Abstract
The chapter reads José Saramago’s All the Names and Death at Intervals and suggests that although the symbolic order fetishizes the dead letter, works of art can resurrect inert signifiers and turn them into living, breathing, and growing bodies. The argument is that what allows Saramago’s texts to persist beyond the death wreaked by representation are two miracles that take place in the interstices of signification: first the miracle of love and second the miracle of poetry and in particular of metaphor. These miracles, I argue, form the backbone of Saramago’s texts, suggesting that the loss, or death, inflicted by the signifier can be rejoined, pasted, or united in a space between the symbolic and the Real, between law and literature.
This chapter is a slightly modified version of an article previously published as “Bare Law Between Two Lives: José Saramago and Cornelia Vismann on Naming, Filing and Cancelling,” in Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer (eds.), Liminal Discourses: Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature (Berlin: De Gruyters, 2013), pp. 37–52. I am grateful to de Gruyters for permission to reuse the material.
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Notes
- 1.
“The first act by which Adam established his lordship over the animals is this, that he gave them a name, i.e., he nullified them as beings on their own account” (Hegel 1979, p. 221). Lacan continues this theme: “Thus the symbol manifests itself as the killing of the thing, and this death results in the endless perpetuation of the subject’s desire” (Lacan 2006c, p. 262).
- 2.
See also p. 133: “the state, the bureau, and the file were arranged in such a way that the entire order could be derived from the smallest element, the state from a single file.”
- 3.
“The paradigm of diplomatics focuses attention on the transmitted law, not on the transmission itself. So the erratic side of the law, the administrative operations, the transmission medium itself—remains a blind-spot for legal history. When the emphasis is on results, certifications, validity, and storage capacities, files, as mere transmission media, have no epistemological place. They are treated as the other of diplomas, as ‘non-documents’” (Vismann 2008, p. 75).
- 4.
“Taboos still exist among us. Though expressed in a negative form and directed toward another subject-matter, they do not differ in their psychological nature from Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’, which operates in a compulsive fashion and rejects any conscious motives” (Freud 1955, p. xiv).
- 5.
I explore this question in Aristodemou 2011.
- 6.
For an incisive analysis of Eichmann’s actions from a Lacanian perspective, see MacCannell 1996.
- 7.
Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s 2006 film The Life of Others is one famous recent attempt to portray this paradox.
- 8.
Saramago’s point here is reminiscent of the constant search for God, or the origin of origins, of Borges’s characters and in particular his short story “The Library of Babel”; I examined this aspect of Borges’s fiction in chapter 9 of Aristodemou 2000.
- 9.
Saramago comments again on number 100 as “a frontier, a limit, a ne plus” (AN 19).
- 10.
“To language then, to language alone, it is that fictitious entities owe their existence—their impossible yet indispensable existence,” quoted in Ogden 1932, p. xxxii. Lacan confirms the importance of Bentham’s theory of fictions to an understanding of the subject’s capture by the signifier: “Bentham , as that work of his which has recently drawn some attention shows, is the man who approaches the question at the level of the signifier” (1992, p. 228)
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Aristodemou, M. (2018). Death by Representation: In Law, in Literature, and in That Space Between. In: Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_6
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