Notes on Avital Ronell's talk, Tuesday, September 18th: 3:30 p.m., for her "Literature and Philosophy" class in the German Department at NYU.

The teacher entered the room, and began by ringing a small black bell. She calls this a convocation--to convoke our teachers, bring them to mind--"that's all!"

The following are notes taken from the teacher's talk, summarizing what she said, in so far as I was able to write it down, remember certain things that she said and forget others and so on. Thus it is also the record of my thought. Marcus Boon.

It is not possible to connect discursive sites at this time.

Lyotard says "il faut enchainer"--we must make links, connect. If he says "we must", it's because there is no linking happening. It's not the right time, we're not ready, words vaporize, but we have to make that effort.

At the same time, anyone who tries to connect, without the above injunction, anyone who makes meaning happen too quickly, is in error. Probably a Hegelian or a Christian. We're not at a moment when we can do this.

We need to hang on to an edge of sheer unintelligibility. There's nothing appropriate to say. We're faced with the inappropriable. We're in a place where we're blasted apart. I'm not saying you can't fabricate meaning - but it's too easy. There are flashes of meaning, modalities of thought ... but the minute you think you've understood, you shut down.

It's not even clear that this happened in the past. Nietzsche speaks of an event--like the death of God--which happens in past, present and future--so that we do not know, we cannot say that "it has happened".

Writing, inscription is taking place everywhere on the street [the signs and notes and posters that cover all the public spaces of downtown Manhattan] ... that seems to be related to a need.

This is what we share: being. That we're here.

There is no trauma free zone. I've read that if you're having obsessional or intrusive thoughts, that's a sign of trauma. But if you're having no thoughts, a lack of thought, then that's also a sign of trauma. So there is no trauma free zone right now.

What does it mean for history to be the history of trauma? If you're a Hegelian, that kind of trauma is productive of meaning, reason. One of the things implicit in trauma is cognitive failure--hovering in the place of disruption. Trauma is that which can't be internalized.

So ... what would it mean today that history must be the history of trauma?

That you don't get it, don't grasp it.

And those fugitive intervals that bind us ethically. How is it possible to think ethics now in a hyperbolically ethical space? Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is key here.

I spoke to Derrida's family today. He's in China, but he sends his concern, his best wishes. Hélene Cixous and Jean-Luc Nancy too. A lot of energy is coming here. A lot of language failure.

All totalizing narratives (like "America is arrogant") are defensive maneuvres. It marks the failure of understanding at the first level to say "this means that".

On all levels this has been a narcissistic blowout.

It's through failure of understanding that certain types of narrative emerge.

All trauma texts are organized around the enigma of survival. There is an inherent forgetting in trauma. We forget and then something flashes back. Only through forgetting is trauma experienced at all.

And forgiveness is a crisis in memory. A forgetting.

How do we read the disruption that occurs traumatically in our experience of history. Consider Benjamin's notion of shock.

Understanding understands only itself.

Architecture holds pain and crumbles in pain. Architecture is ...?

The importance of there being two towers, not one, for disruption of the signifying chain. Repetition: there were two hits. This disrupts the register of intelligibility. Two towers: two eyes ... testicles ... breasts. Everyone says, "it wasn't the Empire State Building." Something about the disaster being doubled fits into the rhythm of trauma.

We need literature at times like this because literature doubles, gives immediacy and distance.... It is less liable to cover the non- symbolizable wound. Literature remains true to stupefaction, speechlessness.

Bataille says that at moments of extreme laceration, we need stories. We will read Kleist's Michael Kollhaas, re. the failure to forgive, shifting borders. Then The Marquise von O--a politically incorrect tale. She finds herself pregnant but doesn't know how. A lapse must have occurred. A rape.

Forgiveness. The gift. "Le don." Also "le don" in abandonment. Forgiveness without amnesia. What Hannah Arendt calls "the irreparable."

The problem of address: who do we address our trauma to? And what is it that was addressed to us?

Let's shift focus. One has to take a step back in order to return. This is what I was going to say last week--before the current situation.

It's 1946. Hannah goes to Freiberg and leaves a message for Martin [Heidegger] to meet her. Martin's wife refuses to let him go. He pushes his wife aside, goes to Hannah's hotel and spends the night with her, leaves in the morning. Hannah says "I have forgiven Heidegger."

Forgiveness between student and professor, between lovers, sexes, races.

Forgiveness plunges us into the night of the unintelligible.

There has to be a sense of a structure of the impossibility of forgiving. For forgiveness to be pure, we have to be right in the heart of the radically unforgivable.

What is given in forgiveness? There are lots of difficulties.

If the person who does the unforgivable thing has clarity, then that's a different person--but who do you address your will to forgive then?

Can any survivor say "I forgive you?" Isn't it up to the destroyed, who can't speak?

Saying "I forgive you" already puts you in a state of power, etc. Of subjective mastery.

And what about you? Should you be forgiven? Can you? What's the split involved in "forgiving yourself"?

Forgive the Germans ... the French ... slavery ...

Pure forgiveness can't be therapeutic. No amnesty is involved. According to Derrida, it has to be aneconomic. Economy busting. Once you see a reason ... that's not forgiveness.

There's a proliferation of scenes of repentance, of forgiveness. Why now?

When someone is unforgiven, there's still the chance of an apocalyptic, transcendental judgement.

Forgiveness should not amount to reconciliation or an economy of normalization ... even a work of mourning.

It should be extraordinary, exceptional. History itself is interrupted, when this unconditional forgiveness is made.

BREAK

A student says that she can't accept that there's no social or political meaning possible in what's just happened. The teacher responds: we're inscribed in certain types of language that no longer apply (cf Adorno on the impossibility of poetry after the holocaust). I can perform masteries, I have done, but that would be letting you down as a teacher. It would be much easier to perform understanding right now. It's not that there are no social or political discourses, but they're disconnected right now. Shattered. Consider Bush: he understands, right? I don't understand. But he does. (laughter)

There's no transcendental guarantor of intelligibility.

Wouldn't forgiveness itself then be a traumatic event? Yes.

In Derrida's work on the gift, the true gift cannot be perceived. If it can be perceived, then economy, a system of exchanges, is reinscribed. [Discusses French philosopher Jankelevitch's work on forgiveness]. The person who is aware of their guilt is someone other than the guilty one. So where is forgiveness then?

On the one hand, the gracious gift is without conditions. On the other hand, there's the conditional. They're different but indissociable. The unconditional forgiveness, unlocatable as an act, and then the articulation, which relies on conditions.

Someone asks: what about agency? The teacher responds: it's difficult to speak of agency right now. The terrorists who slammed the plane into the WTC--what was their agency? And where was the CI Agency??? The questioner speaks of Arendt's notion of the banality of evil. The teacher responds: this may not be the banality of evil. We don't know that yet. It may be something else. Agency is an optimistic notion that doesn't allow for the unconscious. Let's be careful about evil, be careful about the onto-theological word- lists that are coming up.

I'm speaking from the spiral of a knocked out transmitter.

These crimes are unforgivable. Comparative lists are disrespectful. We shouldn't compose calculative lists. Each act is incalculable. A multiplicity. The desire to calculte is a metaphysical reflex. I refuse to compare atrocities. By refusing, I honor each atrocity in its singularity. Not just in the past, but the future. Time is compromised by trauma.

Who does one ask for forgiveness? God forgives Faust at the end of Goethe's book. Nietzsche thought this was unrealistic.

Pure forgiveness has nothing to do with judgement. Only the dead have the right to forgive?

Both sides have to recognize the nature of the fault. Therefore they have to speak the same language.

Lyotard's The Differend. Reality is always the plaintiff's responsibility. A victim is one who cannot prove something. Kafka warned us that it's impossible to establish one's innocence in and of itself. With rape, there is a need to re-enact in order to establish that something has happened, which produces a further violation.

To speak of forgiveness right now is untimely in Nietzsche's sense.

A student speaks of a friend who was raped and is struggling. Should she forgive? The teacher responds: if she needs to forgive then she should.

A student asks if there is a difference between compassion and forgiveness. The teacher replies: compassion is recuperative whereas forgiveness/the unforgivable implies alterity, the failure of cognition. Compassion involves the possibility of identifying with the other, whereas forgiveness/the unforgivable implies non- identification.

A student asks what the syllabus for this course is. The teacher replies: those buildings that blew up out there, that's the syllabus!

Avital Ronell is Chair of the German Department at New York University.