If reading is about the formation of identities, subjectivities...

Where does the sub come in to subjectivity? What are we beneath, so to speak? What are we subjected to? We think of the subject as the one under control but obviously in the French theory tradition, if I can speak of it shorthand, the subject is the one subjected, formed by other discourses.

There is a kind of compulsion here: I couldn't any more give up my Creeley than give up my Coltrane. The grooves are strong and deep, the scarring is permanent. We speak of "déformation professionelle." My graduate students use the concept of "agency" as a counteracting force to this compulsion: the subject is autonomous and can speak for itself.

For graduate students, the process is double: there is a subjection to the norms of the "profession." And a subjection to the literature itself. To say there is a tension between these two things is the understatement of the century. At best there is a tension, at worst the second subjection simply fails to take place.

But how to conceive of this tension? One view is that the subjection to poetry is purer and less conditioned, but poetry is also an institution, or rather, it is inseparable from its various institutions, its concrete instantiations on this earth. (Any particular way that it exists materially.) So then it becomes a question of which institutions matter and who is in control of them, not of finding a space outside of institutions. The way Silliman, for example, insists that other institutions outside of academia should be the true legitimators. But he is no less invested in there being a legitimating mechanism.

All arguments about poetry are about this.

It's often seemed to me that the canon of high/late European modernist literature and the canon of capital T "Theory" were co-extensive. Thus an interest in Celan, Char, and Beckett goes perfectly well with an interest in Derrida, Levinas, Blanchot, and Heidegger. Foucault wrote a book on Roussel, after all, and Barthes was an early defender of the nouveau roman. Blanchot himself was a novelist.

This idea is hardly new with me, but I think it has certain implications that haven't been fully spelled out. One is that a certain intellectual proximity between theorists and writers is taken for granted in certain circles. When French theory is applied in English departments, it is often done in a way that doesn't presuppose this proximity. In other words, the "leap" is greater from the theory to the text because there is not that ready-made connection that you find when Derrida writes about Jabès. It's the complaint that French (or European) theory is de-contextualized in the US academy. It would be like taking an essay by Charles Bernstein and "applying" it to some French poet, without taking into account the intellectual milieu of Bernstein, his own intellectual habitus and the way Charles might have been influenced by Creeley or Kerouac or Grenier.

Now when Gamoneda translates Mallarmé (with his daughter who is professor of French), then there is a desire to lay claim to that particular high modern / Blanchot tradition. That is the way Gamoneda is championed, in this kind of language and rhetoric. It is not so much that you need modernist theory to deal with Gamoneda or Valente, but that you want to establish a kind of affiliation, and this takes place through a kind of "high modern" rhetoric that draws on Heidegger and Blanchot for its vocabulary.

Here the theory is not necessarily de-contextualized, because these are indeed European poets, albeit Spanish ones. (The idea that Spain merely aspires to Europeanness!) I'm the guy in the back of the room who wants to raise his hand and say wait a minute, what's going on here? I want to question the naturalness of the move that sees European high modernism as the culmination of everything worthwhile. At the same time, I love this European late modernism myself, so I don't want to question it too loudly either. I guess what I'm saying is I'd rather look at the problematics of affiliation rather than simply produce a high-modernist reading that applies Levinas to Gamoneda, or what have you. Let other people do that.