthermore, there is a sort of

tautology in solving the impossibility of time

through the invocation of force. Force functions

as an alias. It is arrested in the name of time, but

in fact force is therefore simply understood to be

what time was until it came to be. Theres

something awry here and in fact the circle can

only ever be a crooked figure, existing on a bias

and not quite joined up, like a badly drawn O

that misses itself. For, even if a perfectly

circular figure of forces fulfilment can account

for the past, by envisaging all those nows

which have happened as merely potential staging

posts on the way to here and now (a problematic

enough idea), then it is still difficult to see how

the relationship to the future can be theorized,

unless the identity of the now is once more

breached and thought of as at once actualization

(of past potential) and potential (for future

actualization).

In all of this (meta-)physical thinking there

is a double movement, in which force is both

taken too seriously as a truth, something

understood to have been (present) and yet

not seriously enough the impossibility of its

being now simply subsumed or sublated into

an understanding of the now, which is thus

pre-comprehended both as present and as

possible. Impossibility, that is to say, is taken

simply as a dialectical spur towards the

revelation of the possible. Whereas we might

always ask what gives the impossible to be

read.

That, in effect, is what Derrida does at the end

of his essay Ousia and Gramme. He asks how

the demand that we think force, in all its strange

impossibility, can be read or given us to think at

all. How can it be inscribed in metaphysical

texts such as Aristotles Physics, when

anything glossable, inferable or summarizable

we can abstract from these texts is nothing but

a thematization of presence, or is present as

thematization? But on the other hand its got to

fiction of forcefiction of force

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be there somewhere (as the police in Poes

The Purloined Letter might have said):

Absent, either it would give us nothing to

think or it still would be a negative mode of

presence. Therefore the sign of this excess

must be absolutely excessive as concerns all

possible presence-absence, all possible produc-

tion or disappearance of beings in general, and

yet, in some manner it must still signify, in a

manner unthinkable by metaphysics as such.

In order to exceed metaphysics it is necessary

that a trace be inscribed within the text of

metaphysics, a trace that continues to signal

not in the direction of another presence,

or another form of presence, but in the

direction of an entirely other text. Such a

trace cannot be thought more metaphysico.

No philosopheme is prepared to master it.

And it (is) that which must elude mastery.

Only presence is mastered. (MP 65)

Like the excessive, crooked curve or swerve of a

hyperbole, like the impossible hyperbole of

adynaton, Derrida suggests, force signals,

describes a shape, figures. Its legible only as

the trace of its own erasure, the mark of its

own impossibility (an impossibility it could

never own). But writing is thereby essential to it,

the only way of cultivating it in its obliteration.

And reading, too, there would have to be reading,

though reading could no longer be imagined as

the activation or actualization of a virtuality.

The fiction of force calls, then, for a different

experience of writing and of reading: I think we

could call it literary. When, in an interview with

Derek Attridge, Derrida considers the relation

between literature and philosophy it is

precisely in terms of force:

Even if they always do so unequally and

differently, poetry and literature have as a

common feature that they suspend the

thetic naivety of the transcendent reading.

This also accounts for the philosophical force

of these experiences, a force of provocation to

think phenomenality, meaning, object, even

being as such, a force which is at least

potential, a philosophical dynamis which

can, however, be developed only in response,

in the experience of reading, because it is not

hidden in the text like a substance.5

The force of literature and poetry is not some-

thing that they harbour, but is a question of

forces relation to perhaps we should not say

enaction in a reading. In this account,

the reader does not realize the potential that

is in the text, putting it to work or recuperating

its promise. Nor is the reader simply affected by

a texts force, her response an effect to its cause.

What is experienced in reading literature is not

energeia but dynamis itself. And this is so

because of literatures power of suspense or

suspension. There is no literature, Derrida

goes on to say, without a suspended relation to

meaning and reference (Attridge 48).6 One

should not take this too quickly as adverting to

the suspension of the referent, which would, after

all, be the condition of referentiality as such.

Language could not refer, without the suspense of

a hiatus between itself and that to which it

pointed. Derrida, on the other hand, is claiming

for literature the power to suspend reference

itself, or at least to be in a suspenseful and

suspended relation vis-a`-vis referentiality.

We might map the notion of reference onto the

classical model of dynamis. That is to say that we

could understand the signifier as a potential to be

fulfilled or actualized in the signified, or the sign

in toto as potential to be fulfilled in the referent.

Now, Derrida suggests, there is something about

literature (and we have to understand his use

of this word as neologistic, reinventing literature

in its own name, doubling up its forces even as it

displaces them) which suspends this whole

dynamic.

With what, then, are we left? We have a notion

of literature which cannot, for a start, be thought

according to classical models of force. In that

case, we must ask whether the word force or

dynamis pertains at all. If the force literature

has is that of suspending reference tout court,

then this force is precisely not the force of a drive

to fulfilment or completion, but rather the

reverse, a(n) (a)dynamis which thwarts this or

staves it off. We can here quote Derrida, though

he is referring to something different: literature

has a virtuality that, in exceeding the philoso-

phical determination of the possibility of the

possible (dynamis, power, Moglichkeit), exceeds

connorsconnors

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by the same token the classical opposition of the

possible and the impossible.7

What makes of this virtuality something

peculiarly literary is precisely its recalcitrance

to philosophical determination. It can only exist

as a sort of fiction, and the fiction precisely of its

virtuality, of its force. There is a fiction of force

here again in a double-genitive sense. The

relationship between literature and philosophy, or

the literary and the philosophical, is vexed by the

force of fiction then. For a start, literatures force

might be described as the force of philosophy

par excellence. In particular, literatures

suspension of reference, which enables us to

explore phenomenality, meaning, object, even

being as such, makes it appear as the

most faithful doppelganger of Husserlian

phenomenology or Cartesian epistemology, for

example, in their suspension of the

natural attitude, or everyday knowledge.

Literature on this account would have force

because it did better what philosophy aspired to

do but because of its ultimate investment in

presence could not. Literature mimes, in the

false appearance of a present, philosophical force,

its treachery towards and disregard for truth truer

to dynamis than philosophy can ever know.

The idea of philosophys aspiration to know

dynamis takes us to the notion of philosophical

dynamis, understood according to the objective

rather than the subjective genitive. We have

already suggested how the ether of conceptuality

stifles dynamis a priori. We might now say,

therefore, that dynamis can only appear to

philosophy as a fiction, whose truth-value might

of course be assured by converting it to energeia,

but at the expense of losing what was uniquely

engaging about it in the first place. Fictional force

is thus doubly necessary to philosophy, and in

a way prior to any conceptual distinction it might

strive to make between the true and the untrue,

between itself and literature. Philosophy can,

of course, still undertake such taxonomic work.

Even literatures recalcitrance to philosophical

determination, for example, can have an

exemplary quality recuperable by philosophy, in

so far as it marks it as literary, in a way

which provides the best answer to the prosaic

philosophical question: what is literature?

All that suggests, perhaps, an equable push

and pull between the philosophical and the

literary, each the best guardian of the others

truth, but that would be to miss what is most

troubling about this dynamic. We have moved

away from a Platonic philosophical model of

literature, which would be true to philosophys

truth through a further mediation or re-presenta-

tion of it. But theres a risk of drifting too

drowsily into a sort of melancholy pathos of the

literary here: a description of the fiction of force

as a negative capability; a pure forcelessness in its

absence of striving, in its dwelling in uncertain-

ties, and in its capacity to be philosophized as

such uncertainty. Whereas, we would have to say

that if fictions force is philosophys force, then

any retroactive attempt by philosophy to master

or marshal it will already be scuppered by the

attempt which gets it going.

We can see this in Keatss epistolary

philosophizing: his attempt to theorize great

literature as a kind of principled maintenance of

possibility, a refusal to rationalize or make

factual. When, struck by his great idea en route

from the Christmas pantomime, Keats gives

the name Negative Capability to the

quality which goes to form a Man of

Achievement especially in Literature & which

Shakespeare possessed so enormously, he is a

shade too quick, I think, to make negative

capability the possession of a subject, of a great

Man.8 But the beautiful hyperbole of the phrase

itself cuts both ways, suggesting the negation of

capability itself, or at least opening up room for

a capability more capacious than any Man, and

possessing as much as possessed. Cherishing the

writerly, rather than the purely philosophical,

element in Keatss letter itself allows us

to figure literatures miming of philosophys

force what we are calling the fiction of

force itself as a kind of pantomime:

a hyperbolic miming, an exorbitant language

of shapes and figures.

All this I read in Shakespeare too, or at least

a small fragment of Shakespeares writing, a

prologue to a play of forces:

O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention,

fiction of forcefiction of force

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A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,

And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

Then should the warlike Harry, like himself,

Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels,

Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword

and fire

Crouch for employment. But pardon,

gentles all,

The flat unraised spirits that hath dared

On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth

So great an object. Can this cockpit hold

The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

Within this wooden O the very casques

That did affright the air at Agincourt?

O pardon, since a crooked figure may

Attest in little place a million,

And let us, ciphers to this great accompt,

On your imaginary forces work.

Suppose within the girdle of these walls

Are now confined two mighty monarchies,

Whose high upreared and abutting fronts

The perilous narrow ocean parts asunder.

Piece out our imperfections with

your thoughts.

Into a thousand parts divide one man

And make imaginary puissance.

Think, when we talk of horses, that you

see them

Printing their proud hoofs ithreceiving earth.

For tis your thoughts that now must deck

our kings,

Carry them here and there, jumping

oer times,

Turning thaccomplishment of many years

Into an hour-glass: for the which supply,

Admit me Chorus to this history,

Who prologue-like your humble patience pray,

Gently to hear, kindly to judge our play.9

How to represent force? Thats the choruss

ostensible problem. How to stage force when it

exceeds all staging, yet amounts to nothing except

a principle of amplification or augmentation,

an imaginary number, a nought. Its only

a fictional problem, though. Or rather, the chorus

does not have to reach irritably after force.

It does not conjure with it but conjures it.

Its deliberately orotund this chorus, with the

round-mouthed O of the invocation dreaming

of rendering o-ceanic the wooden O of what

might or might not be the Globe.10 And since the

O is being thematized, that plea O pardon

can potentially turn around on itself. Thus it

might also mean pardon the O, pardon the

invocation, and even pardon the topos of modesty

itself. According to this reading, the gesture

of abasement would be abyssal, as well as

excessive, in its very humility. It needs to

invoke pardon, since its a crooked not a perfect

figure. Its ostensibly perfect circularity is

breached, it never closes in on itself, so that it

comes in on a bias rather than simply remaining

within a formal purity and completion. And if it

does turn round on itself, asking forgiveness for

its own invocation too, theres a sort of crisis of

legitimacy here, although that can always be

allowed for and made to work again in

the rhetorical force even of this profession of

powerlessness, in a spiralling upping of the ante.

Another crooked locution which turns around

on itself without quite joining up, negative

capability in act, is that phrase imaginary

forces forces of imagination, all the footnotes

hurry to tell us, but might they not also be

imaginary?11 Which is to say, might they after all

not exist or exist only as virtual? This would

surely be the risk of any text, in its intentional

relationship to its future readings and

performances: a text can never guarantee its

own future conditions of reception. If the

historicist critic desires to speak with the dead,

the text, on the other hand, always addresses the

not-yet-actual, chorically conjuring them, though

they might never come to exist.

Chorus vulnerable but chancing it,

inventing it as it goes along is almost a

character, of course. And so is character almost

a character for character, too, plays off this

hesitation between the virtual and the actual to

wit: the warlike Harry like himself.

Like himself, that phrase of praise suggesting

one is being true to the most noble essence of

latent potential in ones character also suggests,

on the other hand, a latent flaw in the idea of

character as virtual, since one never knows how

its going to come out, as it plays itself out across

time. In that sense being like oneself suggests

something bogus about identity, rather than the

reverse. Or rather, identity itself would entail

both authenticity and inauthenticity, and both

virtuality and actuality, in that to have even

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a minimal sameness, it must always repeat itself,

en-act itself through time.

Of course, these questions about the authen-

ticity or inauthenticity of Harrys identity are also

played out in the critical and performance history

of the play.12 Is it a play about heroism, and good

kingship, a portrait of the king in all his vim,

vigour and virility, in all his pith and puissance

a mirror of all Christian kings?

Or is it the depiction of a Machiavellian

cypher, who can use the rhetoric of hot and

forcing violation with no greater or lesser

sincerity than that of Crispins day comradeship

whose rhetoric is a power employed

simply in the tyrannical augmentation of his

ruthless force?13

Or, refusing (or not) an either/or logic, might

we not argue that the play stages a contradiction

or clash of models of force; that it offers

a synthesis which acknowledges the difficulties

and imperfections of la condition humaine; or

that it manifests a productively recalcitrant

undecidability, whose privileged figure might be

not a prince but a duck/rabbit?14

All of these things have been argued, cogently,

forcefully and more or less patiently.

But the enterprise is hopeless if one muses on

the fact that literary criticism has already been

determined, knowingly or not, voluntarily or

not, as the philosophy of literature. As such

[. . .] criticism will have neither the means nor,

more particularly, the motive for renouncing

eurhythmics, geometry, the privilege given to

vision. (WD 28)

So lets eschew criticism, and stay here, now,

with our preface, and remark a further, silent,

doubling up of forces. The casques that did

affright the air at Agincourt are metonyms for

forces in the sense of armed forces (as when

Henry later in the play talks of his grandfathers

forces (1.2.147)) and this sense, it is implied,

has been understood by the time we reach

the line on your imaginary forces work.

The metre here demands the emphasis of this

implication on your imaginary forces work:

your virtual as opposed to your actual forces.

Its always, we might suggest, on the crooked-

ness of an emphasis or stress that force will be

felt, in the workings of rhythm, the tensions of

tone. But this conjuration magic as it might be

this tugging of the reader right into the

middle of things, already there in the rhythm, is

work too, a forceful labour, working on and

working over.

And this is what Derrida emphasizes, to come

almost full-circle, at the end of Force and

Signification: writing cannot be thoroughly

Dionysiac. And again: It will be necessary to

descend, to work, to bend, in order to engrave

(WD 29). Theres a sober call to endeavour here:

to toil, travail and graft. But, in hunkering

down, bowing over the page, the

writer herself embodies

the crooked, immodest,

hyperbolic figure of force, her

work an oeuvre an opening and

an overture.

notes1 Jacques Derrida, By Force of Mourning, trans.Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, in TheWork of Mourning, eds. Pascale-Anne Brault andMichael Naas (Chicago and London: U of ChicagoP, 2001) 142^64 (164).

2 Jacques Derrida,Writing and Difference, trans.Alan Bass (London: Routledge, 1978) 21.HenceforthWD.

3 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans.Alan Bass (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1982)60. Henceforth MP. Cf. Marges de la philosophie(Paris: Minuit,1972) 69.

4 Aristotle, Physics, trans. P.H. Wicksteed andF.M.Cornford, Books I^IV (London: Harvard UP,1957) 393.

5 Derek Attridge, This Strange InstitutionCalled Literature: An Interview with JacquesDerrida, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and RachelBowlby, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge(London: Routledge,1992) 33^75 (45^46).

6 Peggy Kamuf discusses this passage in her essayFiction and the Experience of the Other inTheQuestion of Literature: The Place of the Literary inContemporary Theory, ed. Elizabeth BeaumontBissell (Manchester and New York: ManchesterUP, 2002) 156^73. She argues that the suspension

fiction of forcefiction of force

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of the referent is also, irreducibly, a suspensionfrom or dependence on the referent (163).

7 Jacques Derrida,Without Alibi, ed. and trans.Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002) 135.

8 Letters of John Keats, ed. Robert Gittings(Oxford: Oxford UP,1987) 43.

9 WilliamShakespeare,KingHenryV, ed.T.W.Craik(London: Routledge,1995) Prologue1^34.

10 For a discussion of this possibility, see CraiksIntroduction to King HenryV 3^5.

11 The OED shows the word vacillating betweensubjective and objective senses in the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries, the instances it givesfrom More and Hobbes being difficult to placeunequivocally in either camp.

12 For anexcellent accountof the critical andpro-duction history of the play, see Emma Smithsintroduction to her edition of Henry V(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002) 1^81.

13 See E.M.W. Tillyard, Shakespeares History Plays(London: Chatto,1944); and Jan Kott, ShakespeareOur Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski(London: Methuen,1967).

14 See Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and theProblem of Meaning (Chicago and London: U ofChicago P,1981).

Clare Connors

The Queens College,

Oxford OX1 4AW

UK

E-mail: clare.connors@queens.oxford.ac.uk

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