The Law of Genre
Author(s): Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 7, No. 1, On Narrative (Autumn, 1980), pp. 55-81
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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The Law of Genre
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Avital Ronell
Genres are not to be mixed.
I will not mix genres.
I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them.
Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all by themselves.
Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free their random
virtualities and turn them over to my audience-or, rather, to your
audience, to your auditory grasp, to whatever mobility they retain and
you bestow upon them to engender effects of all kinds without my havin
to stand behind them.
I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to be mixed; I will
not mix them.
As long as I release these utterances (which others might call speech
acts) in a form yet scarcely determined, given the open context out of
which I have just let them be grasped from "my" language-as long as I
do this, you may find it difficult to choose among several interpretative
options. They are legion, as I could demonstrate. They form an open
and essentially unpredictable series. But you may be tempted by at least
two types of audience, two modes of interpretation, or, if you prefer to
give these words more of a chance, then you may be tempted by two
different genres of hypothesis. Which ones?
On the one hand, it could be a matter of a fragmentary discourse
whose propositions would be of the descriptive, constative, and neutral
genre. In such a case, I would have named the operation which consists
of "genres are not to be mixed." I would have designated this operation
in a neutral fashion without evaluating it, without recommending or
From Glyph 7 (Spring 1980). Copyright ? 1980 by The Johns Hopkins University Press.
55
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56 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
advising against it, certainly without binding anyone to it. Without
claiming to lay down the law or to make this an act of law, I merely would
have summoned up, in a fragmentary utterance, the sense of a practice,
an act or event, as you wish: which is what sometimes happens when we
revert to "genres are not to be mixed." With reference to the same case,
and to a hypothesis of the same type, same mode, same genre-or same
order: when I said, "I will not mix genres," you may have discerned a
foreshadowing description-I am not saying a prescription-the descriptive
designation telling in advance what will transpire, predicting it
in the constative mode or genre, that is, it will happen thus, I will not mix
genres. The future tense describes, then, what will surely take place, as
you yourselves can judge; but for my part it does not constitute a commitment.
I am not making you a promise here, nor am I issuing myself
an order or invoking the authority of some law to which I am resolved to
submit myself. In this case, the future tense does not set the time of a
performative speech act of a promising or ordering type.
But another hypothesis, another type of audience, and another
interpretation would have been no less legitimate. "Genres are not to be
mixed" could strike you as a sharp order. You might have heard it
resound the elliptical but all the more authoritarian summons to a law of
a "do" or "do not" which, as everyone knows, occupies the concept or
constitutes the value of genre. As soon as the word "genre" is sounded, as
soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn.
And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions are not far
behind: "Do," "Do not" says "genre," the word "genre," the figure, the
voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in all genres, be
it a question of a generic or a general determination of what one calls
"nature" or physis (for example, a biological genre in the sense of gender,
or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general), or be it a question of
a typology designated as nonnatural and depending on laws or orders
which were once held to be opposed to physis according to those values
associated with technk, thesis, nomos (for example, an artistic, poetic, or
literary genre). But the whole enigma of genre springs perhaps most
closely from within this limit between the two genres of genre which,
neither separable nor inseparable, form an odd couple of one without
the other in which each evenly serves the other a citation to appear in the
figure of the other, simultaneously and indiscernibly saying "I" and
Jacques Derrida is professor of the history of philosophy at L'Ecole
Normale Superieure in Paris. His greatly influential works include
Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology, Spurs: Of Nietzsche's Styles, and the
forthcoming Positions and Dissemination. Avital Ronell teaches German at
the University of Virginia and is the author of Poetics of Desire and
Principles of Textuality in Kafka's "Das Schloss."
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 57
"we," me the genre, we genres, without it being possible to think that the
"I" is a species of the genre "we." For who would have us believe that we,
we two, for example, would form a genre or belong to one? Thus, as soon
as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a
line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity.
And so it goes in all cases, whether or not this law of genre be interpreted
as a determination or perhaps even as a destination of physis, and regardless
of the weight or range imputed to physis. If a genre is what it is,
or if it is supposed to be what it is destined to be by virtue of its telos, then
"genres are not to be mixed"; one should not mix genres, one owes it to
oneself not to get mixed up in mixing genres. Or, more rigorously:
genres should not intermix. And if it should happen that they do intermix,
by accident or through transgression, by mistake or through a
lapse, then this should confirm, since, after all, we are speaking of "mixing,"
the essential purity of their identity. This purity belongs to the
typical axiom: it is a law of the law of genre, whether or not the law is, as
one feels justified in saying, "natural." This normative position and this
evaluation are inscribed and prescribed even at the threshold of the
"thing itself," if something of the genre "genre" can be so named. And so
it follows that you might have taken the second sentence in the first
person, "I will not mix genres," as a vow of obedience, as a docile response
to the injunction emanating from the law of genre. In place of a
constative description, you would then hear a promise, an oath; you
would grasp the following respectful commitment: I promise you that I
will not mix genres, and, through this act of pledging utter faithfulness
to my commitment, I will be faithful to the law of genre, since, by its very
nature, the law invites and commits me in advance not to mix genres. By
publishing my response to the imperious call of the law, I would correspondingly
commit myself to be responsible.
Unless, of course, I were actually implicated in a wager, a challenge,
an impossible bet-in short, a situation that would exceed the matter of
merely engaging a commitment from me. And suppose for a moment
that it were impossible not to mix genres. What if there were, lodged
within the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of
contamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the law
were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility that would
confound its sense, order, and reason?
I have just proposed an alternative between two interpretations. I
did not do so, as you can imagine, in order to check myself. The line or
trait that seemed to separate the two bodies of interpretation is affected
straight away by an essential disruption that, for the time being, I shall let
you name or qualify in any way you care to: as internal division of
the trait, impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition, perversion,
deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, or degenerescence.
All these disruptive "anomalies" are engendered-and
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58 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
this is their common law, the lot or site they share-by repetition. One
might even say by citation or re-citation (ri-cit), provided that the restricted
use of these two words is not a call to strict generic order. A
citation in the strict sense implies all sorts of contextual conventions,
precautions, and protocols in the mode of reiteration, of coded signs,
such as quotation marks or other typographical devices used for writing
a citation. The same holds no doubt for the recit as a form, mode, or
genre of discourse, even-and I shall return to this-as a literary type.
And yet the law that protects the usage, in stricto sensu, of the words
"citation" and "ricit" is threatened intimately and in advance by a
counter-law that constitutes this very law, renders it possible, conditions it
and thereby renders it impossible-for reasons of edges on which we shall
run aground in just a moment-to edge through, to edge away from, or
to hedge around the counter-law itself. The law and the counter-law
serve each other citations summoning each other to appear, and each
recites the other in this proceeding (procks). There would be no cause for
concern if one were rigorously assured of being able to distinguish with
rigor between a citation and a non-citation, a recit and a non-ricit or a
repetition within the form of one or the other.
I shall not undertake to demonstrate, assuming it is still possible,
why you were unable to decide whether the sentences with which I
opened this presentation and marked this context were or were not
repetitions of a citational type; or whether they were or were not of the
performative type; or certainly whether they were, both of them,
together-and each time together-the one or the other. For perhaps
someone has noticed that, from one repetition to the next, a change had
insinuated itself into the relationship between the two initial utterances.
The punctuation had been slightly modified, as had the content of the
second independent clause. Theoretically, this barely noticeable shift
could have created a mutual independency between the interpretative
alternatives that might have tempted you to opt for one or the other, or
for one and the other of these two sentences. A particularly rich combinatory
of possibilities would thus ensue, which, in order not to exceed
my time limit and out of respect for the law of genre and of the audience,
I shall abstain from recounting. I am simply going to assume a
certain relationship between what has just now happened and the origin
of literature, as well as its aborigine or its abortion, to quote Philippe
Lacoue-Labarthe.
Provisionally claiming for myself the authority of such an assum
tion, I shall let our field of vision contract as I limit myself to a sor
species of the genre "genre." I shall focus on this genre of genre wh
generally supposed, and always a bit too rashly, not to be part of na
of physis, but rather of technk, of the arts, still more narrowly of poet
and most particularly of literature. But at the same time, I take
liberty to think that, while limiting myself thus, I exclude nothin
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 59
least in principle and de jure-the relationships here no longer being
those of extension, from exemplary individual to species, from species to
genre as genus or from the genre of genre to genre in general; rather, as
we shall see, these relationships are a whole order apart. What is at stake,
in effect, is exemplarity and its whole enigma-in other words, as the
word "enigma" indicates, exemplarity and the recit-which works
through the logic of the example.
Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall
attempt to formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formal
as possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is precisely a
principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy. In
the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I would speak
of a sort of participation without belonging-a taking part in without
being part of, without having membership in a set. With the inevitable
dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundary of the set
comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket larger than the
whole; and the outcome of this division and of this abounding remains as
singular as it is limitless.
To demonstrate this, I shall hold to the leanest generalities. But I
should like tojustify this initial indigence or asceticism as well as possible.
For example, I shall not enter into the passionate debate that poetics has
brought forth on the theory and the history of genre-theory, on the
critical history of the concept of genre from Plato to the present. My
stance is motivated by these considerations: in the first place, we now
have at our disposal some remarkable and, of late, handsomely enriched
works dealing either with primary texts or critical analyses. I am thinking
especially of the journalPoetique, of its issue entitled "Genres" (32) and of
Genette's opening essay, "Genres, 'Types,' Modes." From yet another
point of view, L'Absolu litteraire [The literary absolute] has already
created quite a stir in this context, and everything that I shall risk here
should perhaps resolve itself in a modest annotation on the margins of
this magistral work which I assume some of you have already read. I
could further justify my abstention or my abstinence here simply by
acknowledging the terminological luxury or rapture as well as the
taxonomic exuberance which debates of this kind, in a manner by no
means fortuitous, have sparked: I feel completely powerless to contain
this fertile proliferation-and not only because of time constraints. I
shall put forth, instead, two principal motives, hoping thereby to justify
my keeping to scant preliminary generalities at the edge of this prob-
lematic.
To what do these two motives essentially relate? In its most recent
phase--and this much is certainly clear in Genette's propositions--the
most advanced critical axis has led to a rereading of the entire history of
genre-theory. This rereading has been inspired by the perception-and
it must be said, despite the initial denial, by the correction---of two types
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60 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
of misconstruing or confusion. On the one hand, and this will be the first
motive or ground for my abstention, Plato and Aristotle have been subjected
to considerable deformation, as Genette reminds us, insofar as
they have been viewed in terms alien to their thinking, and even in terms
that they themselves would have rejected; but this deformation has usually
taken on the form of naturalization. Following a classical precedent,
one has deemed natural structures or typical forms whose history is
hardly natural but, rather, quite to the contrary, complex and heterogeneous.
These forms have been treated as natural-and let us bear in
mind the entire semantic scale of this difficult word whose span
far-ranging and open-ended that it extends as far as the expr
"natural language," by which term everyone agrees tacitly to o
natural language only to a formal or artificial language without the
implying that this natural language is a simple physical or bio
production. Genette insists at length on this naturalization of gen
"The history of genre-theory is strewn with these fascinating ou
that inform and deform reality, a reality often heterogenous to the lite
field, and that claim to discover a natural 'system' wherein they con
a factitious symmetry heavily reinforced by fake windows" (p. 408,
added). In its most efficacious and legitimate aspect, this critical re
of the history (and) of genre-theory is based on an opposition bet
nature and history and, more generally-as the allusion to an artif
construct indicates (". . . wherein they construct a factitious
metry. .. .")-on an opposition between nature and what ca
called the series of all its others. Such an opposition seems to go wi
saying; placed within this critical perspective, it is never quest
Even if it has been tucked away discretely in some passage th
escaped my attention, this barely visible suspicion clearly had no
on the general organization of the problematic. This does not dim
the relevance or fecundity of a reading such as Genette's. But a
remains open for some preliminary questions concerning his
suppositions, for some questions concerning the boundaries wh
begins to take hold or take place. The form of these boundarie
contain me and rein me in. These general propositions whose num
always open and indeterminable for whatever critical interpretation
not be dealt with here. What however seems to me to require
urgent attention is the relationship of nature to history, of nature
others, precisely when genre is on the line.
Let us consider the most general concept of genre, from the m
mal trait or predicate delineating it permanently through the mo
tions of its types and the regimens of its history: it rends and de
itself by mustering all its energy against a simple opposition that
from nature and from history, as from nature and the vast lineage
others (techn2, nomos, thesis, then spirit, society, freedom, history, et
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 61
tween physis and its others, genos certainly locates one of the privileged
scenes of the process and, no doubt, sheds the greatest obscurity on it.
One need not mobilize etymology to this end and could just as well
equate genos with birth, and birth in turn with the generous force of
engenderment or generation--physis, in fact-as with race, familial
membership, classificatory genealogy or class, age class (generation), or
social class; it comes as no surprise that, in nature and art, genre, a
concept that is essentially classificatory and genealogico-taxonomic, itself
engenders so many classificatory vertigines when it goes about classifying
itself and situating the classificatory principle or instrument within a set.
As with the class itself, the principle of genre is unclassifiable; it tolls the
knell of the knell (glas), in other words, of classicum, of what permits
one to call out (calare) orders and to order the manifold within a nomenclature.
Genos thus indicates the place, the now or never of the most
necessary meditation on the "fold" which is no more historical than natural
in the classical sense of these two words, and which turns phyein
over to itself across others that perhaps no longer relate to it according to
that epoch-making logic which was decisory, critical, oppositional, even
dialectical but rather according to the trait of an entirely different contract.
De jure, this meditation acts as an absolute prerequisite without
which any historical perspectivizing will always be difficult to legitimate.
For example, the Romantic era-this powerful figure indicted by Genette
(since it attempted to reinterpret the system of modes as a system of
genres)-is no longer a simple era and can no longer be inscribed as a
moment or a stage placeable within the trajectory of a "history" whose
concept we could be certain of. Romanticism, if something of the sort
can be thus identified, is also the general repetition of all the folds that in
themselves gather, couple, divide physis as well as genos through the
genre, and through all the genres of genre, through the mixing of genre
that is "more than a genre," through the excess of genre in relation to
itself, as to its abounding movement and its general assemblage which
coincides, too, with its dissolution.' Such a "moment" is no longer a
simple moment in the history and theory of literary genres. To treat it
thus would in effect implicate one as tributary-whence the strange
logic--of something that has in itself constituted a certain Romantic
motif, namely, the teleological ordering of history. Romanticism simultaneously
obeys naturalizing and historicizing logic, and it can be shown
easily enough that we have not yet been delivered from the Romantic
heritage--even though we might wish it so and assuming that such a
deliverance would be of compelling interest to us-as long as we persist
in drawing attention to historical concerns and the truth of historical
1. In this respect, the second footnote in L'Absolu litteraire (Paris, 1978), p. 271, seems
to me, let us say, a bit too equitable in its rigorous and honest prudence.
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62 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
production in order to militate against abuses or confusions of naturalization.
The debate, it could be argued, remains itself a part or effect
of Romanticism.
A second motive detains me at the threshold or on the edge of a
possible problematic of genre (as) history and theory of history and of
genre-theory-another genre, in fact. For the moment, I find it impossible
to decide-impossible for reasons that I do not take to be accidental,
and this, precisely, is what matters to me-I find it impossible to
decide whether the possibly exemplary text which I intend to put to the
test does or does not lend itself to the distinction drawn between mode
and genre. Now, as you may recall, Genette demonstrates the stringen
necessity of this distinction; and he rests his case on "the confusion of
modes and genres" (p. 417). This implies a serious charge again
Romanticism, even though "the romantic reinterpretation of the system
of modes as a system of genres is neither defacto nor dejure the epilogu
to this long history" (p. 415). This confusion, according to Genette, ha
aided and abetted the naturalization of genres by projecting onto them
the "privilege of naturalness, which was legitimately . . . that of three
modes..." (p. 421). Suddenly, this naturalization "makes these arch
genres into ideal or natural types which they neither are nor can b
there are no arch-genres that can totally escape historicity while preserving
a generic definition. There are modes, for example: the recit. There are
genres, for example: the novel; the relation of genres to modes is com
plex and perhaps not, as Aristotle suggests, one of simple inclusion."
If I am inclined to poise myself on this side of Genette's argument, i
is not only because of his ready acceptance of the distinction between
nature and history but also because of its implications with regard to
mode and to the distinction between mode and genre. Genette's definition
of mode contains this singular and interesting characteristic: it re
mains, in contradistinction to genre, purely formal. Reference to a content
has no pertinence. This is not the case with genre. The generi
criterion and the modal criterion, Genette says, are "absolutely
heterogenous": "each genre defined itself essentially by a specification o
content which was not prescribed by the definition of mode .. ." (p. 417
I do not believe that this recourse to the opposition of form and content
this distinction between mode and genre, need be contested, and m
purpose is not to challenge isolated aspects of Genette's argument. One
might just question the presuppositions for the legitimacy of such an
argument. One might also question the extent to which his argument ca
help us read a given text when it behaves in a given way with regard t
mode and genre, especially when the text does not seem to be written
sensibly within their limits but rather about the very subject of those
limits and with the aim of disrupting their order. The limits, for instance,
of that mode which would be, according to Genette, the ric
("There are modes, for example: the rdcit"). Of the (possibly) exemplar
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 63
text which I shall address shortly, I shall not hasten to add that it is a
"r&cit," and you will soon understand why. In this text, the "ricit" is not
only a mode, and a mode put into practice or put to the test because it is
deemed impossible; it is also the name of a theme. It is the nonthematizable
thematic content of something of a textual form that assumes a point
of view with respect to the genre, even though it perhaps does not come
under the heading of any genre-and perhaps no longer even under the
heading of literature, if it indeed wears itself out around genreless
modalizations, and would confirm one of Genette's propositions:
"Genres are, properly speaking, literary/or aesthetic/ categories; modes
are categories that pertain to linguistics or, more precisely, to an anthropology
of verbal expression" (p. 418).
In a very singular manner, the very short text which I will discuss
presently makes the recit and the impossibility of the recit its theme, its
impossible theme or content at once inaccessible, indeterminable, interminable,
and inexhaustible; and it makes the word "r&cit," under the
aegis of a certain form, its titleless title, the mentionless mention of its
genre. This text, as I shall try to demonstrate, seems to be made, among
other things, to make light of all the tranquil categories of genre-theory
and history in order to upset their taxonomic certainties, the distribution
of their classes, and the presumed stability of their classical nomenclatures.
It is a text destined, at the same time, to summon up these classes
by conducting their proceeding, by proceeding from the proceeding to
the law of genre. For if the juridical code has frequently thrust itself
upon me in order to hear this case, it has done so to call as witness a
(possible) exemplary text and because I am convinced fundamental
rights are bound up in all of this: the law itself is at stake.
These are the two principal reasons why I shall keep to the liminal
edge of (the) history (and) of genre-theory. Here now, very quickly, is
the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership,
of contamination, etc., which I mentioned earlier. It will seem
meager to you, and even of staggering abstractness. It does not particularly
concern either genres, or types, or modes, or any form in the strict
sense of its concept. I therefore do not know under what title the field or
object submitted to this law should be placed. It is perhaps the limitless
field of general textuality. I can take each word of the series (genre, type,
mode, form) and decide that it will hold for all the others (all genres of
genres, types, modes, forms; all types of types, genres, modes, forms; all
forms of forms, etc.). The trait common to these classes of classes is
precisely the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one
recognizes, or should recognize, a membership in a class. There should
be a trait upon which one could rely in order to decide that a given
textual event, a given "work," corresponds to a given class (genre, type,
mode, form, etc.). And there should be a code enabling one to decide
questions of class-membership on the basis of this trait. For example-a
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64 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
very humble axiom, but, by the same token, hardly contestable-if a
genre exists (let us say the novel, since no one seems to contest its generic
quality), then a code should provide an identifiable trait and one which is
identical to itself, authorizing us to determine, to adjudicate whether a
given text belongs to this genre or perhaps to that genre. Likewise,
outside of literature or art, if one is bent on classifying, one should
consult a set of identifiable and codifiable traits to determine whether
this or that, such a thing or such an event belongs to this set or that class.
This may seem trivial. Such a distinctive trait qua mark is however always
a priori remarkable. It is always possible that a set-I have compelling
reasons for calling this a text, whether it be written or oral-re-marks on
this distinctive trait within itself. This can occur in texts that do not, at a
given moment, assert themselves to be literary or poetic. A defense
speech or newspaper editorial can indicate by means of a mark, even if it
is not explicitly designated as such, "Viola! I belong, as anyone may
remark, to the type of text called a defense speech or an article of the
genre newspaper-editorial." The possibility is always there. This does
not constitute a text ipsofacto as "literature," even though such a possibility,
always left open and therefore eternally remarkable, situates perhaps
in every text the possibility of its becoming literature. But this does not
interest me at the moment. What interests me is that this re-mark-ever
possible for every text, for every corpus of traces-is absolutely necessary
for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry, or literature. It
underwrites the eruption of technk, which is never long in coming. I
submit this axiomatic question for your consideration: Can one identify
a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it
does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or
make it remarkable in any way? Let me clarify two points on this subject.
First, it is possible to have several genres, an intermixing of genres or a
total genre, the genre "genre" or the poetic or literary genre as genre of
genres. Second, this re-mark can take on a great number of forms and
can itself pertain to highly diverse types. It need not be a designation or
"mention" of the type found beneath the title of certain books (novel,
recit, drama). The remark of belonging need not pass through the consciousness
of the author or the reader, although it often does so. It can
also refute this consciousness or render the explicit "mention" mendacious,
false, inadequate, or ironic according to all sorts of overdetermined
figures. Finally, this remarking-trait need be neither a
theme nor a thematic component of the work-although of course this
instance of belonging to one or several genres, not to mention all the
traits that mark this belonging, often have been treated as theme, even
before the advent of what we call "modernism." If I am not mistaken in
saying that such a trait is remarkable, that is, noticeable, in every aesthet
ic, poetic, or literary corpus, then consider this paradox, consider the
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 65
irony (which is irreducible to a consciousness or an attitude): this supplementary
and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, does
not properly pertain to any genre or class. The re-mark of belonging
does not belong. It belongs without belonging, and the "without" (or the
suffix "-less") which relates belonging to non-belonging appears only in
the timeless time of the blink of an eye (Augenblick). The eyelid closes,
but barely, an instant among instants, and what it closes is verily the eye,
the view, the light of day. But without such respite, nothing would come to
light. To formulate it in the scantiest manner-the simplest but most
apodictic-I submit for your consideration the following hypothesis: a
text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre.
Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless
text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never
amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a
free, anarchic, and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of
participation itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic
mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself. If remarks of
belonging belong without belonging, participate without belonging, then
genre-designations cannot be simply part of the corpus. Let us take the
designation "novel" as an example. This should be marked in one way or
another, even if it does not appear, as it often does in French and
German texts, in the explicit form of a subtitled designation, and even if
it proves deceptive or ironic. This designation is not novelistic; it does
not, in whole or in part, take part in the corpus whose denomination it
nonetheless imparts. Nor is it simply extraneous to the corpus. But this
singular topos places within and without the work, along its boundary, an
inclusion and exclusion with regard to genre in general, as to an identifi,able
class in general. It gathers together the corpus and, at the same
time, in the same blinking of an eye, keeps it from closing, from identifying
itself with itself. This axiom of non-closure or non-fulfillment
enfolds within itself the condition for the possibility and the impossibility
of taxonomy. This inclusion and this exclusion do not remain exterior to
one another; they do not exclude each other. But neither are they immanent
or identical to each other. They are neither one nor two. They
form what I shall call the genre-clause, a clause stating at once the juridical
utterance, the precedent-making designation and the law-text, but also
the closure, the closing that excludes itself from what it includes (one
could also speak of a floodgate ["&cluse] of genre). The clause or floodgate
of genre declasses what it allows to be classed. It tolls the knell of
genealogy or of genericity, which it however also brings forth to the light
of day. Putting to death the very thing that it engenders, it cuts a strange
figure; a formless form, it remains nearly invisible, it neither sees the day
nor brings itself to light. Without it, neither genre nor literature come to
light, but as soon as there is this blinking of an eye, this clause or this
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66 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
floodgate of genre, at the very moment that a genre or a literature is
broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the end
begins.
The end begins, this is a citation. Maybe a citation. I might have
taken it from the text which seems to me to bring itself forth as an
example, as an example of this unfigurable figure of clusion.
What I shall try to convey to you now will not be called by its generic
or modal name. I shall not say this drama, this epic, this novel, this
novella or this recit-certainly not this recit. All of these generic or modal
names would be equally valid or equally invalid for something which is
not even quite a book, but which was published in 1973 in the editorial
form of a small volume of thirty-two pages. It bears the title La Folie du
jour [approximately: The Madness of the Day]. The author's name:
Maurice Blanchot. In order to speak about it, I shall call this thing La
Folie dujour, its given name which it bears legally and which gives us the
right, as of its publication date, to identify and classify it in our copyright
records at the Bibliotheque Nationale. One could fashion a non-finite
number of readings from La Folie dujour. I have attempted a few myself,
and shall do so again elsewhere, from another point of view. The topos of
view, sight, blindness, point of view is, moreover, inscribed and traversed
in La Folie du jour according to a sort of permanent revolution that
engenders and virtually brings to the light of day points of view, twists,
versions, and reversions of which the sum remains necessarily uncountable
and the account, impossible. The deductions, rationalizations, and
warnings that I must inevitably propose will arise, then, from an act of
unjustifiable violence. A brutal and mercilessly depleting selectivity will
obtrude upon me, upon us, in the name of a law that La Folie dujour has,
in its turn, already reviewed, and with the foresight that a certain kind of
police brutality is perhaps an inevitable accomplice to our concern for
professional competence.
What will I ask ofLa Folie dujour? To answer, to testify, to say what it
has to say with respect to the law of mode or the law of genre and, more
precisely, with respect to the law of the recit, which, as we have just been
reminded, is a mode and not a genre.
On the cover, below the title, we find no mention of genre. In this
most peculiar place that belongs neither to the title nor to the subtitle,
nor even simply to the corpus of the work, the author did not affix,
although he has often done so elsewhere, the designation "recit" or
"novel," maybe (but only maybe) by erroneously subsuming both of
them, Genette would say, under the unique category of the genre. About
this designation which figures elsewhere and which appears to be absent
here, I shall say only two things:
1. On the one hand it commits one to nothing. Neither reader nor
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 67
critic nor author are bound to believe that the text preceded by this
designation conforms readily to the strict, normal, normed, or normative
definition of the genre, to the law of the genre or of the mode.
Confusion, irony, the shift in conventions toward a new definition (in
what name should it be prohibited?), the search for a supplementary
effect, any of these things could prompt one to entitle as novel or recit
what in truth or according to yesterday's truth would be neither one nor
the other. All the more so if the words "ricit," "novel," "cine-roman," "complete
dramatic works" or, for all I know, "literature" are no longer in the
place which conventionally mentions genre but, as has happened and will
happen again (shortly), they are found to be holding the position and
function of the title itself, of the work's given name.
2. Blanchot has often had occasion to modify the genre-designation
from one version of his work to the next or from one edition to the next.
Since I am unable to cover the entire spectrum of this problem, I shall
simply cite the example of the "recit-" designation effaced between one
version and the next of Death Sentence (trans. Lydia Davis [Barrytown,
N.Y., 1978]) at the same time as a certain epilogue is removed from the
end of a double recit, which, in a manner of speaking, constitutes this book.
This effacement of "recit," leaving a trace that, inscribed and filed away,
remains as an effect of supplementary relief which is not easily accounted
for in all of its facets. I cannot arrest the course of my lecture here, no
more than I can pause to consider the very scrupulous and minutely
differentiated distribution of the designations "recit" and "novel" from
one narrative work to the next, no more than I can question whether
Blanchot distinguished the genre and mode designations, no more than
I can discuss Blanchot's entire discourse on the difference between the
narratorial voice and the narrative voice which is, to be sure, somethi
other than a mode. I would point out only one thing: at the very mome
the first version of Death Sentence appears, bearing mention as it does
"recit," the first version of La Folie dujour is published with another tit
about which I shall momentarily speak.
La Folie dujour, then, makes no mention of genre or mode. But the
word "recit" appears at least four times in the last two pages in order t
name the theme of La Folie du jour, its sense or its story, its content o
part of its content-in any case, its decisive proceedings and stakes. It is
recit without a theme and without a cause entering from the outside; y
it is without interiority. It is the recit of an impossible recit whose "pr
duction" occasions what happens or, rather, what remains, but whi
does not relate it, nor relate to it as to an outside reference, even if
everything remains foreign to it and out of bounds. It is even less feasible
for me to relate to you the story of La Folie du jour which is staked
precisely on the possibility and the impossibility of relating a story.
Nonetheless, in order to create the greatest possible clarity, in the name
of daylight itself, that is to say (as will become clear), in the name of the
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68 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
law, I shall take the calculated risk of flattening out the unfolding or
coiling up of this text, its permanent revolution whose rounds are made
to recoil from any kind of flattening. And this is why the one who says
"I," and the one after all who speaks to us, who "recites" for us, this one
who says "I" tells his inquisitors that he cannot manage to constitute
himself as narrator (in the sense of the term that is not necessarily literary)
and tells them that he cannot manage to identify with himself
sufficiently or to remember himself well enough to gather the story and
recit that are demanded of him-which the representatives of society and
the law require of him. The one who says "I" (who does not manage to
say "I") seems to relate what has happened to him or, rather, what has
nearly happened to him after presenting himself in a mode that defies all
norms of self-presentation: he nearly lost his sight (his facility for viewing)
following a traumatic event-probably an assault. I say "probably"
because La Folie dujour wholly upsets, in a discrete but terribly efficient
manner, all the certainties upon which so much of discourse is constructed:
the value of an event, first of all, of reality, of fiction, of appearance
and so on, all this being carried away by the disseminal and
mad polysemy of "day," of the word "day," which, once again, I cannot
dwell upon here. Having nearly lost his sight (vue), having been taken
in by a kind of medico-social institution, he now resides under the watchful
eye of doctors, handed over to the authority of these specialists who
are representatives of the law as well, legist doctors who demand that he
testify-and in his own interest, or so it seems at first-about what happened
to him so that remedial justice may be dispensed. His faithful
recit-(but let me borrow for the sake of simplicity, and because it conforms
fairly well to this context, the English word "account")-hence, his
faithful account of events should render justice unto the law. The law
demands a narrative account.
Pronounced four times in the last three pages of La Folie dujour, th
word "account" does not seem to designate a literary genre but rather
certain type or mode of discourse. That is, in effect, the appearance of i
Everything seems to happen as if the account-the question of or rathe
the demand for the account, the response, and the nonresponse to the
demand-found itself staged and figured as one of the themes, objects,
stakes in a more bountiful text, La Folie dujour, whose genre would be o
another order and would in any case overstep the boundaries of th
account with all its generality and all its genericity. The account itself
would of course not cover this generic generality of the literary corpu
named La Folie dujour. Now we might already feel inclined to consider
this appearance suspect, and we might be jolted from our certainties b
an allusion that "I" will make: the one who says "I," who is not by force
necessity a narrator, nor necessarily always the same, notes that th
representatives of the law, those who demand of him an account in th
name of the law, consider and treat him, in his personal and civil iden
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 69
tity, not only as an "educated" man-and an educated man, they often
tell him, ought to be able to speak and recount; as a competent subject,
he ought to be able to know how to piece together a story by saying "I"
and "exactly" how things happened to him-they regard him not only as
an "educated" man, but also as a writer. He is writer and reader, a
creature of "libraries," the reader of this account. This is not sufficient
cause, but it is, in any case, a first clue and one whose impact incites us to
think that the required account does not simply remain in a relationship
that is extraneous to literature or even to a literary genre. Lest we not be
content with this suspicion, let us weigh the possibility of the inclusion of
a modal structure within a vaster, more general corpus, whether literary
or not and whether or not related to the genre. Such an inclusion raises
questions concerning edge, borderline, boundary, and abounding which
do not arise without a fold.
What sort of a fold? According to which fold and which figure of
enfoldment?
Here are the three final paragraphs; they are of unequal length,
with the last of these comprising approximately one line:
They demanded: Tell us "exactly" how things happened.-An account?
I began: I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known
some joy. This is saying too little. I related the story in its entirety,
to which they listened, it seems, with great interest-at least initially.
But the end was a surprise for them all. "After that beginning,"
they said, "you should proceed to the facts." How so? The
account was over.
I should have realized that I was incapable of c
account of these events. I had lost the sense of the st
pens in a good many illnesses. But this explanation on
more demanding. Then I noticed, for the first time,
two and that this infringement on their traditional
though it can be explained away by the fact that one
eye doctor, the other a specialist in mental illnessesgave
our conversation the character of an authoritar
tion, overseen and controlled by a strict set of rules
neither of them was the chief of police. But being tw
they were three, and this third one remained firml
am sure, that a writer, a man who speaks and reasons
tion, is always capable of recounting the facts which
An account? No, no account, nevermore.
In the first of the three paragraphs that I have just cited, he claims
that something is to begin after the word "account" punctuated by a
question mark (An account?-herein implied: they want an account, is it
then an account that they want? "I began..."). This something is nothing
other than the first line on the first page ofLa Folie dujour. These are
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70 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
the same words, in the same order, but this is not a citation in the strict
sense for, stripped of quotation marks, these words commence or recommence
a quasi-account that will engender anew the entire sequence
comprising this new point of departure. In this way, the first words ("I
am neither learned nor ignorant...") that come after the word "account"
and its question mark, that broach the beginning of the account
extorted by the law's representatives-these first words mark a collapse
that is unthinkable, irrepresentable, unsituable within a linear order of
succession, within a spatial or temporal sequentiality, within an objectifiable
topology or chronology. One sees, without seeing, one reads the
crumbling of an upper boundary or of the initial edge in La Folie dujour,
uncoiled according to the "normal" order, the one regulated by common
law, editorial convention, positive law, the regime of competency in our
logo-alphabetical culture, etc. Suddenly, this upper or initial boundary,
which is commonly called the first line of a book, is forming a pocket
inside the corpus. It is taking the form of an invagination through which
the trait of the first line, the borderline, splits while remaining the same
and traverses yet also bounds the corpus. The "account" which he claims
is beginning at the end and, by legal requisition, is none other than the
one that has begun from the beginning ofLa Folie dujour and in which,
therefore, he gets around to saying that he begins, etc. And it is without
beginning or end, without content and without edge. There is only
content without edge-without boundary or frame-and there is only
edge without content. The inclusion (or occlusion, inocclusive invagination)
is interminable: it is an analysis of the account that can only turn in
circles in an unarrestable, inenarrable, and insatiably recurring
manner-but one terrible for those who, in the name of the law, require
that order reign in the account, for those who want to know, with all the
required competence, "exactly" how this happens. For if "I" or "he"
continued to tell what he has told, he would end up endlessly returning
to this point and beginning again to begin, that is to say, to begin with an
end that precedes the beginning. And from the viewpoint of objective
space and time, the point at which he stops is absolutely unascertainable
("I have told them the entire story..."), for there is no "entire" story
except for the one that interrupts itself in this way.
A lower edge of invagination will, if one can say so, respond to this
"first" invagination of the upper edge by intersecting it. The "final line"
resumes the question posed before the "I began" (An account?) and bespeaks
a resolution or promises it, tells of the commitment made no
longer to give an account. As if he had already given one! And yet, yes
(yes and no), an account has taken place. Hence the last word: "An
account? No, no account, nevermore." It has been impossible to decide
whether the recounted event and the event of the account itself ever
took place. Impossible to decide whether there was an account, for the
one who barely manages to say "I" and to constitute himself as narrator
recounts that he has not been able to recount-but what, exactly? Well,
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 71
everything, including the demand for an account. And if an assured and
guaranteed decision is impossible, this is because there is nothing more
to be done than to commit oneself, to perform, to wager, to allow chance
its chance-to make a decision that is essentially edgeless, bordering
perhaps only on madness.
Yet another impossible decision follows, one which involves the
promise "No, no account, nevermore": Is this promise a part of or apart
from the account? Legally speaking, it is party to La Folie dujour, but not
necessarily to the account or to the simulacrum of the account. Its trait
splits again into an internal and external edge. It repeats-without
citing-the question apparently posed above (An account?) of which it
can be said that, in this permanent revolution of order, it follows, doubles,
or reiterates it in advance. Thus another lip or invaginating loop
takes shape here. This time the lower edge creates a pocket in order to
come back into the corpus and to rise again on this side of the upper or
initial line's line of invagination. This would form a double chiasmatic
invagination of edges:
A. "I am neither learned nor ignorant..."
B. "An account? I began:"
A'. "I am neither learned nor ignorant..."
B'. "An account? No, no account, nevermore..."
"I began.. ."
It is thus impossible to decide whether an event, account, account of
event, or event of accounting took place. Impossible to settle upon the
simple borderlines of this corpus, of this ellipse unremittingly repealing
itself within its own expansion. When we fall back on the poetic consequences
enfolded within this dilemma, we find that it becomes difficult
indeed to speak here with conviction about an account as a determined
mode included within a more general corpus or one simply related, in its
determination, to other modes or, quite simply, to something other than
itself. All is narrative account and nothing is; the account's outgate remains
within the account in a non-inclusive mode, and this structure is
itself related so remotely to a dialectical structure that it even inscribes
dialectics in the account's ellipse. All is account, nothing is: and we shall
not know whether the relationship between these two propositions-the
strange conjunction of the account and the accountless-belongs to the
account itself. What indeed happens when the edge pronounces a sen-
tence?
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72 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
Faced with this type of difficulty-the consequences or implications
of which cannot be deployed here-one might be tempted to take recourse
in the law or the rights which govern published texts. One might
be tempted to argue as follows: all these insoluble problems of delimitation
are raised "on the inside" of a book classified as a work of literature
or literary fiction. Pursuant to these juridical norms, this book has a
beginning and an end that leave no opening for indecision. This book
has a determinable beginning and end, a title, an author, a publisher, its
distinctive denomination is La Folie du jour. At this place, where I am
pointing, on this page, right here, you can see its first word; here, its final
period, perfectly situable in objective space. And all the sophisticated
transgressions, all the infinitesimal subversions that may captivate you
are not possible except within this enclosure for which these transgressions
and subversions moreover maintain an essential need in order to
take place. Furthermore, on the inside of this normed space, the word
"account" does not name a literary operation or genre, but a curre
mode of discourse, and it does so regardless of the formidable problem
of structure, edge, set theory, the part and whole, etc., that it raises
this "literary" corpus.
That is all well and good. But in its very relevance, this objection
cannot be sustained-for example, it cannot save the modal determination
of the account--except by referring to extra-literary and ev
extra-linguistic juridical norms. The objection makes an appeal to t
law and calls to mind the fact that the subversion of La Folie du jo
needs the law in order to take place. Whereby the objection reproduce
and accomplishes its staging within La Folie du jour: the account, man
dated and prescribed by law but also, as we shall see, commandin
requiring, and producing law in turn. In short, the whole critical scen
of competence in which we are engaged is party to and part of La Folie
jour, in whole and in part, the whole is a part.
The whole does nothing but begin. I could have begun with wh
resembles the absolute beginning, with the juridico-historical order o
this publication. What has been lightly termed the first version of La Fo
dujour was not a book. Published in the journal Empedocle (2 May 1949
it bore another title-indeed, several other titles. On the journal's cove
here it is, one reads:
Maurice Blanchot
Un recit?
[An Account?]
Later, the question mark disappears twice. First, when the title is
reproduced within the journal in the table of contents:
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 73
Maurice Blanchot
Un recit
[An Account],
then below the first line:
Un recit [An Account
par by
Maurice Blanchot M. B.]
Could you tell whether these titles, writ
the archives, make up a single title, titles o
account (which of course figures as an imp
or the title of a genre? Even if the latter w
would be of the sort that releases questi
enacted by La Folie du jour. This enactm
naturalization and deconstitution of the op
mode/genre.
Now let us turn to some of these questions. First, to what could the
words "An Account" refer in their manifold occurrences and diverse
punctuations? And precisely how does reference function here? In o
case, the question mark can also serve as a supplementary remark
dicating the necessity of all these questions as the insolvent character
indecision: Is this an account? Is it an account that I entitle? asks the title
in entitling. Is it an account that they want? What entitles them? Is it an
account as discursive mode or as literary operation, or perhaps even as
literary genre whose theme would be mode or genre? Likewise, the title
could excerpt, as does a metonymy, a fragment of the account without
an account (to wit, the words "an account" with and without a question
mark), but such an iterative excepting is not citational. For the title,
guaranteed and protected by law but also making law, retains a referential
structure which differs radically from the one underlying other
occurrences of the "same" words in the text. Whatever the issue-title,
reference, or mode and genre-the case before us always involves the
law and, in particular, the relations formed around and to law. All the
questions which we have just addressed can be traced to an enormous
matrix that generates the non-thematizable thematic power of a simulated
account: it is this inexhaustible writing which recounts without
telling, and which speaks without recounting.
Account of an accountless account, an account without edge or
boundary, account all of whose visible space is but some border of itself
without "self," consisting of the framing edge without content, without
modal or generic boundaries--such is the law of this textual event, of
this text that also speaks the law, its own and that of the other as reader
of this text which, speaking the law, also imposes itself as a law text, as
the text of the law. What, then, is the law of the genre of this singular
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74 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
text? It is law, it is the figure of the law which will also be the invisible
center, the themeless theme of La Folie dujour or, as I am now entitled to
say, of "An Account?"
This law, however, as law of genre, is not exclusively binding on the
genre qua category of art and literature. But, paradoxically, and just as
impossibly, the law of genre also has a controlling influence and is binding
on that which draws the genre into engendering, generations,
genealogy, and degenerescence. You have already witnessed its approach
often enough, with all the figures of this degenerescent selfengendering
of an account, with this figure of the law which, like the day
that it is, challenges the opposition between the law of nature and the law
of symbolic history. The remarks that have just been made on the double
chiasmatic invagination of edges should suffice to exclude any notion
linking all these complications to pure form or one suggesting that they
could be formalized outside the content. The question of the literary
genre is not a formal one: it covers the motif of the law in general, of
generation in the natural and symbolic senses, of birth in the natural and
symbolic senses, of the generation difference, sexual difference between
the feminine and masculine genre/gender, of the hymen between the
two, of a relationless relation between the two, of an identity and difference
between the feminine and masculine. The word "hymen" tells us
several things. It not only points toward a paradoxical logic that is
inscribed without however being formalized under this name; it should,
in the first place, serve to remind the Anglo-American reader that, in
French, the semantic scale of genre is much larger and more expansive
than in English, and thus always includes within its reach the gender.
Additionally, and with respect to the "hymen," let us not forget everything
that Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy tell us in
L'Absolu litteraire (especially on p. 276) about the relationship between
genre (Gattung) and marriage, as well as about the intricate bonds of
serial connections begotten by gattieren ("to mix," "to classify"), gatten
("to couple"), Gatte/Gattin ("husband/wife"), and so forth?
Once articulated within the precinct of Blanchot's entire discourse
on the neuter, the most elliptical question would inevitably have to assume
this form: What about a neutral genre/gender? Or one whose
neutrality would not be negative (neither . . . nor), nor dialectical, but
affirmative, and doubly affirmative (or... or)?
Here again, due to time limitations but also to more essential reasons
concerning the structure of the text, I shall have to excerpt some
abstract fragments. This will not occur without a supplement of violence
and pain.
As first word and surely most impossible word ofLa Folie dujour, "I"
presents itself as self (moi), me, a man. Grammatical law leaves no doubt
about this subject. The first sentence, phrased in French in the masculine
("Je ne suis ni savant ni ignorant" and not "Je ne suis ni savante ni
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 75
ignorante"), says, with regard to knowledge, nothing but a double negation
(neither ... nor). Thus, no glint of self-presentation. But the double
negation gives passage to a double affirmation (yes, yes) that enters into
alignment or alliance with itself. Forging an alliance or marriage-bond
("hymen") with itself, this boundless double affirmation utters a measureless,
excessive, immense yes: both to life and to death:
I am neither learned nor ignorant. I have known some joy. This is
saying too little: I am living, and this life gives me the greatest
pleasure. And death? When I die (perhaps soon), I shall know an
immense pleasure. I am not speaking of the foretaste of death,
which is bland and often disagreeable. Suffering is debilitating. But
this is the remarkable truth of which I am sure: I feel a boundless
pleasure in living and shall be boundlessly content to die.
Now, seven paragraphs further along, the chance and probability of
such an affirmation (one that is double and therefore boundless, limitless)
is granted to woman. It returns to woman. Rather, not to woman or
even to the feminine, to the female genre/gender, or to the generality of
the feminine genre but-and this is why I spoke of chance and
probability-"usually" to women. It is "usually" women who say yes, yes
To life to death. This "usually" avoids treating the feminine as a genera
and generic force; it makes an opening for the event, the performance
the uncertain contingencies, the encounter. And it is indeed from the
contingent experience of the encounter that "I" will speak here. In the
passage that I am about to cite, the expression "men" occurs twice. The
second occurrence names the sexual genre, the sexual difference (aner,
vir-but sexual difference does not occur between a species and
genre); in the first occurrence, "men" comes into play in an indecisive
manner in order to name either the genre of human beings (the genre
humain, named "species" in the text) or sexual difference:
Men would like to escape death, bizarre species that they are. And
some cry out, "die, die," because they would like to escape life.
"What a life! I'll kill myself, I'll surrender!" This is pitiful and
strange; it is in error.
But I have encountered beings who never told life to be quiet or
death to go away-usually women, beautiful creatures. As for men,
terror besieges them .... [Italics added]
What has thus far transpired in these seven paragraphs? Usually
women, beautiful creatures, relates "I." As it happens, encounter,
chance, affirmation of chance do not always manage to happen. There i
no natural or symbolic law, universal law, or law of a genre/gender here
Only usually, usually women, (comma of apposition) beautiful creatures
Through its highly calculated logic, the comma of apposition leaves open
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76 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
the possibility of thinking that these women are not beautiful and then,
on the other hand, as it happens, capable of saying yes, yes to life to
death, of not saying be quiet, go away to life to death. The comma of
apposition lets us think that they are beautiful, women and beauties,
these creatures, insofar as they affirm both life and death. Beauty, the
feminine beauty of these "beings," would be bound up with this double
affirmation.
Now I myself, who "am neither learned nor ignorant," "I feel a
boundless pleasure in living and shall be boundlessly content to die." In
this random claim that links affirmation usually to women, beautiful
ones, it is then more than probable that, as long as I say yes, yes, I am a
woman and beautiful. I am a woman, and beautiful. Grammatical sex (or
anatomical as well, in any case, sex submitted to the law of objectivity):
the masculine genre is thus affected by the affirmation through a random
drift that could always render it other. A sort of secret coupling
would take place here, forming an odd marriage ("hymen"), an odd
couple, for none of this can be regulated by objective, natural, or civil
law. The "usually" is a mark of this secret and odd hymen, of this coupling
that is also perhaps a mixing of genres. The genres pass into each
other. And we will not be barred from thinking that this mixing of
genres, viewed in light of the madness of sexual difference, may bear
some relation to the mixing of literary genres.
"I," then, can keep alive the chance of being a fe-male or of changing
sex. His transsexuality permits him, in a more than metaphorical and
transferential way, to engender. He can give birth, and many other signs
which I cannot mention here bear this out, among other things the fact
that on several occasions he "brings something forth to the light of day."
In the rhetoric of La Folie du jour, the idiomatic expression "to bring
forth to the light of day" ("donner le jour") is one of the players in an
exceedingly powerful polysemic and disseminal game that I shall not
attempt to reproduce here. I only retain its standard and dominant
meaning which the spirit of linguistics gives it: donner lejour is to give
birth-a verb whose subject is usually maternal, that is to say, generally
female. At the center, closely hugging an invisible center, a primal scene
could have alerted us, if we had had the time, to the point of view ofLa Folie
du jour and to A Primal Scene. This is also called a "short scene."
"I" can bring forth to light, can give birth. To what? Well, precisely
to law or more exactly, to begin with, to the representatives of law,
to those who wield authority-and let us also understand by this the
authority of the author, the rights of authorship-simply by virtue of
possessing an overseer's right, the right to see, the right to have everything
in sight. This panoptic and this synopsis demand nothing else, but
nothing less. Now herein lies the essential paradox: from where and
from whom do they derive this power, this right-to-sight that permits
them to have "me" at their disposal? Well, from "me," rather, from the
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 77
subject who is subjected to them. It is the "I"-less "I" of the narrative
voice, the I "stripped" of itself, the one that does not take place, it is he
who brings them to light, who engenders these lawmen in giving them
insight into what regards them and what should not regard them.
I liked the doctors well enough. I did not feel belittled by their
doubts. The bother was that their authority grew with every hour.
One isn't initially aware of it, but these men are kings. Showing me
my rooms they said: Everything here belongs to us. They threw
themselves upon the parings of my mind: This is ours. They interpellated
my story: Speak! and it placed itself at their service. In
haste, I stripped myself of myself. I distributed my blood, my privacy
among them, I offered them the universe, I brought them
forth to the light of day. Under their unblinking gaze, I became a
water drop, an ink blot. I was shrinking into them, I was held
entirely in their view and when, finally, I no longer had anything
but my perfect nullity present and no longer had anything to see,
they, too, ceased to see me, most annoyed, they rose, shouting:
Well, where are you? Where are you hiding? Hiding is prohibited,
it is a misdeed, etc.
Law, day. One believes it generally possible to oppose law to
affirmation, and particularly to unlimited affirmation, to the immensity
of yes, yes. Law-we often figure it as an instance of the interdictory
limit, of the binding obligation, as the negativity of a boundary not to be
crossed. Now the mightiest and most divided trait of La Folie dujour or of
"An Account?" is the one relating birth to law, its genealogy, engenderment,
generation, or genre-and here I ask you once more to be especially
aware of gender-the one joining the very genre of the law to the
process of the double affirmation. The excessiveness of yes, yes is no
stranger to the genesis of law (nor to Genesis, as could be easily shown,
for it also concerns an account of Genesis "in the light of seven days" [p.
20]). The double affirmation is not foreign to the genre, genius, or spirit
of the law. No affirmation, and certainly no double affirmation without
the law sighting the light of day and the daylight becoming law. Such is
the madness of the day, such is an account in its "remarkable" truth, in
its truthless truth.
Now the feminine, or generally affirmative gender/genre, is also the
genre of this figure of law, not of its representatives, but of the law
herself who, throughout an account, forms a couple with me, with the
"I" of the narrative voice.
The law is in the feminine.
She is not a woman (it is only a figure, a "silhouette," and not a
representative of the law) but she, la loi, is in the feminine, declined in
the feminine; but not only as a grammatical gender/genre in my language
(elsewhere Blanchot brought this genre into play for speech ["la
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78 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
parole"] and for thought ["la pensee"]). No, she is described as a "female
element," which does not signify a female person. And the affirmative
"I," the narrative voice, who has brought forth the representatives of the
law to the light of day, claims to find the law seductive-sexually seductive.
The law appeals to him: "The truth is that she appealed to me. In
this milieu overpopulated with men, she was the only female element.
One time she had me touch her knee: a bizarre impression. I declared to
her: I am not the kind of man who contents himself with a knee. Her
response: that would be revolting!" She pleases him and he would n
like to content himself with the knee that she "had [him] touch." Thi
contact with the knee (genou), as my student and friend Pierre-FranCo
Berger brought to my notice, recalls the inflectional contiguity of the
and the we, theje and the nous, of an I/we couple of whom we shall spe
again in a moment.
The law's female element has thus always appealed to: me, I, he, w
The law is appealing: "The law appealed to me ... In order to tempt her
I called softly to the law: 'Approach, so I can see you face to face'
wanted to take her aside for a moment). Impudent appeal; what would
have done had she responded?"
He is perhaps subjected to law, but he neither attempts to escap
her, nor does he shrink before her: he wishes to seduce the law to who
he gives birth (there is a hint of incest in this) and especially-this is on
of the most striking and singular traits of this scene-he inspires fear i
the law. He not only troubles the representatives of the law, the lawme
who are the legist doctors and the "psy-" who demand of him, but ar
unable to obtain, an organized account, a testimony oriented by a sens
of history or his story, ordained and ordered by reason, and by the uni
of an I think, or of an originally synthetic apperception accompanyin
all representations. That the "I" here does not always accompany itself i
by no means borne lightly by the lawmen; in fact, he alarms thus the
lawmen, he radically persecutes them, and, in his manner, he conceals
from them without altercation the truth they demand and without whi
they are nothing. But he not only alarms the lawmen, he alarms the law
one would be tempted to say the law herself, if she did not remain here
silhouette and an effect of the account. And what is more, this law whom
the "I" frightens is none other than "me," than the "I," effect of h
desire, child of his affirmation, of the genre "I" clasped in a specular
couple with "me." They are inseparable (jelnous and genou, jeltoi an
jeltoit), and so she tells him, once more, as truth: "The truth is that we c
no longer be separated. I shall follow you everywhere, I shall dwell und
your roof [toit], we shall have the same sleep." We see the law, whose s
houette stands behind her representatives, frightened by "me," by "him
she is inclined toward and declined byje/nous, I/we, in front of "me,"
front of him, her knees marking perhaps the articulation of a gait, t
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 79
flexion of the couple and sexual difference, but also the continuity without
contact of the hymen and the "mixing of genres."
Behind their backs, I perceived the silhouette of the law. Not the
familiar law, who is strict and not terribly agreeable: this one was
different. Far from falling prey to her menace, I was the one who
seemed to frighten her. According to her, my glance was lightning
and my hands, grounds on which to perish. Moreover, she ridiculously
attributed to me all kinds of power, she declared herself
perpetually to be kneeling before me. But she let me demand
nothing, and when she granted me the right to be in all places, that
meant that I hadn't a place anywhere. [Elsewhere Blanchot designates
the non-place and the atopical or hypertopical mobility of the
narrative voice in this way.] When she placed me above the authorities,
that meant: you are authorized to do nothing.
What game is the law, a law of this genre, playing? What is she
playing up to when she has her knee touched? For if La Folie dujour plays
down the law, plays at law, plays with law, it is also because the law
herself plays. The law, in its female element, is a silhouette that plays. At
what? At being . .. born, at being born like anybody and no body. She
plays upon her generation and displays her genre, she plays out her
nature and her history, and she makes a plaything of an account. In
mock-playing herself she takes into account the account: she recites; and
her birth is accountable to the account, the recit, one could even say to
her: (to la voix ...) the narrative voice, him, her, I, we, the neuter genre
that subjects and merges itself while giving birth to her, who lets himself
be captivated by the law and escapes her, whom she escapes and whom
she loves. She lets herself be put in motion, she lets herself be cited by
him when, in the midst of her game, she says, pursuing an idiom that her
disseminal polysemy conveys to the abyss, "I see day":
Here is one of her games. [He has just recalled that she "once had
(him) touch her knee."] She showed me a section of the space
between the top of the window and the ceiling: "You are there," she
said. I looked at this point with intensity. "Are you there?" I looked
at it with all my power. "Well?" I felt the scars of my glaze leap, my
sight became a wound, my head, a gap, a gutted bull. Suddenly she
cried out: "Oh! I see day! Oh God!" etc. I protested that this game
tired me enormously, but she was insatiable for my glory.
For the law to see the day is her madness, is what she loves madly
like the glory, the emblazed illustration, the day of the writer, of the
author who says "I," and who brings forth law to the light of day. He says
that she is insaturable, insatiable for his glory-he, who is, too, author of
the law to which he submits himself, he, who engenders her, he, her
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80 Jacques Derrida The Law of Genre
mother who no longer knows how to say "I" or to keep memory intact. I
am the mother of law, behold my daughter's madness. It is also the
Madness of the Day, for day, the word "day" in its disseminal abyss, is
law, the law of the law. My daughter's madness is to want to be bornlike
anybody, whereas she remained a "silhouette," a shadow, a profile,
her face never in view. He had said to her, to the law, in order to "tempt
her": "Approach, so I can see you face to face."
Such would be the "remarkable truth" that clears an opening for the
madness of day-and that appeals, like law, like madness, to the one who
says "I" or I/we. Let us be attentive to this syntax of truth. She, the law,
says: "The truth is that we can no longer be separated. I shall follow you
everywhere, I shall live under your roof.. ." He: "The truth is that she
appealed to me ... ," she, law, but also-and this is always the principal
theme of these sentences-she, la verite, truth. One cannot conceive truth
without the madness of the law.
I have let myself be commanded by the law of our encounter, by the
convention of our subject, notably the genre, the law of genre. This law,
articulated as an I/we which is more or less autonomous in its movements,
assigned us places and limits. Even though I have launched
appeal against this law, it was she who turned my appeal into a c
firmation of her own glory. But she also desires ours insatiably. Sub
mitting myself to the subject of our colloquium, as well as to its law
sifted "An Account," La Folie dujour. I isolated a type, if not a genre
reading from an infinite series of trajectories or possible courses. I h
pointed out the generative principle of these courses, beginnings, an
new beginnings in every sense: but from a certain point of vie
Elsewhere-in accordance with other subjects, other colloquia and
tures, other I/we drawn together in one place-other trajectories cou
have, and have, come to light.
Nonetheless, it would be folly to draw any sort of general conclus
here. I could not say what exactly has happened in this scene, nor in m
discourse or my account. What was perhaps seen, in the blink of tim
eye, is a madness of law-and, therefore, of order, reason, sense,
meaning, of day: "But often" (said "I"), "I was dying without sayin
thing. In time, I became convinced that I was seeing the madness of
face to face; such was the truth: light became mad, clarity took leav
her senses; she assailed me unreasonably, without a set of rules, with
a goal. This discovery was like jaws clutching at my life." I am woma
and beautiful; my daughter, the law, is mad about me. I speculate on m
daughter. My daughter is mad about me; this is law.
The law is mad, she is mad about "me." And across the madness o
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Critical Inquiry Autumn 1980 81
this day, I keep this in sight. There, this will have been my self-portrait of
the genre.
The law is mad. The law is mad, is madness; but madness is not the
predicate of law. There is no madness without the law; madness cannot
be conceived before its relation to law. Madness is law, the law is madness.
There is a general trait here: the madness of the law mad for me,
the day madly in love with me, the silhouette of my daughter mad about
me, her mother, etc. But La Folie du jour, An (accountless) Account?,
carrying and miscarrying its titles, is not at all exemplary of this general
trait. Not at all, not wholly. This is not an example of a general or generic
whole. The whole, which begins by finishing and never finishes beginning
apart from itself, the whole that stays at the edgeless boundary of
itself, the whole greater and less than a whole and nothing, An Account?
will not have been exemplary. Rather, with regard to the whole, it will
have been wholly counter-exemplary.
The genre has always in all genres been able to play the role of
order's principle: resemblance, analogy, identity and difference,
taxonomic classification, organization and genealogical tree, order of
reason, order of reasons, sense of sense, truth of truth, natural light and
sense of history. Now, the test of An Account? brought to light the madness
of genre. Madness has given birth to and thrown light on the genre
in the most dazzling, most blinding sense of the word. And in the writing
of An Account?, in literature, satirically practicing all genres, imbibing
them but never allowing herself to be saturated with a catalog of genres,
she, madness, has started spinning Peterson's genre-disc like a demented
sun. And she does not only do so in literature, for in concealing the
boundaries that sunder mode and genre, she has also inundated and
divided the borders between literature and its others.
There, that is the whole of it, it is only what "I," so they say, here
kneeling at the edge of literature, can see. In sum, the law. The law
summoning: what "I" can sight and what "I" can say that I sight in this
site of a recitation where I/we is.
Une traduction?
par
M
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