(This essay was given at the 6th Annual SEP-FEP Joint Conference in Cardiff, Wales, on August 27, 2009)
The Laughter of Dionysus:
Bataille and Derrida on Joyce’s ‘Welsh Coffin’
James Luchte
In his essay on Bataille, ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,’[1] Derrida alludes to Bataille’s reference to Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake in his essay, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice’,[2] in which the ‘Welsh Coffin’ is illustrated as the symbol of a communal event that is performed – comically, as with the ‘wake’ in the southern United States – in the face of the tragic ‘event’ of death. As Derrida retells Bataille’s (second-hand) story,[3] the deceased is stood up in his coffin in pride of place amongst his fellows – dressed with a top hat, cigar and suit – and who, contrary to the usual and useful expulsion of the corpse – begin to essentially ‘roast’ the one who had passed – but, is still strangely in attendance. Such a surreal performance, similar to the dark comic absurdities of Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood,[4] or Buňuel, as with The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), is an example of a Dionysian mortality that is shared by each member of the community.[5]
In the following pages, I will explore various threads of philosophical questioning that have emerged in light of this ‘unconscious’ and ‘unstable’ last text of Joyce – in its reception by the exiled surrealist Bataille, and by the post-structuralist Derrida, in his own excursions into Joyce and Bataille. I will argue that Finnegan’s Wake is a disseminal text for questions of ‘truth’/'lies’, of meaning/meaningless, of sense/non-sense. In the wake of the dispersion of the text, it will be necessary for us to go elsewhere… into a poetics of becoming and being.
Reading Joyce: The Makeshift of Text and World
(Book One, Chapter 1.1, pp 23-25)[6]
O foenix culprit! Ex nickylow malo comes mickelmassed bo-
num. Hill, rill, ones in company, billeted, less be proud of. Breast
high and bestride! Only for that these will not breathe upon
Norronesen or Irenean the secrest of their soorcelossness. Quar-
ry silex, Homfrie Noanswa! Undy gentian festyknees, Livia No-
answa? Wolkencap is on him, frowned; audiurient, he would
evesdrip, were it mous at hand, were it dinn of bottles in the far
ear. Murk, his vales are darkling. With lipth she lithpeth to him
all to time of thuch on thuch and thow on thow. She he she ho
she ha to la. Hairfluke, if he could bad twig her! Impalpabunt,
he abhears. The soundwaves are his buffeteers; they trompe him
with their trompes; the wave of roary and the wave of hooshed
and the wave of hawhawhawrd and the wave of neverheedthem-
horseluggarsandlisteltomine. Landloughed by his neaghboormis-
tress and perpetrified in his offsprung, sabes and suckers, the
moaning pipers could tell him to his faceback, the louthly one
whose loab we are devorers of, how butt for his hold halibutt, or
her to her pudor puff, the lipalip one whose libe we drink at, how
biff for her tiddywink of a windfall, our breed and washer givers,
there would not be a holey spier on the town nor a vestal flout-
ing in the dock, nay to make plein avowels, nor a yew nor an eye
to play cash cash in Novo Nilbud by swamplight nor a’ toole o’
tall o’ toll and noddy hint to the convaynience.
He dug in and dug out by the skill of his tilth for himself and
all belonging to him and he sweated his crew beneath his auspice
for the living and he urned his dread, that dragon volant, and he
made louse for us and delivered us to boll weevils amain, that
mighty liberator, Unfru-Chikda-Uru-Wukru and begad he did,
our ancestor most worshipful, till he thought of a better one in
his windower’s house with that blushmantle upon him from ears-
end to earsend. And would again could whispring grassies wake
him and may again when the fiery bird disembers. And will
again if so be sooth by elder to his youngers shall be said. Have
you whines for my wedding, did you bring bride and bedding,
will you whoop for my deading is a? Wake? Usgueadbaugham!
Anam muck an dhoul ! Did ye drink me doornail?
Now be aisy, good Mr Finnimore, sir. And take your laysure
like a god on pension and don’t be walking abroad. Sure you’d
only lose yourself in Healiopolis now the way your roads in
Kapelavaster are that winding there after the calvary, the North
Umbrian and the Fivs Barrow and Waddlings Raid and the
Bower Moore and wet your feet maybe with the foggy dew’s
abroad. Meeting some sick old bankrupt or the Cottericks’ donkey
with his shoe hanging, clankatachankata, or a slut snoring with an
impure infant on a bench. ‘Twould turn you against life, so
‘twould. And the weather’s that mean too. To part from Devlin
is hard as Nugent knew, to leave the clean tanglesome one lushier
than its neighbour enfranchisable fields but let your ghost have
no grievance. You’re better off, sir, where you are, primesigned
in the full of your dress, bloodeagle waistcoat and all, remember-
ing your shapes and sizes on the pillow of your babycurls under
your sycamore by the keld water where the Tory’s clay will scare
the varmints and have all you want, pouch, gloves, flask, bricket,
kerchief, ring and amberulla, the whole treasure of the pyre, in the
land of souls with Homin and Broin Baroke and pole ole Lonan
and Nobucketnozzler and the Guinnghis Khan. And we’ll be
coming here, the ombre players, to rake your gravel and bringing
you presents, won’t we, fenians? And il isn’t our spittle we’ll stint
you of, is it, druids? Not shabbty little imagettes, pennydirts and
dodgemyeyes you buy in the soottee stores. But offerings of the
field. Mieliodories, that Doctor Faherty, the madison man,
taught to gooden you. Poppypap’s a passport out. And honey is
the holiest thing ever was, hive, comb and earwax, the food for
glory, (mind you keep the pot or your nectar cup may yield too
light !) and some goat’s milk, sir, like the maid used to bring you.
This selection from Book One, Chapter 1.1, pp. 23-25 of Finnegan’s Wake tells of the resurrection – the necromancy – of Tim Finnegan at his wake. His wife Annie, in the manner of the surrealists, had laid out his exquisite corpse as a meal for the mourners to eat. After a brawl breaks out amongst the mourners, whiskey is spilt upon the corpse, and Finnegan rises up seeking wine, as he says for himself,
Have you whines for my wedding, did you bring bride and bedding,
will you whoop for my deading is a? Wake? Usgueadbaugham!
Of course, this is an ‘agreed’ meaning of this text amongst those institutional experts and readers of Joyce whom Derrida tainted – in an extemporaneous style – at the James Joyce Symposium in 1992 with his ‘Two Words for Joyce’ in which he asked, ‘How many languages can be lodged in two words by Joyce, lodged or inscribed, kept or burned, celebrated or violated?’[7] Derrida is alluding to the ‘nightmare’ – and to the comic ecstasy – of historicity, of temporal existence, as it is intimated in the traumatic work of Joyce. Derrida declares – in light of its undecided status – there can be no ‘… Joycean competence…. no Joycean foundation, no Joycean legitimacy.’[8] Behind this declaration, however, lies a philosophical question – but not that of an announcement of ‘meaninglessness’ – ‘non-sense’ – by the likes of Carnap and his mourners who still feed on his corpse. Instead, for Derrida, the text of Joyce is a sublime example for his provisional ‘motif’ of différance[9] which intimates a play that, he claims, is prior to Being, and the ontological difference between beings and Being. This ‘motif’ is neither a word nor a concept – it is instead a trace of becoming which does not have being, or presence – or, is not, and this is significant, meant to have presence. Joyce himself tells us that he is seeking in Finnegan’s Wake to intimate ‘nocturnal life’ and the ‘dark night of the soul’.[10] Yet, perhaps, for Derrida, Joyce says too much (as he already allows ‘discourse’ to begin to quarantine – in the sense of Foucault – his ‘statement’ from the homogenous discourse of the ‘order of things’). Derrida, on the contrary, considers that which is shown, exposed by the text of Joyce, as significant and sublimely insignificant.
We have heard the words of Joyce, but did we, can we, understand these words in a univocal manner as the ‘Joyce experts’ do? And, is this not precisely the question – one that we could – and do – carry with us as we traverse our own and other textualities of existence? Is not ‘Joyce’ simply an example, a limit situation, an an-arche-text intimating the makeshift – provisional, unstable, contingent – status of all linguistic and indeed all temporal constructions? Is there any difference between a ‘house of cards’ and an ‘epoch of history’, of a sandcastle and a cathedral? Are there truly laws of history, or, of Being, and are there any ‘laws’ that we can understand, that have meaning for ‘us’? What is meaning (especially in light of the eliminationist strategems and echo chambers of the analytic ‘tradition’)? We have read the words of Joyce. What does he mean, and what does it mean that there are scholars who say – or want to know – what he means…. what ‘Nietzsche’ means, what ‘Heidegger’ means, what even ‘Derrida’ means ….? Is this essay – right now – not just a ‘flower made of clay’ (Velvet Underground, from ‘It’s hard to live in the City’)? Should we not become silent immediately – as with John Cage or when Bultmann preached that it was a ‘sin’ even to mention the ‘name of God’ (‘He war’).[11] Yet, we know enough to ascertain the contours of the question. Joyce himself sought to enact a nocturnal dithyramb in which a univocal ‘meaning’ was impossible. But, what does his intention matter after the purported ‘death of the author’? And, even in the wake of différance? In other words – should we play along with Joyce, Derrida et al. or should we simply dismiss this – though longstanding – last work – as did many critics, including the ‘fascist’ Pound – as an impenetrable and self-indulgent work? Or, should we become ‘Joyce experts’ and pretend to have deciphered that which, for Derrida, is an inexhaustible text, one that, in its instability, bleeds upon the surface of every page – and into ‘worlds’?
Derrida reads Joyce as an intimation of the utter untranslatability and the radical dispersion of the text. Is Finnegan’s Wake not already translated? Is there any need to translate this text? Cannot everyone misunderstand it? A book for all and none? Would not translation be redundant, dead, useless?
It would seem however that we should instead witness the fragmentation that disseminates from this text.
Bataille on Joyce: On Dismemberment
Bataille engages Joyce’ Finnegan’s Wake in his essay, ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice.’ The essay itself is a symptom of his longstanding quasi-masochistic attempt to grasp the philosophy of Hegel (through Kojeve). For although Hegel commands us – as the Sage – to ‘think contradiction’, he – at once – seduces us to acquiesce to his non-ironic absolute, ‘unity, the ‘good infinite’ – to that which sublates ‘contradiction’ as the Absolute Idea. Hegel failed – which is doubly ironic – as a romantic poet (cf. Agamden’s The Language of Death). Yet, he succeeded in a way his friends Hölderlin and Schelling have not – yet – as a philosopher. Hegel wishes to bring us into an Absolute in which we are necessarily ‘eaten’, ‘digested’ and ‘excreted’ – a situation, as Nietzsche suggests in his Will to Power, ‘New World Conception’, in which excrement is the food of becoming.
Bataille invokes the sacred as the ‘indigestible’, as the radically heterogeneous and useless. In this light, the ritual of the ‘Welsh Coffin’, as with Greek tragedy, provides the sacrificial space in which the restrictive taboo of homogeneity is transgressed – and re-configured – amid the general economy of the comic ‘event’, of the radical energetics of the tiger.[12] Bataille describes the event:
The Irish and Welsh custom of the “wake” is little known but was still practiced at the end of the last century. It is the subject of Joyce’s last work, Finnegan’s Wake – the deathwatch of Finnegan (however, the reading of this famous novel is difficult at best). In Wales, the coffin was placed open, standing at the place of honor of the house. The dead man would be dressed in his finest suit and top hat. His family would invite all of his friends, who honoured the departed all the more the longer they danced and the deeper they drank to his health. It is the death of an other, but in such instances, the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death. Only under one condition could anyone so rejoice; with the presumed agreement of the dead man – who is an other -, the dead man that the drinker in turn will become shall have no other meaning than his predecessor.[13]
As the corpse shares in the Dionysian feast, the ‘Welsh Coffin’, through its surreal subversion of the everyday, invokes a sense of the tragic sacred, the only response to which – after perhaps an initial terror or horror – is the sublimity of laughter, beyond the restricted economy of solemn production. The laughter of tragedy, in this way, invades and mutates the rhythmic normalcy of religion within the limits of reason through the temporary irruption of the radically other – of that which, contrary to Habermas, is not the imperative violence of a heterogeneity which profanes itself through an incestuous amalgamation with homogenous power, but a subversive dissolution of a homogenous order which is not a community of intimates, but whose jurisdiction is already that of strife (Heraclitus). In this way, the festival of death that is celebrated does not seek to establish a regime of violence, but to invoke, disseminate, and propagate amid this ‘order of things’ that which it seeks to exclude – and, in this way, to dissolve this ‘order’.
Bataille, at the precipice of his essay, quotes Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment’ (déchirement). It is this be-ing torn into dancing threads that is intimated in the text of Joyce, this makeshift of an indefiniteness that cannot ever fathom the ‘infinite’, the grace of the absolute idea, the ‘end of history’, the eclipse of temporality, the redemption of finitude. This is the sense of Bataille’s laughter at Hegel’s totalitarian ‘system’, a laughter that is possible from the placelessness of the sovereign ‘outside’. The ‘outside’ is this state of dismemberment that resists the masks of the ‘order’ of a restricted economy. The sacred, in Bataille’s sense, could never be co-opted into the service of such an economy, but must still ceaselessly resist its ‘hunger’.
Derrida on Bataille (and Joyce): A ‘Holocaust’ of Words
The key to Derrida’s interest in Bataille (and Joyce) concerns the opaque topos of inter-textuality, of an open space of interacting ‘absences’ (amid the indefinite ‘All’). As through a looking-glass darkly, Derrida plunges into the text of Joyce as an instance of the disintegrative epoché of authoritative – ‘authorial’ – determination, intention – amidst a deconstructive incitement that celebrates the play of meaninglessness as sovereign silence – and despite the fact that Joyce ‘let the cat out of the bag’ with his quasi-Wagnerian description of the project of the ‘reconstruction of nocturnal life’, in which amid the surreal noumena, ‘objects’ lose their being in the night of the world.[14] This is the background sense of Derrida’s contestation of the ‘legitimacy’ of Joyce scholarship. After all, the very point of Finnegan’s Wake is not only the projection of a performative space of relative meaninglessness, but also of inviting the Nothing, death, back into the world of positivity – even though, except for his lobe, the corpse would not allow itself to be eaten). Derrida points out an ambiguity in this situation:
In discourse (the unity of process and system), negativity is always the underside and accomplice of positivity. Negativity cannot be spoken of, nor has it ever been except in this fabric of meaning. Now, the sovereign operation, the point of nonreserve, is neither positive nor negative. It cannot be inscribed in discourse, except by crossing out predicates and by practicing a contradictory superimpression that then exceeds the logic of philosophy.[15]
Perhaps, Derrida would intimate that Finnegan’s Wake is such a superimpression that exceeds the ‘logic of philosophy’, of ‘meaning’ (in the sublative sense of Hegel). Such a reading may allow us to begin to fathom his statements in ‘Two Words for Joyce.’ Indeed, it is precisely the ‘expert reader’ who seeks to know what the text means – and will struggle for an exclusive possession of meaning with respect to the ‘Joycean symposium’. At the same time, however, the Joycean text, even Finnegan’s Wake, does make gestures toward ‘meaning’ – even if poly-semic – and can be read – read not only as a deliberate ‘linguistic integration’ (Hitler, Mein Kampf), but also as a cultural artefact with its own indigenous and polyvalent meanings. Nevertheless, the text is unstable, and does intimate that which for Bataille is heterogeneous with respect to the homogenous order of (sayable) ‘meaning’ (within the limits of reason alone). Yet, is this instability merely an intimation of the negativity which, Derrida alludes, abides as the underside of positivity, an impotent revolt that remains servile to the ‘seriousness of meaning and the security of knowledge’?…[16]
Is there not another sense or state of play in which the Joycean text intimates or incites ‘sovereignty’? For not only does Finnegan’s Wake playfully describe the archaic practise of the ‘Welsh Coffin’ – or, the invasion of the homogenous world of utility and order by the heterogeneous ‘other’ – but it also, through its own linguistic practise, infects this ‘order’, not only disseminating the myriad instabilities of laughter and confusion within the realm of ‘discourse’, but also – and this could be Bataille’s reply to Derrida (and to any ‘resolute’ Wittgensteinian) – exposes the makeshift character, the imposture, of this alleged ‘order’ of ‘sense’. That which is significant – and this is something upon which Derrida and Bataille can agree – is that it is the wings of a dove, the stillest hour of sovereign silence – the general economy of existence – which resists – and for Bataille, erupts, to destabilise any particular restricted economy of ‘meaning’ – and thus, to allow for a transfiguration of the economy of ‘meaning’ into a radically ‘other’, into, as it were, the ‘eternal recurrence of the same’. Wittgenstein quotes Augustine in his comments on Heidegger, ‘What you swine, you want not to talk nonsense? Go ahead and talk non-sense, it does not matter.’[17]
Habermas: On the Tragic Irony of the Law
We will turn briefly to Habermas’ essay on Bataille, ‘Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille,’[18] in an attempt to address his criticisms of Bataille’s notion of sovereignty in light of our current discussion of Joyce. While much of the essay on Bataille is expositional – with many long quotations from works covering differing periods of Bataille’s work – Habermas does engage critically with Bataille with respect to his notion of ‘sovereign violence’. In what is essentially a political interpretation of Bataille’s philosophy – and one that speaks, it has to be said, from the timely perspective of the ‘homogenous order’ – Habermas questions (as he does with Foucault) whether or not Bataille has set forth sufficient ‘theoretical’ resources to be able to make the necessary distinctions as to any specific character of subversive transgression, as for instance, between ‘socialist’ and ‘fascist’ violence – both of which (among the other usual suspects of poets, philosophers, artists, and anarchists) are indicated by Bataille as ‘heterogeneous forces’ in ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’.[19] At the same time, however, while Bataille could be ‘identified’ as a fellow traveller of the political Left (as he regarded himself), such a limitation of his perspective does not adequately address the significance of his explorations of sacrifice, eroticism, intoxication (a Dionysian ‘Communism’)– and, his appropriation of the archaic sacred – or his distinction between homogeneous and heterogeneous ‘forces’ – or, between a ‘restricted’ and ‘general’ economy. Such a limitation cannot allow us to fathom Bataille’s cultural strategy of subversion and his resistance to the marriage of ‘utility’, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘religion’ (‘ideology’). Indeed, Habermas acknowledges:
Just as religion already stands under the curse of labor, and only restores the destroyed order of things and makes possible a wordless communication with it for brief moments of ritual renunciation of the self, so, too, is pure sovereignty to be won back on in moments of ecstasy.[20]
While one could question this formulation of Bataille’s thought – and the suggestion that Bataille was dangerously close to ‘fascism’ – it is important to fathom that Bataille’s attempt to conjure the sacred as subversive transgression does not hold the same significance for Habermas with respect to ‘meaning’. For the latter, sovereignty exhibits a ‘tendency toward a differentiation of distinctions of rank.’[21] Yet, for Bataille such a play of difference need not be tied immediately to any political and ideological field – just as with the case of Hegel, Heidegger, or Nietzsche. Indeed, it would seem that Bataille is instead attempting to account for historical change as an ‘event’ of infiltration of a restricted (profane) economy by the exteriority of the general (sacred) economy. In this way, the question is not that of the perfection of a ‘homogenous order’ which is already always tainted by imperative forces (and the incestuous ‘enlightenment’ project of the alleged purification of such forces), but of disclosing – or exposing – the tenuousness of any homogenous order that has attempted (as with the Apollonian suppression of Dionysiac music and poetry in the polis of Plato) to suppress the incessant eruptions of the general economy of the sacred in everyday life. That which Habermas fails to see is the tragic irony of the law, which by suppressing otherness as such, fails to exhibit the critical resources to call into question these imperative – unlawful – forces in the homogeneous order – whether this order be ostensibly ‘socialist’, ‘fascist’, or, for that matter (and, in our own case), ‘liberal’. That which is essential for Bataille is his notion of an expenditure that erases the priority and seeming eternity of any homogeneous order of work and utility – and recalls to us the unrestricted general economy of the gift which surges beneath the surface of representation. As Leonard Cohen sings, in his song ‘Anthem’
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
The In-Significance of Joyce: The Chaos of the Primal
In its dispersion and radical uselessness, Finnegan’s Wake is a disseminal text for contemporary questions of ‘truth’, of meaning/meaningless, of sense/non-sense, but in its an-archic distablisation, the text of Joyce intimates that which we could call an irresolute Wittgenstein – or a radically post-structuralist Heidegger – a sublime topos of a primal celebration of chance as it is disseminated through language games, forms of life, and subversive expressions and transgressions (‘custom’ as the existential negotiation of rule-following and rule-breaking).
In the wake of the dispersion of the text, it is necessary for us to go elsewhere – with Nietzsche et al. – beyond and before the antitheses of the ‘logic of philosophy’ into a makeshift poetics of becoming and being. Such a gesture points to Dionysus and the rebirth of the Open (in the sense of Trakl’s ‘Helian’) as the transfiguration – and destruction – of the pretentious ‘order’ of the restricted economy. The mask is torn off revealing the ever faceless apparitions of an ever receding flux and chaos (the chasm of the Open in the sense of Hesiod) of primal existence.
Trakl laments:
O how their hair stiffens with excrement and worms
When he stands in it with silver feet,
And they step deceased from bleak rooms.
O you psalms in fiery midnight rains
When servants smite gentle eyes with nettles,
The childlike fruits of the elderberry
Bend astonished over an empty grave.
Softly yellowed moons roll
Over the youth’s feverish linen
Before the silence of winter follows.
It is the silent showing, revealing that abides the space where we can hear the peal of laughter in the wake of our primal situation of our existence. The peal of laughter, that sublime, unexpected response amid the tightening rope of horror and nihilism, reminds us of the open space (chaos) that surrounds us at every moment (Hesiod). Laughter is one of our affirmations of be-ing amidst the enclosing horizons of nothingness. If we listen close enough, we can hear that it is we ourselves who are laughing. Nietzsche sings a dirge with a twist:
Lift up my anxious heart that
Finds no rest in heaven’s height.
I throw myself into green grass
And from gushing tears,
My eyes become gloomy, my cheeks wet,
My soul pure and bright.
Branches bend down,
Enshroud the sick and
Weary with their shadows
Like a still grave
I would like to die in this green forest
No! No; away with such bitter
Thoughts! There in the green forest,
Where merry bird songs resound
Where oak trees shake their mighty heads
Soon a much greater power
Will shake your grave,
Peace of soul will come there to your coffin
Only through it can you
Attain true peace
Clouds, in golden beams,
Surround you like white snow,
And gather themselves into storm
And lightning flames down to earth
When the sky weeps in lovely Spring
And jubilation resounds far and wide
He is only meant to find
One who longs for death
Such bitter tears fall upon you
And you wake up
And you stand up
And look around and laugh[22]
________________________________
1] Derrida, Jacques (2003) ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve’, Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, London and New York: Routledge.
[2] Bataille, Georges (1990) ‘Hegel, Death and Sacrifice,’ Yale French Studies, No. 78: On Bataille, Yale University Press, pp. 9-28.
[3] Both Bataille and Derrida testify that Finnegan’s Wake is difficult, if not, impossible reading – or, that it is in its articulation ‘indigestable’. Symptoms that both relied, to some extent, on second hand accounts come, on the one hand, come from Bataille’s reference in footnote 12 to ‘E. Jolas, “Elucidation du monomythe de James Joyce” in Critique (July 1948): 579-595, and on the other, to Derrida’s own repetition of Bataille’s account of the ‘Welsh coffin’. It could be argued, however, that the ‘true’ account, that the surrealist Annie laid out Tim Finnegan to be eaten, would have given each of their own analyses more bite.
[4] Thomas, Dylan (2001) ‘Under Milk Wood,’ Dylan Thomas Omnibus, London: Phoenix.
[5] A more recent example could be found in the ‘dark poetry’ of the late comedian Bill Hicks, especially in his expressive and performative transgressions such as in the routine, ‘Goat Boy’.
[6] James Joyce (1976) Finnegan’s Wake, New York: Penguin. A delineated online version of the text can be found at: http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/F1-1.htm.
[7] Attridge, Derek (1985) Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the French, Cambridge University Press, p. 145.
[8] Roughley, Alan (1999) Reading Derrida Reading Joyce, University of Florida Press, p. 60.
[9] Derrida, J. (1968) ‘Différance’, Margins of Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[10] Ellmann, Richard (1983) James Joyce, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[11] Bultmann, Rudolf (1969) ‘What does it mean to speak of God?,’ Faith and Understanding, Harper & Row.
[12] The tiger is a symbol in the Accursed Share, Volume One, of the Dionysian general economy of existence which stalks at the limits of the restrictive economy (order) of ‘things’.
[13] Bataille (1990), p. 24.
[14] Regardless of his dis-stated meaning, however, for Derrida, Joyce will dissolve, become faceless, into the nowhere (utopia) between the shore and the waves, between terrestriality and aquacity.
[15] Derrida, Jacques (2003) ‘From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve,’ Writing and Difference, translated by Alan Bass, London and New York: Routledge, p. 327.
[16] Derrida (2003), p. 328.
[17] For an in depth discussion of these issues, see Luchte, J., ‘Under the Aspect of Time (“sub specie temporis”): Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and the Place of the Nothing,’ Philosophy Today, Volume 53, Number 2 (Spring, 2009)
[18] Habermas, Jürgen (2007) ‘Between Eroticism and General Economics: Georges Bataille,’ The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, translated by Frederick Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity Press.
[19] Bataille, Georges (1985) ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism,’ Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, University of Minneapolis Press.
[20] Habermas (2007), 225-226.
[21] Habermas (2007), p. 226.
[22] Nietzsche, F. (2010) ‘Oh, sweet forest peace’, The Peacock and the Buffalo: The Poetry of Nietzsche, Second Edition, translated by James Luchte , New York and London: Continuum International Publishing.
