Countersignature1

So I do not begin. But even before beginning, I shall read some linesfrom a great book that was not yet published when I was writingGlas, a book I love and admire, in spite of some questions that leave akind of wound in me, in a disconcerted, divided ‘me’, proving Genetboth wrong and right, today more than ever. The book is Prisoner ofLove. Countersigning without countersigning what is said there — forexample about an occasionally undecidable frontier between a ‘Jewishquestion’ and an ‘Israeli question’. We shall doubtless be speakingagain later about the Jewish question, precisely between Hegel andGenet. Facing each other in Glas, Hegel and Genet perhaps saysomething analogous about the Jewish people and its history. Prisonerof Love can be read, especially in its final pages, as the last signature ofJean Genet that countersigns all the others. I shall begin and end there.

So, before beginning to begin, I would like to use as an epigraphsome lines from Prisoner of Love concerning what I would call the‘betrayal of truth’. Leaving this expression ‘betrayal of truth’ all itschances and risks of ambiguity. Its polysemy [plurivocite] is obviouslyterrifying, oscillating endlessly between at least three distinct possi-bilities. I say terrifying deliberately. I say it deliberately, for terror,terrorism (and not only ‘terror in letters’ as Paulhan would say) areon the programme of a semantic instability oscillating between anobjective genitive and a subjective genitive.

Three possibilities therefore: first, the ‘betrayal of truth’ meansthat if truth is betrayed, this can only be by a lie, falsification, non-veracity, infidelity, perjury, simulacrum and a countersignature that,instead of authenticating a first signature, sets about imitating it, thatis counterfeiting it. It would already be a betrayal. A betrayal of truthand of an authentic countersignature.

Second possibility: truth, without itself being betrayed, is whatbetrays, lies, deceives, perjures, is unfaithful. Truth is then a lie. Awell-known Nietzschean theme. But to whom, to what, how cantruth or veracity lie? How can a truth not only be betrayed, but betray?

Third possibility: truth is betrayed, it can only be betrayed inthe sense that one says in French that truth is ‘revealed’, that isunmasked, denounced or demonstrated by someone or something,in a moment of unveiling that is also a moment of denunciation.For example, in writing, a fiction or a simulacrum that does not

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pretend to be ‘true’ — and because it does not pretend to truth andauthenticity — betrays the truth, suddenly lets it appear, manifests orsignifies it as if despite itself. In this sense too, truth can be betrayed,but this time in a logic of the symptom or of fiction and through aneffect of countersigning. The countersignature can thus betray itselfin betraying what it countersigns.

Supposing that a countersignature betrays the truth of an earliersignature, in what sense does it do this? If the betrayal of truth in itsthree meanings counterfeits and contravenes by means of a counter-feiting that can, in certain singular cases, ‘make the truth’ (Veritatemfacere, as Augustine says), it can be said that the countersignature betraysthe signature by counterfeiting it or, on the contrary, respects it bynot imitating it, by not counterfeiting it, for example by signing verydifferently. The question becomes: what does it mean to countersignand counterfeit? And especially, what does it mean to betray?

In French, a symptom is said to ‘betray’ a truth. This expressiondoes not operate in every language. I am posing these questions herevery quickly, but they shall remain unresolved, watching over thedevelopment of this introduction. I could of course have begun by along lecture on Genet as a poet and partisan of betrayal, and evokedhis ethics as an ethics of betrayal. As you know, there are a thousandelements that support this view. In Glas, I had moreover tried to thinkthe possibility, thus the necessity, of this betrayal at the very heartof the signature and to posit the authentication of the signature inthe countersignature as the first betrayal of the signature, beyond alldisciplines, literary criticisms, exegesis, etc. Before the quotation fromPrisoner of Love that I announced, allow me therefore to read a passagefrom Glas on the question of the betrayal lodged at the heart of thesignature [au sein du seing]. Not by chance, this passage is opposite areading by Hegel of Judaism and circumcision. Here first is a fragmentin the ‘Hegel’ column:

What comes and deposits itself in the Abrahamic cut? Two remarks on this subject:(1) Errance, the war with nature and nations, the ruse, the control, the violence

do not dissolve the Jewish family. On the contrary, the Jewish family constitutesitself in isolation, the jealous closure of its identity, the fierceness of its endogamy.Abraham will have cut his bonds with his family and father only in order tobecome the stronger father of a more determinate family. What remains of/fromthe cut becomes stronger.

In order to remark the isolation, to reinforce the identification, to call itself afamily (a family less natural than the preceding but still too natural by the veryfact that it opposes nature): circumcision.

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Circumcision is a determining cut. It permits cutting but, at the same timeand in the same stroke [du meme coup], remaining attached to the cut. The Jewarranges himself so that the cut part [le coupe] remains attached to the cut. Jewisherrance limited by adherence and the countercut. The Jew is cutting only inorder to treat thus, to contract the cut with itself. [One could play endlessly attransposing these motifs into certain passages of Prisoner of Love.] ‘He [Abraham]steadily persisted in cutting himself off from others, and he made this conspicuousby a physical property imposed on himself and his posterity.’ (. . .)

(2) Opposing himself to hostile, infinitely aggressive nature and humankind,Abraham behaves as a master. Through his infinite opposition, he reaches thatthought of the infinite the Greek lacks. In this sense the spirit of Judaism elaboratesa negativity or an abstraction indispensable to the production of Christianity. (. . .)

He could not even love his son [that is what Hegel says]. Just as he imposeson himself the sign (or simulacrum) of castration, he is constrained to cut himselfoff from his son, or at least to engage the operation that remained, it too, asimulacrum of sacrifice.2

In the ‘Genet’ column opposite this passage on Hegel, here is thepassage of the notice given to all experts at reading:

Departed [second movement of the crowd on the theoretical agora] are thosewho thought the flower signified, symbolized, metaphorized, metonymized, thatone was devising repertories of signifiers and anthic figures, classifying flowersof rhetoric, combining them, ordering them, binding them up in a sheaf ora bouquet around the phallic arch (arcus, arca, K�� K�, which trap you fall intodoesn’t matter).

Departed then are, save certain exceptions, duly so considered, the arche-ologists, philosophers, hermeneuts, semioticians, semanticians, psychoanalysts,rhetoricians, poeticians, even perhaps all those readers who still believe, inliterature or anything else.

Those still in a hurry to recognize are patient for a moment: provided that itbe anagrams, anamorphoses, somewhat more complicated, deferred and divertedsemantic insinuations capitalized in the depths of a crypt, cleverly dissimulated inthe play of letters and forms. Genet would then rejoin this powerful, occultedtradition that was long preparing its coup, its haywire start from sleep, whilehiding its work from itself, anagrammatizing proper names, anamorphosingsignatures and all that follows. Genet, by one of those movements in (n)ana,would have, knowing it or not — I have my own views about this, but thatdoesn’t matter — silently, laboriously, minutely, obsessionally, compulsively, andwith the moves of a thief in the night, set his signatures in (the) place of all themissing objects. In the morning, expecting to recognize familiar things, you findhis name all over the place, in big letters, small letters, as a whole or in morselsdeformed or recomposed. He is no longer there, but you live in his mausoleum

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or his latrines. [The book opened on an allusion to latrines.] You thought youwere deciphering, tracking down, pursuing, you are included. He has affectedeverything with his signature. He has affected his signature. He has affected itwith everything. He himself is affected by it (he will even be decked out, lateron, with a circumflex). He has tried, he himself, properly to write what happensbetween the affect and the seing.

How does one give the seing to an affect? How does one do it without asimulacrum to attract the attention of all? By postiches, fetishes, pastiches? (. . .)Visibly dreaming about becoming, so as to resound, his own proper (glas), toattend his own interment after giving birth to himself or performing his owndecollation, his own ungluing, he would have been watchful to block up allthat he writes in the forms of a tomb. Of a tomb that comes down to hisname, whose stony mass no longer even overflows the letters, yellow as gold orbetrayal, like the genet. Letters without a pedestal, a contract with writing as afuneral rite.

[And here is the betrayal:] More precisely, the contract does not have the burial(place) as its object. Burial is not an event to come, foreseen by a contractualact. Burial is the signature of the contract. So much so that in determinedplaces — those that seem to interest us here — this so-called literature of betrayalwould itself betray itself; concealing, stealing the signature would have its stooliein the text. (40-3)

And here now, twelve years later, is Prisoner of Love that I followin its letter. What really should be done, to hear properly the tenlines I am about to read, and what I cannot do here, is to reconstitutethe sequence without sequence, the organized breaks in construction,the discontinuities, the series of anacoluthons, the play of narrativeellipsis that both connects and isolates pensive maxims, aphorismsresembling asides like apostrophes apostrophizing another addresseein the audience, in a word the art of writing. These sequences,these aphorisms are separated by gaps that seem to interrupt allrelation, all significant complicity, all internal and logical complicitybetween them, as if there were a leap and an arbitrary break inconstruction, even though precisely the secret link is thus revealedand can retrospectively be interpreted, revealed, betrayed.

The sequence preceding the passage I am going to read concerns ascene of photography, the would-be capture of the truth by faithfulreproduction. Photographers, then, from all countries, want to captureimages of the fedayeen and ask them — Genet underlines it — to‘pose’: ‘The French made one fedayee pose twelve times for a singlepicture.’3 Sometimes, photographers, notably Italian, want to showthat they know how to take low-angle shots, what Genet calls ‘l’art

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de la contre-plongee’ [literally, the art of counter-diving]. I shall readtwo or three lines before and after the passage most important to mein an attempt, in my turn, not to overly betray this masterpiece ofthe staging of writing, that is of betrayal speaking about betrayal, of atraitor who ‘makes truth’ by betraying it and by saying the betrayal.Since it involves photographers, reporting or information, it is also ameditation on the testimony and politics of the media:

A photographer is seldom photographed, a fedayee often, but if he has to posehe’ll die of boredom before he dies of fatigue. Some artists think they see a haloof solitary grandeur around a man in a photograph, but it’s only the wearinessand depression caused by the antics of the photographer. One Swiss made thehandsomest of the fedayeen stand on an upturned tub so that he could take himsilhouetted against the sunset.

Here there is a gap, then these lines that should be read in adifferent tone:

What is still called order, but is really physical and spiritual exhaustion, comesinto existence of its own accord when what etymologically should be calledmediocrity is in the ascendant.

Again, a space, and then this aphorism isolated between two gaps:‘Betrayal is made up of both curiosity and fascination [vertige].’ Obvi-ously, Genet is still talking about photography. The sentence is againfollowed by a space and then there is a long paragraph talking aboutwriting and lies in general:

But what if it were true that writing is a lie? What if it merely enabled us toconceal what was, testimony being only a trompe-l’œil? Without actually sayingthe opposite of what was, writing presents only its visible, acceptable and, so tospeak, silent face, because it is incapable of really showing the other one.

Here Genet is speaking about his book, about what he is doing as awitness, a would-be witness to truth:

The various scenes in which Hamza’s mother appears are in a way flat. Theyooze love and friendship and pity, but how can one simultaneously express all thecontradictory emanations issuing from the witnesses? The same is true for everypage in this book where there is only one voice. And like all the other voices myown is faked [truquee, retain this word, we shall come back to it], and while thereader may guess as much, he can never know what tricks it employs. [In otherwords, you may know it’s faked, you may know that I betray, but as you do notknow how, it is as though you knew nothing.]

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The only fairly true causes of my writing this book were the nuts I picked fromthe hedges at Ajloun. But this sentence tries to hide the book, as each sentencetries to hide the one before, leaving on the page nothing but error: something ofwhat often happened but what I could never subtly enough describe — thoughit’s subtly enough I cease to understand it. Hicham had never been shown anyconsideration by anyone, old or young [I stress this because I shall be coming backconstantly to this question of age for Genet]. No one took any notice of him,not because he was nothing, but because he did nothing. But one day his kneehurt him and he put himself down for medical inspection. . . (32-3; translationslightly modified)

The text returns to standard narrative mode, but you can see thework of writing. The question of the knee will moreover come back.Everything follows on. Thus on the next page we cross an enormousnarrative mass to find the word truque, faked, again:

The show they’d put on for me demonstrated their disillusion, for to play onlywith gestures when your hands ought to be holding kings and queens and knaves,all the symbols of power, makes you feel a fraud [donne le sentiment de truquer], andbrings you dangerously close to schizophrenia. Playing cards without cards everynight is a kind of dry masturbation. (34)

A brief notation concerning age that you might scarcely have noticedif I hadn’t laboured the point — ‘Hicham had never been shown anyconsideration by anyone, old or young’ — initiates at a distance thereflections that, two pages later, after a long narrative digression andthe description of the card game where the word truque reappears,pursue a meditation on the truth of testimony, but this time from thepoint of view of age. The age of the signatory and witness, as if therewas an age of truth as much as a truth of age. A little later, just aftera gap:

At this point I must warn the reader that my memory is accurate as far as facts anddates and events are concerned, but that the conversations here are reconstructed.Less than a century ago it was still quite normal to ‘describe’ conversations, and Iadmit I’ve followed that method. The dialogue you’ll read in this book is in factreconstituted, I hope faithfully. But it can never be as complex as real exchanges,since it’s only the work of a more or less talented restorer, like Viollet-le-Duc.But you mustn’t think I don’t respect the fedayeen. I’ll have done my best toreproduce the timbre and expression of their voices, and their words. Mahjouband I really did have that conversation; it’s just as authentic as the game of cardswithout cards, where the game existed only through the accurate mimicry ofhand and finger and joint.

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And here is the question of age:

Is it because of my age or through lack of skill that when I describe somethingthat happened in the past I see myself not as I am but as I was? And that I seemyself — examine myself, rather — from outside, like a stranger; in the same wayas one sees those who die at a certain age as always being that age, or the age theywere when the event you remember them for happened? And is it a privilege ofmy present age or the misfortune of my whole life that I always see myself frombehind, when in fact I’ve always had my back to the wall?

I seem to understand now certain acts and events that surprised me when theyhappened there on the banks of the Jordan, opposite Israel — acts and eventsunrelated to anything, inaccessible islets I couldn’t fit together then but whichnow form a clear and coherent archipelago. I first went to Damascus when I waseighteen years old. (34-5)

And if you want to follow the thread of age, of the truth of the age ofpeoples or the age of the signatory, I refer you one hundred and tenpages on to another passage that I detach from a narration and wherethe question of age recurs:

A few days later came what might be called the children’s revolt. Some Palestinianboys and girls of about sixteen, together with a few young Jordanians of bothsexes, all laughing and smiling and shouting, ‘Yahya-l-malik!’ (Long live the king!)went up to a line of Jordanian tanks in the streets of Amman (. . .)

Those children make me think of a fox devouring a chicken. The fox’s muzzleis covered with blood. It looks up and bares its perfect teeth — white, shiny andsharp. You expect it to beam like a baby at any moment. An ancient peoplerestored to youth by rebellion and to rebellion by youth can seem very sinister.I remember like an owl. Memories come back in ‘bursts of images’. Writing thisbook, I see my own image far, far away, dwarf size, and more and more difficultto recognize with age. This isn’t a complaint. I’m just trying to convey the ideaof age and of the form poetry takes when one is old: I grow smaller and smallerin my own eyes and see the horizon speeding towards me, the line into which Ishall merge, behind which I shall vanish, from which I shall never return. (133-4)

And about two hundred pages still further on, the question of agecomes back yet again:

As I’m not an archivist or a historian or anything like it, I’ll only have spoken ofmy life in order to tell the story, a story, of the Palestinians.

The strangeness of my position, then, appears to me now either in three-quarter or half-profile or from the back. Never from the front, with my age andstature apparent. I calculate my dimensions from the scope of my movements and

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those of the fedayeen — reconstruct my size and position in the group from thepattern of a cigarette moved downwards, a lighter upward. (237)

These two themes, age and the betrayal of truth, are linked togetherin the interview with Antoine Bourseiller:

I hazard an explanation. Writing is the last recourse one has when one hasbetrayed. There is still something else I would like to say to you. I knew veryearly on, from the age of about fourteen, fifteen, that I could only be a vagabondor a thief, a bad thief of course, but at any rate a thief. My only success in thesocial world was, could have been of that kind, if you like: a bus conductor orperhaps a butcher’s assistant or something like that. And as that sort of successhorrified me, I think that I prepared myself, while very young, for having suchemotions as could only lead me towards writing. If writing means experiencingemotions or feelings that are so strong that all your life will be shaped by them,if they are so strong that only their description, their evocation or their analysiscan really account for them to you, then, yes, it is in Mettray and at fifteen that Ibegan to write.

Writing is what remains when you are driven from the domain of thegiven word.4

First definition: writing is ‘the last recourse one has when onehas betrayed’. And last definition: it is ‘what remains when you aredriven from the domain of the given word’. Thus betrayal, perjury,writing D betrayal, perjury, etc. What remains.

Genet also uses the word ‘betrayal’ in the interview with MadeleineGobeil when he wishes to define what pederasty, an outlawed ex-perience, represents in terms of revolutionary force, that is, as aradical ‘questioning of social values’ (ED, 24). As a ‘pedagogy’ too.Pederasty as pedagogy. That is, as the art of guiding children; as aninitiation — when pedagogical pederasty is linked to writing — intothe revolutionary adventure or, as we shall have occasion to examinefurther, into the poetic adventure — insofar as Genet, as you know,never separates the two. The interview weaves all these words andmotifs together: ‘pederasty’, ‘pedagogy’, ‘betrayal’, ‘writing’, ‘outlaw’.To the question: ‘Have you ever been interested in women?’ Genetanswers: ‘Yes, four women interested me: the Holy Virgin, Joan ofArc, Marie-Antoinette and Madame Curie.’ To the question: ‘Whatmeaning does pederasty have at this moment in your life?’ he answers:

I would like to talk to you about its pedagogical side. Of course I made love withall the boys I took care of. But I took care not only to make love. I sought torepeat with them the adventure I lived whose symbol is bastardy, betrayal, the

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refusal of society and finally writing, that is the return to society, but by othermeans. Is that an attitude unique to me? Pederasty, because it places the pederastoutside the law, obliges him to question social values, and if he decides to takecare of a young boy, he will not take care of him in a flat way. He will makehim aware of the incoherencies, both of mind and heart, that are obligatory in anormal society. At the moment, I’m taking care of a young racer, Jackie Maglia.

The thematics of betrayal insists yet again in a passage of Prisoner ofLove where, again at the heart of a narrative sequence, it is linked tothe motif of translation — here the translation of the Koran — and ofvenal treachery:

What inspired leap launched the naked child, warmed by the breath of an ox,nailed with nails of brass, hoisted up finally, because he had been betrayed, intouniversal glory? Isn’t a traitor one who goes over to the enemy? That amongother things. The Venerable Peter, abbot of Cluny, in order to study the Koranbetter, decided to have it ‘translated’. (69)

So: betrayal, tradition, translation. Further down:

Once we see in the need to ‘translate’ the obvious need to ‘betray’, we shall seethe temptation to betray as something desirable, comparable perhaps to eroticexaltation. Anyone who hasn’t experienced the ecstasy of betrayal knows nothingabout ecstasy at all.

The traitor is not external but inside everyone. (69-70)

And a little further on: ‘Treason was everywhere. Every kid thatlooked at me wanted to sell his father or mother; fathers wantedto sell their five-year-old daughters’ (70). And finally, in the sameperspective, a quotation from That Strange Word. . . (I rememberthe time when Genet was writing this text, I saw a lot of Genetaround then):

To betray is perhaps traditional, but treason is no repose. I had to make a greateffort to betray my friends: in the end, there was a reward.

So, for the great parade before the burial of the corpse, if the funeral mimewants to make the dead man live and die again, he will have to discover, and dareto say them, those dialectophage words that in front of the audience will devourthe life and death of the dead man.5

Now, after this long epigraph, I can finally begin to begin. ‘Counter-sign’ is a word I love, a word I have much loved. There is a sort oflove story — the story of a love that holds me ‘prisoner’ — between

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that word and me. I shall perhaps say more about it in the informalinterview arranged for later with Albert Dichy and Patrice Bougon.Through them, I also thank my Cerisy friends and hosts for welcomingme, yet again, unwearyingly, where I, for my part, am afraid of beingwearisome. So I will tell this love story between this word, this lexicalfamily (with its homonyms: seing, contreseing, countersignature) andme with lots of suspension points and ellipses, through the story of afriendship, as Albert Dichy recalled earlier. A friendship for someonewho shares or shared with me the sometimes unavowable, sometimescruel, often painful, often treacherous, taste for the words of theFrench language. That doesn’t mean of France, or even of Frenchliterature. In his interview with Madeleine Gobeil, Genet says (howmuch I understand him, right down to his denial!): ‘I never looked tobe part of French literature’ (ED, 19). Even if it is false, even if Genetultimately failed to not be part of French literature, this sentence, thetone of this sentence, this derisory ‘be part’, is a stroke of genius in aburst of laughter. It rallies, in its feigned vulgarity, so much scorn andirony towards a French literature that would rally together, protectitself in a gregarious, national way, like a private club or a social class ora family or a clan, a clique, a band of which one is or is not ‘part’, fromwhich one is or is not excluded, of which one is or is not a recognizedmember, with a passport, title, identity card to legitimate it. . . I wouldlike to inscribe what I will say under the sign of ‘testimony’, but youhave heard what relation exists between ‘testimony’ and ‘betrayal’, orbetween ‘testify’ and ‘sign’. With this hypothesis, this hypothec of abetrayal of truth that threatens testimony in advance, whether it’s amatter of the words of language, of writing, or of friendship, I wouldlike to bear witness and counterwitness to a certain friendship betweenGenet and me, a friendship, however enigmatic it was and stays for me,that remains a chance for which I am grateful and that I will considera blessing until the end. A friendship without apparent contrarieties[contrarietes], upset [contrariee] by nothing, to my knowledge. Nothingeven political — and I say this with an awareness of contradiction andbetrayal inspired by the previously unpublished 1970 text that AlbertDichy placed as an epigraph to L’Ennemi declare and that, had I knownof it, I should have quoted and commented on in my book Politics ofFriendship. In it, speaking of himself in the third person, Genet says:

J.G. is looking for [cherche], or seeking [recherche], or wants to discover, withoutever discovering, a delicious enemy (. . .) And irreconcilable with me at any rate.No friends. Especially no friends, a declared but untorn enemy. (ED, 9)

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‘No friends’: does that not echo with the entire tradition from Aristotleto Montaigne: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ Genet: ‘No friends.Especially no friends (. . .) I seek a declared enemy’.

Having read this text, I am obviously not going to draw authorityfrom my friendship with Genet. The friend’s signature, countersig-nature can doubtless always be converted into the enemy’s signatureor, in the other sense, countersignature. Nietzsche, for example, hasmany texts that I quote in Politics of Friendship, where, like Genet,he complains of the disappearance of the enemy: there is a needfor enemies. Enemies are lacking, not friends. . . In the story of thisfriendship, it is thus right to give the word the inverted commasit needs.

I am coming back to the word ‘countersignature’ (or ‘counterseing’)that, according to the Robert dictionary, designates: ‘a second signaturedestined to authenticate the main signature or to mark a commitmentin common’. This preliminary definition, that we will have tocomplicate endlessly, tells us two or three essential things. Firstly itindicates an apparent order: there is a first signature that comes beforeanother. In principle, the signature precedes the countersignature. Thesignature is thus first, it preexists the countersignature. And apparentlynothing can make this antecedence disappear. The definition of thecountersignature says clearly that it is ‘a second signature destinedto authenticate the main signature’. The countersignature is thus asecond signature which can ‘second’ the first one to mark an agreementbut which, in all cases, remains secondary. The one countersigningintervenes after the one signing. In the word’s technical history, thecountersignature was initially a signature authorizing someone to signin another’s place. For example, a secretary has the right to sign aletter in place of the minister who merely adds a little sign so that itcan be posted without a stamp. In this case, the countersignatory isauthorized to authorize, to take the place of the author or authorityin order to sign in his place or to confirm or authenticate a proto-signature, an archi-signature that has already taken place. I wouldlike to say a word about the word ‘counter’ in countersignature, thatcan be an adverb and/or a preposition. The word ‘contre’, counteror against, can equally and at the same time mark both opposition,contrariety, contradiction and proximity, near-contact. One can be‘against’ the person one opposes (one’s ‘declared enemy’, for example),and ‘against’ the person next to us, the one who is ‘right against’ us,whom we touch or with whom we are in contact. The word‘contre’ possesses these two inseparable meanings of proximity and

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vis-a-vis, on the one hand, and opposition, on the other. Clearlyin countersignature, the word has the meaning of proximity andvis-a-vis. It is what is facing us, beside us. We shall of course comeback to this double meaning of the word ‘contre’ that summarizes whatis at stake in this discussion. When it’s a question of the indelible,irreducible anteriority of the signature, the proto-signature, in relationto the countersignature, authorized or authorizing, things immediatelyget complicated and are contaminated precisely by the betrayal oftruth. In effect, a performative value determines every signature andevery countersignature. The signature, like the countersignature, is aperformative. When one signs, one doesn’t merely write one’s name,one affirms: ‘Yes, I am signing, and naturally I promise to confirm thisyes.’ Or again: ‘Yes, it’s I who’s signing and naturally I can confirmthat it’s I who signs by countersigning if necessary.’ This performativevalue is already affected by an immediate iterability: as soon as I sign,I promise that I can do so again, that I can confirm that it was Iwho signed, etc. There is thus a repetition that, from the moment ofthe proto-signature, from the first act of the first signature, prohibitsdistinguishing a before and an after. The repetition of ‘Yes, I sign’,‘Yes, yes, I sign’ is at work from the moment of the proto-signature.Rather than repetition, I would say repeatability or what I calliterability, the possibility or need to repeat. Iterability, to determineit, is already haunting the proto-signature, or archi-signature, whichis therefore from the outset its own countersignature. Consequentlyall future countersignatures come to countersign what was originallya countersignature, an archi-countersignature.

To stay at this level of preliminary generality, before getting to thetext, to more than one text, I want to stress further the ambiguityof the ‘counter’ that means less opposition, even dialectical contra-diction — you can see this is Hegel country — than the proximity ofthe vis-a-vis. So here countersigning, like the word contract in Latin,adverb or preposition, before or beside the opposition of contrariety, isin the situation of something facing, something that is across, or near,or next, right against, and consequently designates the accompanimentor inseparability of two terms vis-a-vis each other, two terms that canmeet [se rencontrer] or find themselves in a chance encounter [rencontre]with each other, as well as reflect each other face to face, double eachother, mirror the other’s image, as a signature and a countersignatureare meant to do to confirm each other. They should be close to eachother, in relation to each other.

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This abyssal double meaning of ‘counter’, of the contract, reflectingproximity or opposition, is of course at work in Glas, not only inthe Genet column, but between the two columns, the Genet oneand the Hegel one — and their spyholes [judas]. So many traitors.I would even say that this oscillating law rules their relations, forsometimes the two columns contradict each other, in an oppositionwhose dialectical formalization — itself evidently contested, queried inGlas — is revealed to us by Hegel, sometimes they do not contradicteach other but rather wink at each other — the word clin, wink, likethe word class, obviously echoing all the cl of the text. The Hegelcolumn and the Genet column are not only opposed, they sometimesconfirm and countersign each other, strangely, surprisingly, with slightdisplacements and occasionally even authenticate or betray themselvesby betraying the other’s truth. That would be the case, for example,not in Glas, but in what I could think of Genet’s politics generallyconcerning a ‘Jewish question’, where the discourse of a certain Hegelis a strangely close rival to that of a certain Genet.

If I might add a very quick note before returning to the text, Iwould say that, even beyond my love for the word and the abyssalthing called ‘countersignature’, it happens that for a long time Ihave ‘cultivated’ or ‘allowed to be cultivated’ in numerous texts theformidable ambiguity of this ‘contre’, as determined in the Frenchidiom. The word ‘contretemps’, for example, designating exhibitionless than time-lag, anachrony; the word ‘contrepartie’ [counterpart],that marks not so much opposition as exchange, the equivalenceof a gift and countergift; the word ‘contre-exemple’ [counterexample]that, like an exception, challenges the generality of the law. All thesewords recur in many of my texts, often to designate the relationbetween me and me, as close as possible to the authenticity, theauthentication of my own signature. Here and there, I have hadoccasion to say that I am at the wrong time [a contretemps], or thatI am my own counterexample or counterpart. Allow me to read apassage from Circumfession, emphasizing the words ‘encounter’ and‘counterexample’:

not only I do not know anyone [but] I have not encountered anyone, I havehad in the history of humanity no idea of anyone, wait, wait, anyone who hasbeen happier than I, and luckier, euphoric, this is a priori true, isn’t it?, drunkwith uninterrupted enjoyment, haec omnia uidemus et bona sunt ualde, quoniam tuea uides in nobis, but that if, beyond any comparison, I have remained, me thecounterexample of myself, as constantly sad, deprived, destitute, disappointed,impatient, jealous, desperate, negative and neurotic. . .6

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And, after the counterexample, the counterpart:

too late, you are less, you, less than yourself, you have spent your life invitingcalling promising, hoping sighing dreaming, convoking invoking provoking,constituting engendering producing, naming assigning demanding, prescribingcommanding sacrificing, what, the witness, you my counterpart, only so that hewill attest this secret truth i.e. severed from truth i.e. that you will never havehad any witness, ergo es, in this very place, you alone whose life will have beenso short, the voyage [I underline the word ‘voyage’] short, scarcely organized, byyou with no lighthouse and no book, you the floating toy at high tide and underthe moon, you the crossing between these two phantoms of witnesses who willnever come down to the same. (314-5)

If I underlined the word ‘voyage’ in this text, it is not only tobeckon towards what will surely one day be an approach towardsGenet’s work based on travel, that is, Genet’s displacement, hisgeopolitical wanderings, his whole text being a series of border-crossings, expulsions, exiles, but also to authorize myself (pleaseforgive me again) to quote another passage, a letter in a book that isa book on the journey called La Contre-allee, where I try to explainto my correspondent my fascination for the lexicon of ‘counter’, thevery term ‘counterpath’ being only one example.

Before doing so, I would like to recall that at the opening of oneof his articles, ‘Lenin’s Mistresses’, to which I’ll come back, Genetdescribes himself in the third person as a ‘traveller’:

When a traveller returns from abroad, for example from Morocco, he reads inL’Humanite an article on Cohn-Bendit — both article and man inset — design-ating him as a fanatic and a German; he leafs through Minute [I can testify to this:Genet read many newspapers at that time, he was all the time reading papers, allpapers]: Cohn-Bendit is a dirty Jew; he buys L’Aurore and Le Figaro: Cohn-Benditis an agitator. (ED, 29)

In La Contre-allee [sidepath, literally counterpath], the contre refersless to opposition than to the proximity of a path parallel to the mainalley. All in all, it is a little like the countersignature that itself is a sortof counterpath. The passage in question figures in a letter:

Spacing itself, the spatiality of spacing, distancing, that is not derived, and whatis a priori original, absolutely prior, is ‘encounter’, the en-counter with space asland [contree]. [Countersignature in German is called Gegend or kontrasignieren. Weshould stop in order to think travel on the edge of the encounter.] Everything isn’tequivalent to an encounter but can you imagine a crossing without encounter?

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We should cultivate the virtualities of this lexicon between ‘with’ (Apud, hoc,cum) and ‘contra’. In Latin, then, against Heidegger (I always travel, as I told you,and I think against Heidegger’s order, I am on the side of his counterexample orhis counterpart. Small-minded prosecutors will claim that it amounts to the samething; perhaps, it’s not sure.) I would have liked to write to you on postcards fullof memories of hundreds of words derived from contra, from contree to contrada.To (Siena) — and to Country. Contradictions, contretemps and contracts wouldbe there to show us the way, directing [renvoyant] us to what in the idea ofcountering [encontre] and encountering [rencontre] sets us travelling again, and thussends us away [renvoie]. Besides, I wonder if I don’t travel so much because(I’ve the feeling that from France) I’ve always been, as from school, sent down[renvoye]. Does one travel because one is expelled [renvoye] or to run towards anencounter? To run counter? What is meant by ‘counter’? and counterhospitality?and counterpath? Is it really a question of travel? (There would thus be travel-questions, like travel-kits, travel-bags, travel-agents.) But there, if one travels witha view to encountering, there is no encounter, nothing happens. The encounteris the undecided rush, without any preparation, at the mercy of the other whodecides the irruption of what one has especially not seen coming — and that canhappen, oh yes, ‘at home’.7

I would now like, in one last detour, to come closer to Genet andGlas in relation to the countersignature. A detour via Cerisy. For ithappens that, on three occasions, in 1975 for Ponge, in 1982 for Jean-Francois Lyotard, and now today, I have had the chance, the honourand the privilege of speaking there about writers or thinkers whowere friends. Admired and respected friends. All three are now dead.8

But two of them were present at the conference devoted to them.I have always been very afraid of speaking about the living — aboutGenet in particular, as I said in Glas: ‘he will vomit all that. . .’ Thesethree friends are all dead but only Genet was not present in Cerisy.Those who knew him can easily imagine that, rightly or wronglybut at no price would he have come here to attend or participate ina conference about his work. There too, I would have a lot to sayconcerning his irony in relation to such things, particularly in relationto academics — I myself was often his first target. . . If I refer to the twoother conferences during which I dared to speak about two friendsin their presence, it is because at the first of them, devoted to Pongein 1975 — Ponge who said to me one day, perhaps a year or twobefore his death: ‘You see, I am someone who doesn’t die’ — abouta year after the publication of Glas, I had proposed a sort of generallogic of the countersignature that came from Glas — without comingfrom it — but especially from Ponge who had elaborated a theory, a

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discourse on the countersignature. This is the strange junction thatI would like to reconstitute here between my reading of Ponge in1975 following closely on the writing of Glas, and the fact that itis in Ponge, not in Genet, that the word countersignature echoesinsistently and literally. I had given a lecture here entitled Signeponge,in the presence of Francis Ponge, where the words seing, signature,countersignature were to be found, as were other words coming fromGlas such as colossus, colossos, colossal. . . I talked of Ponge’s ‘colossalcorpus’ that, while being countersigned by the Ponge that I wascountersigning in my turn, came both from Glas, as I showed earlier,and literally from Ponge. For, curiously, whereas Genet very rarelyuses the word, Ponge, as you will hear, brilliantly and emphaticallyuses the noun ‘countersignature’ and the verb ‘countersign’. Withoutclaiming to have done an inventory, I only found a single occurrenceof the word in Genet, moreover a banal, slightly furtive one, in thearticle published in May 68, ‘Lenin’s Mistresses’, that I just evoked.There Genet says, still in relation to Cohn-Bendit to whom thearticle is generally devoted: ‘Some students are asked if they couldcountersign — not all but nearly all — what Cohn-Bendit said andwrote; many answer ‘yes’, but they also say that he brought to orgasmthe minister’s daughter who brought him to orgasm, that he got paidfor his photos, and his interviews with the big papers’ (ED, 29).

A severe indictment, then, of those, including the students, whoare interested not in Lenin but in his mistresses, not in Cohn-Benditbut in the fact ‘that he brought to orgasm the minister’s daughter’,etc. I quote this article of Genet’s for several reasons. Firstly becauseof the use of the word ‘countersign’, of course, that is followedby a ‘yes’ — the ‘yes’ being what always doubles a countersignature,being itself a countersignature, since the signature is constituted by a‘yes’ — as in a wedding. ‘Yes’ is always an answer, and it is structurallythe answer to the other’s question, an answer subjected to the other’slaw like the countersignature itself. ‘Yes, yes’: the doubling of the yesis irreducible. That begins by a ‘yes yes’ as the promise to say ‘yes’ tothe ‘yes’, that is to confirm, authenticate, countersign the first ‘yes’that already carries iterability, thus the countersignature, within it. Inother words, the first ‘yes’ inscribes the second ‘yes’ in itself. Thesecond ‘yes’ is there before the first, so to say. Or, at any rate, as earlyas the first.

The second reason I quote this article is that its date (May 68) marksa very powerful moment for Genet, the beginning of his engagedperiod, ‘the departure point of his political itinerary’ as Albert Dichy

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rightly emphasizes in his edition of L’Ennemi declare (335). I do notknow if the common expression ‘political engagement’ is appropriatefor Genet, for his engagement was always that of a writer and poetwho acted only at the margin, by speaking and writing, and who neverseparated the idea of revolution from that of poetic event, whetherfor May 68, the Black Panthers or the Palestinians.

The third reason, finally, is that I was seeing Genet a lot at that time,in May 68, and I remember him not only writing and publishing thisarticle with jubilation but walking with me until dawn in the streetsof Paris empty of cars. . . It was the greatest general strike the countryhad ever known, the greatest and the longest: there was no petrol, nocars for eight days. And Genet, in these carless streets, confronted withthe country suddenly immobilized, paralyzed, stunned by the lack ofpetrol, would say: ‘Ah, how beautiful it is! Ah, how beautiful it is!Ah, how elegant it is!’ And I found the same tone in two passages thatI want to quote because they display this affect of May 68 that was socritical for Genet and the combination of the poetic and the politicalallied with the motif of the traveller:

Cohn-Bendit is the origin, poetic or calculated, of a movement that’s in theprocess of destroying, at any rate of shaking, the bourgeois apparatus and, thanksto him, the traveller crossing Paris [Genet is still speaking of himself as a ‘traveller’]knows the sweetness and elegance of a city in revolt. The cars, that are its fat,have disappeared. Paris is finally becoming a thin city, she’s losing a few kilos,and for the first time in his life, the traveller has a sort of joy, returning to France,and rejoices in seeing faces he knew dull, at last joyous and beautiful. If the daysof May had only produced that, already. . . (31)

May 68 is evoked again two years later in the text entitled ‘It SeemsTo Me Indecent To Speak About Me’:

Then there were five or six years of silence, then I suddenly wrote five plays,and the last, The Screens, was a long meditation on the Algerian War. And thathappened twelve years ago. In May 68, I saw that, without seeking to be, I wascompletely on the side of the protesters, students and workers. In May, France,that I so hated, existed no longer, but, for a month, only a world suddenly freedof nationalism, a smiling world, extremely elegant if you will. And May waswrecked by the strong comeback of the Gaullists and the reactionaries. I canthus say that in June 68, my sadness and my anger made me understand thathenceforward I would not pause until the spirit of May in Paris was found again,in France or elsewhere. If I indicate a very subjective mood of my person, it is sothat you will better understand the extent to which I feel close now to the BlackPanthers. (. . .)

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Since I have known them, I keep discovering in them [the Black Panthers]this liberty and this exchange of fraternal tenderness. (ED, 41-2)

I point out and highlight the word ‘fraternal’ because, having sharp-ened and mobilized my permanent suspicion of the theme of fraternitysome years ago in Politics of Friendship, in relation to something likea male homosexuality, the dominant model of friendship, my firstimpulse on reading the word ‘fraternal’ was one of disapproval or,more discreetly, of worried disappointment. Why does Genet say‘fraternal’? As if Genet, as a homosexual who explicitly declared thelink between his sexual desire and his political choices, was actuallyconfirming my most suspicious fears about the fraternalistic schemaI tried to deconstruct in Politics of Friendship as a Christian schema,a phallocentric, macho schema and a genealogistic, familial schema.One’s neighbour, in the Christian sense, being first of all a brother.But not at all. On the contrary, in his May 1970 ‘Letter To AmericanIntellectuals’, Genet displays his distrust of the word ‘brother’, byfollowing moreover one of the themes (it was not the only one butone of the important threads) that I followed in Politics of Friendship todeconstruct a certain tradition of the canonical model of the friend,that is, the brother in the Christian, even evangelical or Pauline senseof the term, man as brother, neighbour as brother, and what is valid forthe Christian is naturally also valid for the Muslim. Here is what Genetwrites, once again linking the poetic to the revolutionary political:

I believe the time has come to use an equally new vocabulary and a syntax capableof making everyone mindful of the double poetical and revolutionary combat[in other words, to make revolution, language, vocabulary and grammar must bechanged. There is no true revolution without such change] of the movementsamong Whites that are comparable to the Black Panthers.

For my part, for example, I refuse to use the word ‘brother’ that is steeped inevangelical sentimentalism and when I speak about the Blacks, I want to speak ofarmed comrades fighting the same enemy. (ED, 46)

The word ‘brother’ is thus denounced as Christian, evangelical.In relation to this Christian, evangelical tradition that Genet knew

only too well, an ineradicable culture, I would like to specify andhighlight two features that lead in the direction of the countersignatureof and in Glas towards which I am moving. Firstly, the question ofChristianity in all its aspects — and they are numerous — is clearlyat the centre of Glas, posed between Genet and Hegel who areoften close. Playing with proximities and contradictions, one can

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say that they are close in what opposes them and in what connectsthem. In Glas, all the scenes from the Gospels are replayed in bothcolumns, on both sides, squinting at each other because of theanalogies, staggered or opposing each other in every way. It’s oneof the reasons I emphasize the Christian aspect. Secondly, one ofthe oppositions between these two great Christians Hegel and Genetremains that between a Protestant, Hegel, who believes that Reformhas a privileged link with philosophy and absolute knowledge (manyof Hegel’s texts show that Protestantism makes thought possible,makes Hegelian thought possible), and on the other hand a perverse,very Catholic choirboy, very marked, as Genet himself says, byfaith, by a faith initially carried by the Catholic catechism thenfreed from the catechism and religion but especially from a theologythat Genet holds to be more Protestant than Catholic. In otherwords, he liberates himself more easily from Protestantism than fromCatholicism. In the interview with Madeleine Gobeil, he distinguisheshis faith from theology and religion, in a way from all Churches, butin passing he makes a barbed remark about theologians as Protestanttheologians:

M.G.: Do you believe in God?J.G.: I believe that I believe in him. I don’t have much faith in the mythologies ofthe catechism. But why must I account for my lifetime by affirming what seemsto me most precious? Nothing compels me. Nothing visible compels me. So whydo I feel so forcefully that I must do it? Previously, the question was immediatelyresolved by the act of writing. My childhood revolt, my revolt when I wasfourteen wasn’t a revolt against faith, it was a revolt against my social situation,my condition of humiliation. It didn’t impinge on my deep faith, but in what?M.G.: And do you believe in eternal life?J.G.: That’s the question of a dying Protestant theologian. [Then he comes backto the Catholic Church:] Are you a Vatican II Council Father? It’s a meaninglessquestion. (27)

This pirouette is typical of Genet. In Glas, it is sometimes from a Jewishor Arabo-islamic outside that the Christianity, Protestant or Catholic,of Hegel or Genet, is both observed and deconstructed. I leave thataside for the moment. But if for me, I’ll explain it better later, the act ofreading a work is or should be or has always been an affirmation ratherthan an act, it’s because this affirmation is not only active or actual butinvolves a submission, a subjection, a certain passive receptivity in thedecision as decision of the other. It is thus not merely performative.If the experience of reading a work as such has always been for

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me an affirmation of countersignature, that is, of authentication andrepetition without imitation, without counterfeiting, a doubling ofthe ‘yes’ in the irreplaceable idiom of each ‘yes’, as at a weddingwhere each ‘yes’ says ‘yes’ to the other, doubling it without repeatingit — and I could insist on this paradigm of the wedding, the conjugalcouple, spousal conjugality, countersignature joining two conjoinedaffirmations, absolutely identical and different, similar and radicallyother — well, the formulation of what may here resemble a theoryor working out of a theory of reading-rewriting is linked for meto the tangling together of the different Cerisy conferences and mytexts on Genet, then Ponge and Genet. I recall that Glas was writtenbut already contained references to Ponge whom I was reading alot at the time, to whom also a great friendship bound me, after Imet him in the same years as Genet through our common friend,Paule Thevenin. Glas was thus already written, with all its workon homonyms, Genet’s proper name, the very fac simile of Genet’ssignature, his falling signature, his relentless pursuit [acharnement] ofsignatures, seings, the mother’s signature and countersignatures, drivenfiercely [acharne] indeed by the lure of the signature (this is the verysense of ‘acharne’ [fierce, literally meaning ‘with the taste for meat’], ahunting term: the lure for a falcon is given the taste of meat). WhenI wrote Signeponge for Cerisy, in it I elaborated a sort of formalizeddiscourse — that had been a long time in the making, dating back asfar as texts such as ‘Signature, Event, Context’ where at the end ofMargins Of Philosophy I play with the imitation by someone else of myown signature — on the experience of countersignature which is tobe found in Ponge’s text and which finds in that text an extraordinaryand exemplary support.

Not being able or willing to make too long a detour via Ponge andwhat in Signeponge, in an allusion to Glas, I called the ‘colossal structureof the seal [seing]’, I shall quickly read some passages whose rereadingI would like to relate to the event of consenting to marriage, to morethan one marriage. A consent to a provisional conjugality, the double‘yes’ of the spouses, the nuptial experience of the countersignaturehere being a not fortuitous paradigm. In this passage, an anguishedquestion — from me to me — emerges that is the same as the oneechoing in Glas: will Ponge accept this? How will he bear it? Will heapprove what I say about him? In other words, will he countersignmy countersignature? This anguished question involved Ponge’s textas much as Genet’s. It wasn’t merely a matter of knowing if FrancisPonge or Jean Genet would approve or accept what I said, but

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whether their text would reaffirm my own countersignature. So itwas as much about the texts as the then living subjects, my friends.That is why I have emphasized the friendship, the fact that thosefriends were alive and present at the time. Would these friends, Pongeor Lyotard, approve what I wrote about them? Would they even beable to read it? In a way, I will never know, I know that I will neverknow. I learned that Genet said kind things about Glas, Ponge aboutSigneponge, but did they read those books and how did they readthem? I do not know. That could be said of all readings, but at anyrate it’s the question echoing in Glas:

Anyhow, he will vomit all that (ca) for me, he will not read, will not be ableto read.

Do I write for him? What would I like to do to him? do to his ‘work’? Ruin itby erecting it, perhaps. (200)

Here now is the passage from Signeponge concerning the countersig-nature:

The colossal structure of the seal assumes a number of aspects, all of themoriginal. (. . .) Someone now [the passage concerns Ponge’s play on his ownname, Franciscus Pontius Nemausensis Poeta] — but who? — will have signed Pongeand pulled it off.

He now needs the countersignature of the other, of the thing that is not yethis own and is to be found in representation in the whole of phusis. [What I amtrying to show there is that ultimately Ponge wants to countersign or rather signthe thing itself, and wants the thing to countersign what he writes about it.]

Chance obliges. But despite the chance of this extraordinary double name(others can carry it without obligation) the immense autograph would haveremained consigned to the invisible, a sort of murmuring, impotent auto-affection, an infatuation bound to a minor narcissism, had he not, in obedience tothe mute and tyrannical law of the thing, expended so much force to effectivelysponge off the debt: in the world. To acquit himself by washing his hands [likePuntius Pilate, as Ponge himself says], I don’t wish to exaggerate, of a spot, thetask of spot checking, the task of his name, entrusted to him by the thing. Of adebt, contracted with Nature.

All the nominal signatures together would not have produced this colossaltext if the signatory (but who?), in order to sponge off the slate and give a giftwithout counterpart to the thing in its own turn, had not interested the thing inthe signature.

Not only by entering a contract with the thing but a contract where nothingis exchanged, where the obligated (impossible, unapproachable) parties remainirrelevant, released from everything at the very moment when they are most

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bound up with each other, a contract where all is exchanged for nothing, acontract without contract where what is exchanged is not something determinateto be signed at the end, but the signature itself, all by itself. (. . .)

Now there is no text here which, in the final analysis, lacks this effect ofcountersignature by means of which, setting my seal at the bottom of an IOUmade out for an infinite debt in regard to the thing as something other, I interestthe thing that regards me, I interest it in signing itself, by itself, and in becoming,while remaining the thing it is, entirely other, also a consigned part of my text.This is also the condition allowing my text to escape me and fly like a rocketalong the path of its own trajectory, freed up, in my name and in the laws of mylanguage, from my name and my language.9

I now get to Ponge’s own text on the countersignature:

‘This has to do with a kind of countersignature. With the signature of the other,your momentary partner [conjoint, spouse; this is the marriage].

‘To the signature (always the same) of the artist, is eventually added a far morevoluminous, grandiose and impassioned one (and different each time), the oneimposed by the emotion aroused by the encounter with the object, by an emotionwhich was the occasional cause of the work, which one can finally surrender toall risks: it doesn’t regard us any more.’

It is thus from the countersignature that a signature is properly carried off.And it is in the instant when it is thus carried off that there is text. You thereforeno longer know which of the two partners will have signed first. ‘Rightly orwrongly, I don’t know why, I have always thought, ever since childhood, thatthe only worthwhile texts were the ones that could be inscribed in stone; theonly texts I could proudly agree to sign (or countersign), ones that could not besigned at all; texts that would still stand as natural objects in the open air, in thesun, in the rain, in the wind. This is precisely the property of inscriptions (. . .)In sum, I approve of Nature �. . .� I countersign the work of Time (or Weather).’ [Thisquotation from Ponge comes from For a Malherbe.] (130)

There, I now come to the theatre of the countersignature inGlas. My interest in the countersignature in Ponge and in Genet, inwhat it does in their texts, has always been in competition, if I maysay — as a sort of counterpath — with what in essence, spontaneouslyor deliberatively, will have always been of the order of an ethicsor law of my writing when it responds to the other’s, to another’swork. What I here call, with a word that leaves me a little dissatisfiedbecause it is ambiguous, the ethics of my writing, the law it is outof the question I should infringe, is to say ‘yes’ to the work thatcomes before me and that will have been without me, a work thatwas already affirmed and signed with the other’s ‘yes’, so that my

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own ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ to the other’s ‘yes’, a sort of blessing and (ringof) alliance. Not infringing this law thus means doing everything notto betray it, not to betray either the law or the other. But, firstly,the possibility of betrayal is part of respect for the law. It must beconstitutive of respect for the law. To obey, to be faithful, it mustbe possible to betray. Someone who couldn’t betray couldn’t be faithful.Secondly, there is also a terrible law of betrayal, as in the declaredfriend-enemy we spoke of earlier, a terrifying law meaning that themore I betray (by writing differently, signing differently), the less Ibetray; and the less I betray (by repeating the same ‘yes’, by imitating,counterfeiting), the more I betray. This means that perjury — orbetrayal, if you prefer — is lodged like a double band at the very heartof the countersignature. That is the betrayal of truth as truth of betrayal.That is also, however terrifying it may seem, faithfulness. One mustfaithfully recognize it and be as faithful as possible to faithfulness. But inorder for my countersignature, that is, this law that comes before anyliterary theory, before any critical methodology, before any conceptof exegesis or hermeneutics or criticism or commentary, in order forthis absolutely anterior, absolutely original countersignature, subject tothis law, to attest both to knowledge [connaissance], the best and mostcompetent knowledge possible, and to recognition [re-connaissance,also gratitude], for it to be both knowing and recognizing — andthis ‘both’ is a double bind or, to borrow the word organizing all ofGlas, a double band — it must both respect the absolute, absolutelyirreducible, untranslatable idiom of the other, of what Ponge or Genetdid and was only done once, and inscribe in my own ‘yes’, at themoment I recognize the other’s singularity, the work of the other. Inmy ‘yes’, in my own untranslatable, singular idiom, I must countersignthe other’s text without counterfeit, without imitation. It is obviouslyimpossible. One must imitate without imitating. One must recognize,countersign, reproduce the other’s signature without reproducing orimitating it.

What can be done to marry the singularity of a non-counterfeitingcountersignature with the equally irreducible singularity of a proto-signature? A protosignature, however, that, like all language, let mesay it again, is itself already divided, repeats itself in a double ‘yes’.In other words, how can my ‘yes yes’ also attest to the singularityof the other’s ‘yes’, to which I say ‘yes’ without imitating it? Howcan one imitate without imitating, when the other’s first ‘yes’, theprotosignature, already involves a repetition, involves a division andan iterability, and thus in a way imitates itself? That makes for a strange

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arithmetic. How can this be done? Well, I ask the question but I haveno answers. Not only I have no answer, but I hold that there mustnot be an answer in the form of a general norm, a rule or a priorcriterion. By definition, there can be no prior answer or method ortechnique. Each time it is necessary to invent the singular law of whatremains and must remain a unique event, held in this aporia or doublebind. That is in any case what I tried, with no certainty of success,each time I wrote in the alliance, in the sense of the nuptial bondor hymen — with all the paradoxes of the hymen that I evoked withrespect to Mallarme’s Mimique in ‘La Double Seance’ — with Artaud,Celan or Ponge.

In relation now to Genet, I shall limit myself to picking out anumber of places in Glas that, more explicitly and quickly than others,can situate what is at stake in the countersignature. Naturally I shall failto catch, even on a single page, the crisscrossing plays of consonances,displacements or agglutinations, collages, gluings, parallelism, counter-apposition (the plays of the ‘contre’ as proximity and opposition) thatwork, are at work in Glas. What I will do, perhaps unjustifiably,is to outline four centres of focus. This number is clearly arbitrary,given the system of contagion or radiation between the places of thetext, the columns and the spyholes [judas]. I called ‘spyholes’, if yourecall, the inset sequences of text that are precisely like spyholes, likeopenings made or pierced in columns to spy and to lie in wait, tosee without being seen. Judas is also the traitor’s name, the figureof the disciple, the Jew who betrayed Jesus, his master, precisely bykissing him.

Again to go quickly, let me say that the first three centres of focusconfigure in Glas the knell [glas] of the signature or seing — that isalso the tocsin, alarm-bell, and somewhere in Glas, according to itsetymology, I believe, the ‘toc seing’ [fake signature] — as signature.The fourth centre of this elaboration would assign its knell, and thesound glas, to the countersignature. So three focusing on the signatureand one on the countersignature.

The first centre staged, from the opening pages, the counterpointor contradiction between, on one hand, the suppression, repression,withdrawal, exclusion of the signature and the proper name byphilosophical discourse and, on the other, its teaching, especially byHegel whose discourse on the religion of flowers or on the familyI follow throughout the book. The contradiction, then, between adiscourse of philosophical teaching that represses, effaces and excludesthe signature, and Genet’s poetic text that carries his own signature,

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is or becomes or incorporates his signature. Everything in Genet’stext begins with a question of the remainder — the signature beingprecisely a remainder — that, throughout the book and beyond, ordersa problematic of remaining [restance] that I cannot reconstitute here,but that escapes all ontology, all philosophy that sees in the remainder‘what remains’, that is, a substance, persistence or even a state. Theremaining of the remainder is not a substance that subsists or stays, itisn’t a being that resists time. That is the book’s ‘philosophical’ ambi-tion: to think a remaining or a surviving that doesn’t fall into the philo-sophical category of ontology, substance, being, existence, essence, etc.

To give some reference points to anchor this centre that, all in all,opposes signature and teaching, I shall skim through the first page ofGlas gleaning some words, for example concerning the undecidablesyntax of the remainder, and pick out, in a doubtless insufficient way,some elements in both columns. The left-hand column, devoted toHegel, starts thus: ‘what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us,here, now, of a Hegel?’ This ‘of the remain(s)’ [du reste, also meaning‘besides’] is clearly undecidable in its syntax. What does that mean:‘what of the remain(s)’? ‘what after all’? and at the opposite angle, at thebottom of the text, in the Genet column, there is again an overlapping‘of the remain(s)’ whose syntax is equally undecidable. Facing the‘what, after all, of the remain(s), today, for us, here, now, of a Hegel?’,there is the beginning of the text by Genet entitled ‘What remainedof a Rembrandt torn into small, very regular squares and rammed down theshithole’. This text is divided in two and, as Marco Siscar earlier recalled,this sentence describes Glas’s structure in advance as the remainder.

Two lines lower: ‘As the remain(s)’ will divide in two. . . Therewill thus endlessly be an interpretation of these two interpretations ofthe remainder. The word ‘already’ intervenes on the fourth line of theHegel column. For us, the words ‘here, now’ are already and alwaysquotations. We learned them from him. They refer to the beginningof The Phenomenology of Mind where Hegel discusses the meaning ofthese terms.

‘Who, him?’ The first column devoted to Hegel emphasizes thefact that he doesn’t sign, that a philosopher doesn’t sign, that the nameof a philosopher isn’t essential to his discourse. After some reflectionson Hegel’s name, here are the passages. The word ‘siglum’ [sigle]appears immediately: ‘Sa from now on will be the siglum of savoirabsolu [absolute knowledge]’ (1). Sigle is a word that simultaneouslydesignates the initials of a proper name and allows the sound, thesyllable gl to echo from the first page. ‘Whether he lets himself be

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taught [enseigner], signed, ensigned is not yet known. Perhaps thereis an incompatibility (rather than a dialectical contradiction) betweenthe teaching and the signature, a schoolmaster and a signer. Perhaps, inany case, even when they let themselves be thought and signed, thesetwo operations cannot overlap each other.’ A ‘remainder’ — the wordoverlap reappears across the page — is necessary. ‘Of the remain(s),after all, there are, always, overlapping each other, two functions.’

The word in the Hegel column that plays with countersignatureis ‘counterproof’. It is in a spyhole: ‘it (ca) does not accentuate itselfhere now but will already have been put to the test [epreuve] on theother side. Sense must conform, more or less, to the calculi of whatthe engraver terms a counterproof.’ It thus already defines, on bothsides, the law organizing the relation between the two columns, andthat continues in the two following pages. Genet column:

Perhaps the case (Fall) [thus the fall, case also means fall] of the seing.If Fall marks the case, the fall, decadence, failure or fissure, Falle equals trap,

snare, springe, the machine that grabs you by the neck.The seing falls (to the tomb(stone)). (2)

In the Hegel column on the next page, there’s a mention of the‘colossal’ statue of the Egyptian Memnon, ‘kolossale Klangstatue’ — ina way the entire book develops as a reflection on the word Klang,on the birth of sound vibration before the voice, nur Klang und nichtSprache. . . Just opposite, the following announces that the book willfocus on the question of the signature:

Between the words, between the word itself as it divides itself in two [the wordin question is reste that can divide in two as noun or verb, but also the wordtombe] (noun and verb, cadence or erection, hole and stone), (to) insinuate thedelicate, barely visible stem, an almost imperceptible cold lever, scalpel, or stylus[the word style recurs constantly in this form, this syntax of the stylus], so as toenervate, then dilapidate, enormous discourses that always end, though more orless denying it, in attributing an author’s rights: ‘that (ca) comes (back) to me,’ theseing belongs to me.

The stake of the signature — does the signature take place? where? how? why?for whom? (. . .) perhaps the seing represents the case, the place for (topically andtropically) overlapping the intrinsic and the extrinsic.

Initialling the margin, the incessant operation: signing in the margin, ex-changing the name against a revenue, paring down, trying to reduce themargin (. . .)

Case and scrap. What remains of a signature? (3-4)

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All this refers to the first centre of focus, concerning the signatureand countersignature at work in the book and engaging both JeanGenet’s proper name — first name and surname, constantly workedon by their homonyms, their associations to flowers, horses, the Johnof the Gospels and of the Apocalypse — and my own proper name,whose occurrences can be read in the text, if one wishes to, in theadverb deja [already], composed of my initials, or in an expression likederriere le rideau [behind the curtain] when I say that I already see myfather’s name, the letters of his name in gold on his tomb. My propername is thus like a countersignature constantly at work in my readingof Genet.

The second centre of focus would be the place of the mother, theholy mother and/or the prostitute, the Immaculate Conception, IC,the Virgin Mary, Saint Mary of the Sea. . . For example, one sceneevokes Saint Mary of the Sea, taking place between Hegel and Genet,between Genet’s Mary, the Virgin Mary, and Hegel’s Mary, betweenhis wife and sister. This mother is the one who signs and the onewho survives. In other words, the ‘remainder’ in my interpretation,the signing remainder, is always of the mother who survives her sonand follows his obsequies. That is why I call her the ‘obsequent’. It’sin a spyhole in the Genet column:

I am (following) the mother. [‘I’, so I, me, ‘I am’ the mother or I am ‘her’, shewho follows her son’s obsequies like an obsequent and survives him]. (. . .) Themother is behind [my name is there: derriere] — all that I follow, am, do, seem — themother follows. As she follows absolutely, she always survives — a future thatwill never have been presentable — what she will have engendered, attending,impassive, fascinating and provoking [in other words, this remaining that I saidescaped ontology’s authority is also the situation of the mother. She remains. Likea remainder which has never been present. Which thus never presents itself andconsequently can never be a being in the present under ontology’s authority];she survives the interring of the one whose death she has foreseen. Logic ofobsequence. [The entire book follows this situation of the mother who survivesor is experienced as surviving:] Such is the great genetic scene: the mother secutrixdenounces, then lets the son die — whom she transforms because of that into adaughter — leaves her, because of that makes her die and simulates, the divinewhore, a suicide [I shall come back later, at the end, to the question of suicidein Genet].

See, farther on, that calculus of the mother.(. . .) What can a mother do better?But to the extent that she is there, to represent herself and detach herself from

herself, you can always sign yourself to death, she transforms your act into a sin

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in all tongues, your text into ersatz, your paraph into a fake. She takes you bythe hand and you always countersign. [In other words, the protosignature is themother’s and even when you countersign, you are letting yourself be signed bythe mother.]

Subject of denunciation: I call myself my mother who calls herself (in) me. Togive, to accuse. Dative, accusative. I bear my mother’s name, I am (following)my mother’s name, I call my mother to myself, I call my mother for myself, I callmy mother in myself, recall myself to my mother. I decline the same subjugationin all cases.

The calculus of the mother — that I am (following): Ah! if my mother couldassist me at my interment. (117)

In Our Lady of the Flowers, during the trial, in a writing anal instyle, Divine testifies for Our Lady: ‘I think he’s very naıve, verychildlike. (. . .) He could be my son.’10

All of this is organized around the names of flowers, Genet’s name.If, for example, you were to make the conjunction between therose, the ‘mystical rose’ everywhere in Miracle of the Rose and theword ‘Rose’ that opens The Screens without our knowing if it’s aproper name or if it describes the colour of the sky, this ‘rose’ thatchimes with the proper name Warda (Rose in Arabic) and the nuptialacquiescence in Our Lady of the Flowers evoked above, the ‘yes yes’ ofcountersignature (remember the spouse in Ponge), then you woulddevelop, as a photographic negative is developed, the scene of a lovergiving a nuptial flower day after day, under Our Lady’s hospitableprotection. ‘Yes yes yes’ under the double sign of the rose and OurLady of the Flowers: that is all expressed and implemented in Glasand beyond.

That is why the word ‘mother’ and the determination of maternitybother me here. Because with the syllable gl, it’s a matter of goingbeyond the mother or womb, towards what in other texts I termedKhora, trying to save the interpretation of Khora in Plato’s Timeusfrom interpretations that precisely made a womb, a mother, of it.Khora, the receptacle, the space that receives the impressions of thecopies of paradigms, has often, and by Plato himself, been comparedmetaphorically to a womb. I tried to show how Khora isn’t one, howit doesn’t even correspond to a maternal figure. Well, I would saythat the gl that organizes Glas escapes the primordiality, the so-calledprimordiality of the mother or womb.

Concerning this mother-son couple, as I interpret it in Glas inrelation to the question of the signature, if you leap across the twelve

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years separating its publication and that of Prisoner Of Love, you canread on the last page:

The Palestinian revolution lives and will live only of itself. A Palestinian family,made up essentially of mother and son, were among the first people I met inIrbid. But it was somewhere else that I really found them. Perhaps inside myself.The pair made up by mother and son is to be found in France and everywhereelse. Was it a light of my own that I threw on them, so that instead of beingstrangers whom I was observing they became a couple of my own creation? Animage of my own that my penchant for day-dreaming had projected on to twoPalestinians, mother and son, adrift in the midst of a battle in Jordan?

All I’ve said and written happened. But why is it that this couple is the onlyreally profound memory I have of the Palestinian revolution? (430)

What remains for Genet, then, of the Palestinian revolution, is thecouple, this couple mother-son/son-mother. Logic of obsequence.

The third centre of focus is that of jealousy. The mother’s jealousy.It has often been noted that the theme of jealousy recurs in manyof my texts. In this one, it’s also a matter of my jealousy of Genet’smother, explicitly thematized for example in the column facing theone on Hegel concerning the umbilical cord and the question ofthe child:

‘When talking about the Colony I sometimes refer to it as ‘‘The Old Lady,’’ or‘‘The Motherfucker.’’ These two expressions would probably not have sufficedto make me confuse it with a woman, but, in addition to the fact that they alreadyusually designate mothers, they occurred to me in connection with the Colony,since I was tired of my solitude as a lost child and my soul called for a mother.’

The breast [sein] of this mother steals away from all names, but it also hidesthem, steals them; it is before all names,

[then, in a spyhole:] as death, the mother fascinates from the absolute of analready. Fascination produces an excess of zeal [zeal means jealousy in Greek]. Inother words, jealousy. Jealousy is always excessive. . . (133-4)

Interpretation of a jealousy that, beyond all the pretexts it can take,concerns the absolute past, what has never been present and what Ican therefore never overcome. Jealousy is always jealousy of the pastand so

can never be presented nor allow any hope for presentation, the presentlypresenting. One is never jealous in front of a present scene — even the worstimaginable — nor a future one, at least insofar as it would be big with a possibletheater. Zeal is only unchained at the whip of the absolute past. Madame Edwarda

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would be a bit of foolishness, running herself dry, producing her apotrope in thespectacle, as far as she were open to a present experience. (134)

In other words, the worst deception or betrayal of the other, wereit to present itself, could never elicit as terrible a suffering as a pastdeception or betrayal. Jealousy is exasperated by a past that thereis no question of either effacing or making present: ‘It [jealousy]has a chance to be terrible only by thrusting within itself a past, anabsolute already: in giving itself to be read, not seen’ (134; translationmodified). One is thus jealous only of what one reads and not ofwhat one sees, ‘of the mother or death, never of a man or womanas such,’ only ‘of a seing or, what comes down here to the same, ofan already’. Jealousy is always exasperated by a past signature. ‘This iswhy metaphysics, which is jealous, will never be able to account, inits language, the language of presence, for jealousy’ (134).

The thesis here is that metaphysics, as a metaphysics of the present,is jealous but cannot account for its own law, that of jealousy: ‘Thisis why the mother (whatever forename or pronoun she may begiven) stands beyond the sexual opposition. This above all is not awoman. She only lets herself, detached, be represented by the sex.’Femininity is only a representation of maternity. ‘That is why thethief distinguishes between the maternal and the feminine’ (134). Thismotif of jealousy at the centre of Glas is also at the centre of manyother of my texts.

I come now to the fourth centre of focus. The first three concernedthe signature or seing, the last the countersignature itself, this timenamed as such in Glas. The countersignature that is both free andcaptive, thus subject to the other. Free as all countersignatures mustbe. When I say ‘yes’, I must say it freely, but this ‘yes’ to the other isnaturally captive to the other:

What I wanted to write is the text’s GALLOWS [POTENCE] [potence in theright column rhymes with what is said about potens in the analysis of Hegel andSchelling on the left].

I expose myself to it, I tend toward it very much [beaucoup], I stretch muchon it.

Anyhow, the scene will finish badly. He is going to be furious with me [m’envouloir a mort; that’s my fear of Genet’s reading], I know from experience the lawof this process [we know a writer can’t tolerate any reading whatsoever]. He willbe furious with me for all sorts of reasons I will not undertake to enumerate.And at all events and cases. If I support or valorize his text [he’ll be furiouseither way, whether I say good or bad of it makes no difference], he will see in

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this a sort of approbation, verily of magisterial, university, paternal or maternalappropriation. It is as if I were stealing his erection from him. His death: ‘Andthe picture showing the capital execution of a convict in Cayenne made me say:‘‘He has stolen my death’’’ (Miracle of the Rose). And if, furthermore, I exposeas a professor the Great(er) Logic of this operation, I do nothing but aggravatethe case. If I was not valorizing, not ‘magnifying’ his glas (but what have I doneon the whole?), the ringer would fuck me again. Anyhow the signer recalled toRoger Blin a lost letter in which he had confided to Blin that his own booksand plays were written against himself [There! Against himself ! He signs againsthimself !]. But he added: ‘And if I do not succeed through the text itself to exposemyself, then you have to help me. Against myself. . . ’ Elsewhere, that his actorshad to show him, he himself, naked. So, anyhow, I am judged and condemned,that is what he always sought to do: if I write for his text, I write against him, if Iwrite for him, I write against his text. This friendship is irreconcilable. [There isthe theme of irreconcilable friendship from L’Ennemi declare, how can a friendshipbe irreconcilable?]

Anyhow, he will vomit [the theme of vomiting is constant in Glas: it’s the gl]all that (ca) for me, he will not read, will not be able to read.

Do I write for him? What would I like to do to him? do to his ‘work’? Ruin itby erecting it, perhaps.

So that one reads it no more? So that one only reads it starting from here, fromthe moment I myself consign and countersign it? (199-200)

In other words, is what I wanted that one only read him after, startingfrom, my countersignature?

There follows a quotation from Warda, and a repeat of ‘there arealways, after all, of the remain(s), two functions overlapping eachother’, and two mournings that, each time transforming it, repeat atheme that appeared earlier and will reappear some fifty pages further,the ‘canopy of the upturned eye [dais de l’œil revulse]’ (260) or the‘milk of mourning [lait de deuil]. His tomb, he loves only that’ (201).On the same page, the opposite or facing column on Hegel deals withan asexual brother-sister relation, and then a word that can mean thecontrary. The theme of contrariety, and of the Christian mother canalso be found in Hegel. . . In other words, reading the two columns,one can see the play of signatures, countersignatures, proximity andcontradiction, enacted in permanence.

To conclude in a few words, thanking you for your patience, I shallat least outwardly move away from Genet’s texts and those of minethat countersign them, but without really leaving Genet’s path andthe ways it crossed mine, despite innumerable and massive differences.It would be impossible to imagine two more different existences than

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Genet’s and mine. How could these paths cross? I call Genet’s patha certain trajectory, an irresistible movement making its way, theway of a single signature, through journeys, return trips [allers-retours],counterpaths [contre-allees], wanderings, in a fierce race towards death.Genet runs to/on death [marche a la mort]. Somewhere, I wrote thatabout myself: I run to/on death. In other words, I run towards death,but also I run on death like a fuel, as an engine runs on petrol. I runon death, death is what makes me run.

In this fierce race, ‘he runs on death’ implies a suicidal signature,if such a thing is possible, a signed suicide, a consigned suicide, asignature destined to sign only to bring about its own effacement [arriver as’effacer]. That is, to attain, to arrive at its own effacement, but also tocome about, to happen, as its own effacement. Simultaneously eventand effacement. There lies the betrayal as self-betrayal, as if the onlypossible, or impossible, event were a suicide worthy of the name. Thissuicide can happen in a moment or last, or accompany, or inspire anentire lifetime. It can be decided in a second, but it involves decision.Thinking the signature is inseparable from thinking the decision andthe moment of decision.

This decision, as I tried to show elsewhere, is another’s decision.My suicide is always a murder come from the other, a heterocide, anon-suicide or a homicide. What does that mean? What do I wantto suggest by this dream of an impossible suicide? And why did Ialways feel close to Genet, right against him, despite all the differ-ences? perhaps because of this obsession, this theatre of the possibleand impossible suicide. The possible-impossible suicide haunts everysignature as signature and as countersignature. Today and elsewhereI have stressed the ‘yes’, the double ‘yes’ etched by the countersig-nature, the affirmative, performative force it implies. Nonetheless, atthis moment I also believe that the affirmative and performative forceat work in a countersignature is doomed to failure and suicide. Itis doomed to fail any way, in at least two ways I shall indicate inconclusion.

It is doomed to fail, to commit suicide, firstly, because it isimpossible that the ‘counter’ of the vis-a-vis, proximity, iterabilityor affirmation should not be encroached on by the ‘counter’ ofdestructive opposition. There is complicity, contagion, contami-nation between these two ‘counters’. At work even in my signa-ture as countersignature-confirmed-and-authenticated by itself isa self-destruction that must accept the survival of the signatureafter the signatory’s death thus countersigned or countersigning.

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The signatory, the signature is swept away and suicidal amnesiaunites with the memory of the ‘yes yes’ unable to avoid thedeathly rigidity of mimetic or mechanical repetition. This is thefirst reason.

The second is that the defeat of the ‘yes’’s performative force isas inevitable as the catastrophe whereby a performative necessarilydisappears in the face of what happens. This is a theme I have beentrying to develop for some time, suggesting, in sum, that where thereis an event, the performative must fail. It’s the performative’s limit. Itis often rightly said that a performative produces an event, producesthe event it speaks of. That is the definition of the performative. Itdoes what it says, makes what it says happen. I say ‘yes’ — marriage,‘yes’ — thus I produce the event I speak of. I sign, countersign,and that in effect produces the event at the side of the work orat the level of the work. But, insofar as every performative, everyperformative power is authorized by an ‘I may’, ‘I can’, is authorizedby conventions and, by its decision, remains the master of theevent thus produced, the subject of a performative act by definitionmasters the event it produces, it is supposed to produce. Well,that very mastery neutralizes the event it produces. Where there ismastery, there cannot be event. Nothing happens. An event musthappen or touch me unexpectedly, unanticipatably, that is, withouthorizon, with no horizon of waiting, like the other’s coming. Whenthe other comes, there is no performative. The other’s comingoutstrips any performative force or power. In this sense, the event,the other’s unexpected coming, never signs or countersigns. Thus theword countersignature can assume another meaning, neither that ofauthenticating confirmation, the performative ‘yes yes’ to a signature,mine or another’s; nor merely (or more) the dialectical oppositionto the signature; but the very event that designates, countersigns inanother sense the countersignature itself, that ‘suicides’ the signature,so to speak, carries it away, undoes it, exceeds it, effaces it, derides it. Itis suicide itself. In this sense, if the marrying, the ‘becoming conjoined’I spoke of, especially in relation to Ponge’s text, is to be an eventworthy of the name, it must exceed the performative legitimization ofthe conventional ‘yes yes’, that is of the signature or countersignature.It must take place, if it takes place, unexpectedly, invisibly, secretly,wordlessly, without a patronymic or matronymic name. Beyond thefather’s or mother’s name. A decision that reckons unconditionallywith the undecidable only by trusting to a ‘perhaps’ or an ‘as if’, whereperformative mastery fails. It is perhaps as if I had married or as if I

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was committing suicide. Waiting for death — a waiting that moreoverwaits for nothing, expects nothing — is the experience of somethinglike an event exceeding every performative, and thus every signatureand every countersignature. That is why I cannot sign my death, evenif I sign my death sentence, even if I believe I am killing myself. Thiswaiting without waiting, this waiting with no horizon of waiting,makes the excess of death both lighter and graver.

To finish, I would like to quote Genet again from L’Ennemi declare,in the interview, one of the funniest ever, with Bertrand Delpech:

B.P.-D.: The Screens present death as something not very dreadful or importantafter all. Is that your opinion?J.G.: It’s Mallarme’s opinion also: ‘This shallow stream. . . ’, you know the rest.[This has also an autobiographical resonance for me: when my friend Paul DeMan, suffering like Genet from cancer and knowing he was going to die, wroteme a letter, he too quoted ‘this shallow stream. . .. ’] Death. . . at least the passagefrom life to non-life to me seems not very sad, not very dangerous for one ifthe vocabulary is changed: the passage from life to non-life instead of life todemise is suddenly nearly consoling, isn’t it? The change of vocabulary is what’simportant. Dedramatizing. The word is frequently used these days — ‘dedramatizethe situation.’ I dedramatize the situation that will make a dead man of me byusing other words.B.P.-D.: A dramatic author who dedramatizes?J.G.: Precisely. If I tried to develop a sort of dramaturgy, it was to settle a scorewith society. Now, I’m indifferent, the score has been settled.B.P.-D.: You’re not angry, you’ve no scene to make?J.G.: Oh! I affirm it so peremptorily, so sharply that I wonder if truly I am notangry, have no scene to make. There you may be onto something. I believe Iwill die still with anger against you.B.P.-D.: And hatred?J.G.: No, I hope not, you’re not worth it.B.P.-D.: Who is worth your hatred?J.G.: The few people I love deeply, and who touch me. (ED, 232-3)

And again, in the interview with Nigel Williams at the close ofL’Ennemi declare:

N.G.: And what do you do with your days there?J.G.: Ah yes, you want to address the problem of time? Well, I’ll answer likeSaint Augustine in relation to time: ‘I’m waiting for death.’ (306)

My thesis, my hypothesis, is that the thought of suicide wasimpossible for Genet who, besides, as he says himself, wrote Prisoner

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of Love at a moment when his cancer had already manifested itself. Hetruly wrote it between the first operation for cancer and his death. Mythesis, my hypothesis, is that this thought of the impossible suicide isnevertheless readable everywhere in his writings. As proof, and theseare my last quotations, it is enough to read this passage in Fragments. . .:

The thought — not the summons — but the thought of suicide, appeared to meclearly around my fortieth year, brought, it seems to me, by the boredom ofliving, by an inner void that nothing, except an absolute decline, seemed ableto abolish.11

There are many other passages I could quote as evidence of thisthought of suicide, but I shall stop with this one:

Before knowing him, I had wanted to commit suicide. But his presence, andthen his image in me, then his possible fate, coming not from him but from thatimage, overwhelmed me. He refused to exist according to this image. (30)

JACQUES DERRIDAEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales

(Translated by Mairead Hanrahan)

NOTES

1 Text pronounced on the occasion of the conference Poetiques de Jean Genet:La Traversee des Genres, held at the Centre Culturel International de Cerisy-la-Salle, 14-21 August 2000. The original French version is due to appearshortly in the Acts of this conference, edited by Albert Dichy and PatriceBougon (Paris, IMEC, 2005).

2 Jacques Derrida, Glas, translated by J. Leavey and R. Rand (Lincoln andLondon, University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 41-2.

3 Prisoner of Love, translated by Barbara Bray with an introduction by AhdafSoueif (New York, New York Review Books, 2003), 32.

4 ‘Entretien avec Antoine Bourseiller’ in Jean Genet, L’Ennemi declare, editedby Albert Dichy (Paris, Gallimard, 1991; henceforward ED), 225-6.

5 That Strange Word. . . in Fragments of the Artwork, translated by CharlotteMandell (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 111-2.

6 Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida, translated byGeoffrey Bennington (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press,1993), 268; translation modified.

7 La Contre-allee, avec Catherine Malabou (Paris, La Quinzaine litteraire-LouisVuitton, 1999), 57-8.

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8 I do not include in this series the Cerisy conference devoted in 1998 to HeleneCixous, another admired and respected friend. For luckily she is alive.

9 Jacques Derrida, SignepongeDSignsponge, translated by Richard Rand (NewYork, Columbia University Press, 1984), 124-8.

10 Our Lady of the Flowers, translated by Bernard Frechtman (London, Panther,1966), 261.

11 Jean Genet, Fragments of the Artwork, translated by Charlotte Mandell (Stan-ford, Stanford University Press, 2003), 23.