Infinite Regress: Expansions of Naught in Racine's Phèdre

Abstract

Infinite Regress: Expansions of Naught in Racine's Phèdre Richard-Laurent Barnett Le plus sûr des mutismes n'est pas de se taire mais de parler. —Ponge Il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, il faut continuer, je vais donc continuer, il faut dire des mots, tant qu'il y en a, il faut les dire, jusqu'à ce qu'ils me trouvent, jusqu'à ce qu'ils me disent, étrange peine, étrange faute, il faut continuer... —Beckett Speaking is a fine madness... —Nietzsche EVER SO INDOMITABLY, an inoperative trope—center-staged— is a theatricidal trope, a meta-textual figure dancing in selfcontained circles, dizzily mesmerized by its own puerile, inexpansive demeanors, by the blinding, pervasive choreographical scenario it scripts up and plays out. Metonym, in a sense, of none but its own-ness, its one-ness, its disengagement from, and cramming out of, all that is other; cipher of its prideful failure to refer, however tweaked or coerced: we have here, in purposefully reductionist terms, the undergirdings of a construct that will sustain neither continuity nor closure, a kind of discursive illegitimacy, its deviance aptly rooted in its blatant refusal to deviate. Thus does discourse transpire as but a breed of involuted play, a repository of object-less desire, an interstice, an illusion, oxymoron, annulation, oneiric absence until it slakes perniciously into silence. The discursive itinerary of France's most celebrated of dramatic poems (the poeticized tale of that long lost daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë) is one of meaning divested, forever deferred; it is the inly, circuitous path of speech as act of excission. The word spoken is a priority forbidden, forever verboten, retrieved and retracted only to be extracted and subverted—endlessly, again. Whence, Phèdre's dismantling tropology of desire stands fundamentally and crucially as an autotelic figuration of its own limits, the unremitting deferral of its own actualization, a commentary from within upon the corrosive substance of its own literarity . A like discourse interminably re-enacts, repeatedly reifies and evisVOL . XXXVIII, NO. 1 35 L'Esprit Créateur cerates the very absence around which it spins its monstrously inebriating web. The obsessive evocation of "nothing" designates a wreckage of words in the face of that which language inadequately and only elliptically embraces, from which it recoils in dread. Still, the lure, the lore, the lull of verses voiced bear one marked triumph : they entrance, enthrall and ultimately enslave she who unleashes them. The treacherous derivatives of such auto-reflexive monomania are singularly perverse and contorting . Ensnared within the labyrinth of self-sown poesis, Racine's would-be heroine is irretrievably subsumed by the delusive structures underwriting her seditiously self-conscious script. The énoncé she ostensibly begets is that by which she is assuredly mis-begotten. And as (Derridean ) neo-classicism would have it, the dragnet that is language prevails , character and discourse drift into radical aporia, self-enticement gives way to annihilation. As the subject writes itself, so too it negates itself, ceases to be subject as being, defers—ever so impotently—to otherness. Ultimately, the script is de-troped, un-written, cedes, as though ineluctably, to scriptlessness. All is transgressed, subsists, alas, without the margins. Surely, the imperilled representation of refractive musings, of inwardly propelled leaps and bounds is not a Racinian contrivance. Partialistic , onanistic, narcissistic glances ushered in and uttered out by the same first person, acts in which nominative and objective, looker on and looked upon, spectator and spectacle, speaker and spoken are fused, however discomfortably, into one unseverable entity—underpin and over-determine seventeenth-century textuality.1 Montaigne's prefigurative Essais, rife and riddled with elusive contortions of self-ness, and wherein the "moi" is to subsist allegedly and emblematically as the sole embodiment of substance—pre-enact, as it were, the autonomic, autoinfatuated vision that is to succeed them; the 1600s will, in fact, invert inside and outside, confound them, juxtapose them until such point that they are no longer delimitable: presence and absence collide, spill over, eradicate difference, as the chartable coordinates that were formerly to demarcate them are irrecoverably displaced. Neo-classical textuality will, as it turns out, externalize ludic tamperings with self-turned interiority; it will...