Signature Pieces

On the Institution of Authorship

Peggy Kamuf

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781501726378
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

Some contemporary approaches to literature still accept the separation of historical, biographical, external concerns from formal, internal ones. On the borderline that lends this division between inside and outside its apparent coherence is signature. In Peggy Kamuf's view, studying signature will help us to rediscover some of the stakes of literary writing beyond the historicist/formalist opposition. Drawing on Derrida's extensive work on signatures and proper names, Kamuf investigates authorial signature in key writers from Rousseau to Woolf, as well as the implications of signature for the institutions of authorship and criticism.

PART I

ROUSSEAU AND THE MODERN SIGNATURE

Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis.

—Ovid

CHAPTER ONE

The Name of a Problem

What if one were to read “Rousseau” as signature, and the works signed by that name as support for the signature? Is such an order tenable, does it hold together, will it get us anywhere to think an inversion or a literalization of the figure of the signature? Let us say Rousseau wrote what he wrote so as to have something to do with his signature. This is not to suggest a psychological motivation that we would pretend to be able to detect. The “logic” we want to isolate is both before and beyond “psychologic.” Indeed, it is this lack of coincidence—at once an excess and a lack—between the signature and the proper name which installs the problem we want to consider in the case of “Rousseau.” As to why that signature before any other, we can do no better than refer to Jacques Derrida’s answers to a similar question.

The second part of Of Grammatology opens with a series of questions about the choice of the “age of Rousseau” as exemplary of the West’s logocentric metaphysics: “Why accord an ‘exemplary’ value to the ‘age of Rousseau’? What privileged place does Jean-Jacques Rousseau occupy in the history of logo-centrism? What is meant by that proper name? And what are the relationships between that name and the texts to which it was underwritten?” Several pages of introduction propose a preliminary form for the answers that Derrida will work out at length in his following chapters. Rousseau’s work, he writes, “seems to me to occupy, between Plato’s Phaedrus and Hegel’s Encyclopedia, a singular position.” This singular situation is ascribed to a new model of presence: “Rousseau is undoubtedly the only one or the first one to make a theme or a system of the reduction of writing profoundly implied by the entire age … but [he] starts from a new model of presence: the subject’s self-presence within consciousness or feeling.” But the “privilege” that is accorded here—the privilege of being first—goes less to Rousseau than to “Rousseau,” that is, to the name: “The names of authors or of doctrines have here no substantial value. They indicate neither identity nor causes… . The indicative value that I attribute to them is first the name of a problem” (italics added).1 “Rousseau” is the name of a problem, the problem of the idealist exclusion of writing—of materiality, of exteriority—in the name of the subject’s presence to itself. Of Gram-matology’s coup de force against this exclusion has meant, first of all, that one can no longer approach Rousseau’s text with complacent disregard for the supplementary writing that takes the self-present concept beyond itself.2 Rousseau will have been transformed, reinscribed as “Rousseau.” Second, therefore, the transformation will have made of Rousseau’s problem not an isolated aberration nor an individual case. Rather, the name “Rousseau” can now be said to supplement the signature on any text and to make of its property, its identity, a problem.

And it is in this sense that we can speak of “Jean-Jacques Rousseau” as the first “modern” signature. We take “Rousseau” to name the problem of a signature that cannot sign for itself, by which we mean both that it carries no guarantee of authenticity and that it cannot sign on its own. This is not just Rousseau’s problem, but for reasons to be explored one may say that his texts uncover the structural limits on the properness of any signature. In Derrida’s reading, Rousseau’s notion of truth as self-presence is made to depend on the reliable authenticity of a subject’s expression of some “internal feeling.” In this expressive relation between the interiority of feeling and the exteriority of discourse, only the subject can say what only the subject feels, but his word is no guarantee that he indeed feels what he expresses or expresses what he feels. Having once engaged his word to speak only the truth that he feels, Rousseau will find himself constrained to multiply the acts of guaranteeing with another signature what he has already signed. Yet no single act of signing can ever sign for itself, and this leaves the door open to all sorts of improprieties and expropriations.

By the “modern” signature we also understand one that compels a certain fascination for the living author or the life of the signatory. It is a fascination exercised in the wake of texts like the Confessions or the Reveries, the autobiographical writings with which Rousseau tried to pin down his own signature on such volatile works as Du contrat social and Emile. The fascination that compulsively substitutes the narrative of a life for the disjunctions and disruptions of a work found its first or at least its most receptive repository in Rousseau himself. Rousseau’s writing “career” (by which we mean the career of the signature “Rousseau”) is, we might say, emblematic of what was to become the sense of signature in a postclassical age, the age of the writing subject writing about itself or in its own name. Since “Rousseau,” it has seemed only natural to ask: In whose name? The demand to know who signs, the move to authenticate the signature are gestures that Rousseau was, to a significant extent, the first to perform and he performed them on “himself” in somewhat the same way that Freud, the founder of another institution of self-reflection, had to perform his own analysis. To an important extent unlike both Augustine and Montaigne (his apparent precursors), Rousseau wrote his Confessions to justify and authenticate a signature already circulating widely so that, at a certain point in its career (after the ban on Emile and the pursuit of the author), his signature is entirely concerned with countersigning what had already been signed. And it is this necessity of doubling itself that marks a certain turn (or turnover) in the history of signature. Indeed, one could justifiably speak of a historicization or narrativization of the signature. Doubling itself, the signature “Rousseau” uncovers what must always divide it; it exposes the limit at which one signs—and signs again.

Two moments of Rousseau’s signature display this limit in a very economical way. Provisionally, we will call them the first and last instances of “Rousseau.” We can also, therefore and just as provisionally, call the narrative they bracket its history.

Rousseau the First, Rousseau the Second

In book IV of The Confessions, a remarkable tangle occurs that crosses the name “Rousseau” first with a pseudonym, then with a homonym. To straighten things out, Rousseau signs.

During the winter 1730–31, Rousseau is living in Lausanne under the anagrammatic name of Vaussore de Villeneuve and passing himself off (although not too successfully) as a Parisian music teacher.3 In April 1731, he travels as Vaussore to the border town of Soleure where he is cornered by the French ambassador (who must have had his reasons for suspecting the young man’s story) and led to give up his masquerade. In this brief account of his confession of his identity to a representative of France, one may already read a mise en abîme of The Confessions as a whole:

Having given myself out as a Parisian, I was, as such, under his Excellency’s jurisdiction. He asked me who I was, and exhorted me to tell the truth. I promised to do so, and asked him for a private audience, which was granted. The Ambassador took me to his study, and shut the door. I threw myself at his feet and kept my word. I should not have confessed less, even if I had made no promise; for a continual need of opening my heart brings it at every moment to my lips.4

The episode impresses the ambassador, who is so “pleased with my little story, and with the way he saw I poured out my heart in telling it to him [et de l’effusion de coeur avec laquelle il vit que je l’avais contée],” that he intervenes to straighten out the young man’s affairs and set him on the road to Paris, where, indeed, Rousseau will endeavor to make his fortune as a musician. No sooner, however, has the young man left his private audience with the ambassador, no sooner has Vaussore the musician changed places with Rousseau the Genevan watchmaker’s son, than this Rousseau aspires to change places with the other Rousseau, the poet.

M. de la Martinière, secretary to the embassy, was, in a manner, entrusted with the care of me. While showing me to the room which was intended for me, he said: “This room, in the time of the Comte du Luc, was occupied by a celebrated man of the same name as yourself; it rests with you to supply his place in every respect, so that it may one day be said Rousseau premier, Rousseau second.” This similarity, of which at that time I had little hopes, would have flattered my ambition less, if I had been able to foresee how heavy would be the price I should one day have to pay for it.

M. de la Martinière’s words excited my curiosity. I read the works of the writer whose room I occupied; and, having regard to the compliment which had been paid me, and believing that I had a taste for poetry, I composed a cantata. (162; 1:157)

For as long as he thought his chances for renown—for making a name for himself—lay in that direction, Rousseau practiced more or less systematically his imitations of Jean-Baptiste Rousseau. In a prefatory note to one of the few published poems,5 the editor of the journal invokes the same homonymy to compliment the young poet: “You will see … that he is able to support the renown of the great name he bears, and that if he continues to practice Poetry, and to perfect his practice, it may well happen one day that the inhabitants of Parnassus will say: Rousseau I, Rousseau II.”6 Rousseau himself makes a somewhat different prediction in a fragment written long after he had given up his aspirations as a poet:

Neither Homer nor Virgil was ever called a great man although they were very great Poets. Some authors have gone to great lengths during my life to call the Poet Rousseau the great Rousseau. When I die, the Poet Rousseau will be a great Poet, but he will no longer be the great Rousseau. While it is not impossible for an author to be a great man, it is not by writing books, whether in verse or in prose, that he will become one. (Fragment 38; 1:1129)

This fragment makes clear a structure at work in the first encounter with the homonym at Soleure: to sign “Rousseau” is to take the name of the already monumentalized Poet, but also already to see one’s name as a monument left to stand in the place of life, after death.

The Telltale Heart

These various crossings of Rousseau’s identity, the slipping from pseudonym to homonym, can be traced to the structure of what passes as the one moment of true naming. At the heart of this truth, which stands between a fraud and a copy, is the metaphor of a heart made manifest. In confessing his real name, Rousseau had, he writes, his heart on his lips, “son coeur sur ses lèvres,” and the ambassador was moved to generosity (even though he had just heard the confession of a fraud) because of the “way he saw I poured out my heart in telling it to him.” Having promised to tell the truth of who he is, Rousseau honors his word but he gives even more than he promised: not just his word, not just his name, but the truth of both word and name which is the heart.

To tell the truth when one has promised to do so is to leave open to question whether one is telling the truth or keeping a promise. Rousseau seems to anticipate this question because he writes: “I should not have confessed less, even if I had made no promise” (“Je n’aurais pas moins dit quand je n’aurais rien promis”).7 What would be at issue is whether this truth comes from the subject, who gives his name of himself and to himself, or whether the truth of the name lies outside the subject which it names in a contract with some other. The movement of the “coeur” from inside to outside appears to decide this question because it gives the name its seal of truth from within and makes of the contractual promise to the other an external and unnecessary circumstance. With his heart on his lips, Rousseau has a reinforced instrument with which both to tell the truth and to tell that he is telling the truth. If this episode might be taken as a model of the felicitous or successful confession of identity (which is also an excuse for the false identity “Vaus-sore”), it is because it leaves no room for doubting the truth of what is being told. The gap into which such doubt might have slipped is closed off when the heart moves to the lips and puts its seal on what is spoken.

Rousseau’s “effusion de coeur” seems to have a unidirectional sense, from inside to outside. But that phrase itself occurs in an ambiguous syntactic location between the two parties to this speech act. The ambassador was, we read, “content de ma petite histoire et de l’effusion de coeur avec laquelle il vit que je l’avais contée [with the way he saw I poured out my heart].” No doubt the ambassador saw many things in the course of the scene in his office—tears or gestures (Rousseau writes that he threw himself at the feet of his interlocutor, although that may be just another manner of speaking). To say, however, that he saw an “effusion de coeur” is to compound a metaphor of expression by a metaphor of...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction A Single Line Divided
• Part I Rousseau and the Modern Signature
• Part II No One Signs for the Other
• Part III Resistance Theories
• Works Cited
• Index