The rhetoric of illness in Jean Paulhan

Jean Paulhan was often ill and constantly preoccupied by the ailments, both the serious ones and the niggling little ones, that afflicted him. He even claimed, in his 1952 radio interview with Robert Mallet, that he had what he called "a great aptitude for illness," which he explains as follows, giving us a brief medical history: "I had been in Madagascar less than six months when I caught malaria. I was wounded in 1914, after three months of war, seriously enough to be given a year's leave. When I was about sixteen I came down with scarlet fever, which caused an inflammation of the kidneys, which meant I was off school for ten months. And so on. At the moment I have terrible sciatica." (1) But Paulhan was as concerned about the well-being of others as he was about his own health. He seemed to have a particular attachment to writers who were in some way physically and mentally disabled, such as Joe Bousquet or Christian Dotremont, and he was one of those who most helped Antonin Artaud, financially as well as in other, less tangible ways. There was something, too, about the increasing proximity to death that illness brings with it that clearly fascinated Paulhan. The text that perhaps illustrates this most movingly is a narrative written in 1946, "Mort de Groethuysen à Luxembourg" ("Groethuysen's death in Luxembourg"), recounting the last weeks of his close friend, Bernard Groethuysen, a colleague at the Nouvelle revue française who was a well-known philosopher and political theorist in France at the time. It is extraordinary both for the detail with which Paulhan describes the physical aspects of his friend's deteriorating body, and for the restraint and complete lack of sentimentalism that characterizes this homage.

At one point in the text, suddenly realizing that he is talking more about himself than about his friend, he confesses that "our two lives became so intertwined that it is now almost impossible to separate them out." (2) This fusion of self and other, along with the desire to take on the suffering of others, seems to suggest an initial interpretation of the relationship that existed for Paulhan between writing and pain, rhetoric and illness, les mots et les maux. Paulhan's exceptionally generous and constant attention to the well-being of others, allied to the meticulous care with which he carried out his professional duties of editor and writer, was for him a kind of editorial modus operandi, a sympathy without excessive pathos. I would like to think through the significance of this rather surprising conjunction by looking more closely at the two texts in which he makes this connection most explicitly, his Lettre au médecin [Letter to my doctor], published for the first time in 1930, and Les douleurs imaginaires [Imaginary Pains], which is from 1955. I will take as a theoretical framework Maurice Blanchot's major critical essay on Paulhan's récits, "La facilité de mourir" ["The Ease of Dying"], first published in 1969 in the testimonial issue of the Nrf following Paulhan's death a year earlier.

The relationship between writing and illness, far from being secondary or circumstantial was, I will argue, a crucial one for Paulhan, as the following often-quoted sentence from the text for which he is most well-known, Les fleurs de Tarbes, ou la Terreur dans les lettres (The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature), testifies: "The illness of literature would, after all, be fairly insignificant if it did not also reveal a chronic illness of expression." (3) In Paulhan's text, the opposition between Terror and Rhetoric appears to polarize two conflicting ideologies of expression; on the one hand the aspiration toward originality, and on the other the attraction to the stability of the commonplace, but this is seen by Paulhan as something that is a universal characteristic of literature and language, and not limited to any particular historical or cultural context. He dismantles Terrorist claims by showing that they are victims of an optical illusion, since they are constantly preoccupied with language, and spend all their time trying to bypass it, or rid it of its impurities. Commonplaces, and other "ready-made" forms of linguistic expression, thus become for Paulhan the locus of a deep-seated tension within language and literature. Les Fleurs de Tarbes is Paulhan's attempt to find some way of resolving this tension, and his solution to the paradox is a revalorization (or a "reinvention"| of Rhetoric. From the point of view of Rhetoric, the author is freed from a constant preoccupation with language precisely by submitting to the authority of commonplaces. In order to have a renewed contact with the world through language, Paulhan suggests that writers should mutually agree to recognize clichés as clichés, and thereby institute a communally agreed-upon rhetoric as a means of resolving the perplexing ambiguity that characterizes commonplaces. The metaphor of illness is one of the central threads running through Les Fleurs de Tarbes insofar as Paulhan conceives of Terror, in its infinite guises, as so many strategies designed to remedy the stultifying illness that (Rhetorician) literature seems to be suffering from. This is how Paulhan critiques the Terrorist method , and the passage clearly explains his particular usage of the term Terror:

There is one practical way of avoiding contagious illnesses: that is to get rid of those who are ill — or at least to keep them permanently isolated. There is a way to fight which consists in dodging punches (or at least in knowing how to take them). But there is another, wiser method, which consists in anticipating the pain: either by throwing the first punches, or by isolating and getting rid of, one by one, the causes of leprosy or tuberculosis. Now Terror, in the war it wages against an affliction of language, behaves like a doctor who would have his patients suffering from contagious illnesses executed. (Fleurs, 138)

Paulhan pursues the analogy as follows: Terrorist writers, believing they are uncontaminated by Rhetoric's illness, have always in fact been infected by it, and the solution he proposes — in a sense his diagnosis and prognosis — to ensure the success of Terrorist ambitions, once the complicity that at the same time opposes and unites Terror and Rhetoric has been acknowledged, is that Terror should allow itself to be invaded by the illness, to give in to it.

The first of his two texts that explicitly thematize the question of illness, Lettre au médecin, is written in the form of a letter, and although it is addressed to his doctor, the narrator is not really interested in seeking any medical treatment or cure, or even in having a precise medical explanation of his condition (it happens to be boils in this instance), since it is not causing him any great pain. We soon realize that the text is in fact a pretext for something that goes beyond a straight-forward concern about being successfully cured. Rather the narrator is looking for a way of coming to terms with his illness, of accommodating it, and he does this by transforming the aetiology of his symptoms into a rather whimsical little fiction:

I believe that sometimes I feel several drops of blood losing their way inside of me, separating and forming a sort of lake.... The lake sometimes moves around. In the night it goes from my temple to my neck, from my forehead to my eyelid. It rarely leaves my face, it started out there. An injury to my thumb, which bled, caused the discomfort and the waves to disappear. The lake has now finally dried up, and I no longer hear anything. (4)

As he writes, he realizes he has in fact become accustomed, and even quite attached, to his illness (Lettre, 269), and he ends up rather perversely asking his doctor for a way not to be cured. Illness thus seems to be an intimation of something else, a secret too important in any event to confide to a doctor, and which the narrator explains as follows, in a key passage toward the end of the text: I am like everyone: I am not continually certain that I am leading a real life. Indeed, I do not doubt that one day I will discover the thought which will guarantee me, almost at every moment, rapture [le ravissement], the absence of boredom. I have more than one reason to think that this discovery is near. (To tell you the truth, I don't know what it will be, nor even if I will be able to say what it is.) But as long as it is not there, Ihave to confess that illness, tiredness or fever... more or less stand in for it [tiennent, peu s'en faut, sa place]. (Lettre, 269-70) In Les douleurs imaginaires (Imaginary Pains, 1955) Paulhan elaborates at greater length and with more precision what he had begun to sketch out in Lettre au médecin. The "pain" of the title is the sciatica to which the narrator had alluded in his interview with Robert Mallet, and for which he seems to have tried every known treatment or remedy, without any success. In desperation he consults a Chinese acupuncturist, who claims to have cured him after one session, and assures him that any pain he feels from now on will simply be imaginary, rather like a phantom limb. The pains however continue as before, but their provisionally imaginary status means that he is now able to perceive them in a more detached manner, which leads him to describe them in an almost childlike language of "fizzles" [pétillements], "flashes" [éclairs], "whiplashes" [coups de fouet], "sparks" [étincelles], "zig-zags" [zigzags], and so on. Not coincidentally, these metaphors echo Paulhan's descriptions of Cubist or informel paintings, and this suggested analogy is made more explicit when he talks about his pains as an "aesthetic spectacle," with his body as the theater on which this spectacle is performed ("it was an entire part of my life in effect taking part in the spectacle, and beginning its aesthetic career") (5). So we could understand the "rhetoric of illness" in this further sense as a form of alternative or complementary medicine, or a counterpoint to the detached rationalism of accepted medical practice. The transformative power of literary language serves to aestheticize or "rhetoricize" the failings or impertections of the body (or, by extension, ot lite), so that this rhetoric functions as a kind of anaesthetic that dulls the consequent pain. Pain appears as something other than what it is, and given that illness is always to some extent a sign of the body not working properly, or of a certain impotence, the sufferer can re-appropriate his or her illness, and thereby feel less impotent. But the illusion quickly loses its charm, and the aesthetic strategy its effectiveness. The narrator is soon only too relieved to be able to feel pain again ("To hell with comparisons and images!," (Douleurs, 38), but not without having had something of a revelation, with the help of the acupuncturist's method. While finding unexpected comfort in the familiarity of his "old pains" [anciennes douleurs], the liberating experience he went through, if only temporarily, has made him conscious of a kind of double, or palimpsestic, pain, which affects him even when the initial pain seems to have disappeared ("I am suffering from not suffering" [Douleurs, 44]). In a metaleptic moment that is typical of Paulhan, the narrator remarks that he has just undergone a "curious reversal" between himself and his sciatica pains: "it is not so much that I am experiencing them, but rather they who are putting me to the test, it is they who are experiencing me (c'est elles plutôt qui me mettent à l'épreuve, c'est elles qui m'éprouvent)" (Douleurs, 39). The experience that Paulhan is attempting to circumscribe (and Blanchot was the first critic to understand this) is not essentially personal, although it has every appearance of being so. Rather, it is an intuition of something that exceeds both the narrator and his pain, subject and object, all of the oppositions that are at work here, and even oppositionality as such:

Now, everything happened as if I had only managed it at the expense of a singular reversal, and as if some mystical event, if you prefer, had necessarily entered into their composition: as if it were part of their nature, or one of the bits from which they are made up, and as if the most banal of lives were presumed to be secretly harboring this extraordinary event. Douleurs, 50)

This analogy leads the narrator to describe this event in terms of philosophical or religious mysticism, alluding, for example, to Saint Augustine, Buddha, Saint John of the Cross, and Lao-Tzu. Because of the language Paulhan uses (trance, ecstasy, revelation, passion, sublimity, and so on), there is no doubt this experience is akin to an epiphany, but with the significant difference that his sciatica is presented as something minor, an explicitly banal example. Yet it takes on a considerable power in the text that should not be underestimated. It overrides the playful "rhetoricization" of the first part of the essay, and becomes by the end the figure that makes possible, and commands, all of the tropological displacements of the text. This process is again very typical of Paulhan's narratives, in that his text shifts from an objective, often quasi-scientific observation, to a surprised performative participation within the very phenomenon it is describing. Illness is thus another instance of this performative self-implication via the fig ure of reversibility, which usually is structured chiastically (in this case, the illness turns out to be the cure). In this respect, the phrase "rhetoric of illness" is somewhat pleonastic, since illness is nothing other than Rhetoric itself, the tropological operation that allows illness and recovery to be opposed, exchanged, or replaced.

But if Rhetoric is illness, it is at the same time an antidote, or the vaccine we use to innoculate ourselves against illness. This is the very same ambivalence that Derrida sees at work in Plato's pharmakon, which is for him as an element that is both beneficial and dangerous, poison and antidote [contrepoison] in French. As Derrida says: "The pharmakon is ambivalent to the extent that it constitutes the milieu within which the opposites are opposed, the movement or play that relates one to the other, reverses them, and makes the one go over into the other (soul/body, good/bad, inside/outside, memory/forgetting, speech/writing, etc.)" (6). For Plato, as Derrida reads him, writing is seen as pharmakon to the extent that it is exterior to the logos (pure voice or memory), but it is at the same time that which makes possible the very distinction between voice and writing. Paulhan himself was fascinated by these kinds of inherently self-contradicting terms, or homophonous antonyms, precisely because of their radical indeterminability. The second, rhetoricized illness in Les douleurs imaginaires functions in a similar manner. It has no substantial identity of its own, but is the play of opposites that are exchanged in the various chiasmic reversals (health/illness, real/imaginary, subject/object, banal/extraordinary, and so on). Like the pharmakon it is also a kind of mise en abyme, and characterized by a certain abyssal structure. Toward the end of Les douleurs imaginaires Paulhan draws out this abyssal folding-in upon itself, which he describes as the infinite regression of the mind's, and of language's, self-reflexivity ("language remains powerless to talk about language, and thought to think thought" Douleurs, 53). Sciatica is even for the narrator "the illness of illnesses, the one we all think about vaguely whenever people talk about health" (Douleurs, 36). The narrator's sciatica could be read, then, as a figure of the continuous mobility of figuration itself, a trope that guarantees the movement between illness and its other, and the promise of a reconciliation between all the opposing terms, or of an ultimate revelation. It manages to achieve this insofar as it is not the thing as such, but its analogy or simulacrum. Les douleurs imaginaires could be read, then, as a more detailed commentary on the passage from the Lettre au medecin quoted earlier. What it tells us is that illness perhaps only "stands in" for a more essential or transcendental experience, but it is not for all that of secondary importance, or a poor imitation of the "real thing."

Maurice Blanchot, in the final essay he devoted to Paulhan, "La facilité de mourir," underlines this rhetorical strategy of Paulhan's recourse to simulacrum, to the "as if." As he puts it: "since, from the point of view of the law, the limit is the absolute delimitation (unsurpassable even if surpassed) and, from transgression's absence of perspective, the limit is only the 'as if' (a turn of phrase whose power to transport Jean Paulhan reinvented which is used to measure, by making it incommensurable, what has been accomplished, by the violence of the unaccomplished. "(7) Blanchot considers the role of illness in Paulhan as crucial to an understanding of his writing, and he theorizes it explicitly in his essay. This is, for example, how Blanchot describes the difference between a religious or mystical way of thinking, and the one Paulhan suggests to us in his recits:

it is that the former agrees to succeed (rapture and ecstatic union being the gift and the sign of success), whereas the latter implies, if not its breakdown, at least its failure: the fault, or failing, or the lack by which it allows itself to be taken hold of or by which it takes hold of us, and taking hold of us, lets us go or conceals itself. This is why "there is no rest." ("Ease," 131)

This last sentence is taken from Les douleurs imaginaires, one of a number of récits Blanchot refers to in the course of his essay. He correctly identifies the récit as Paulhan's preferred literary form, and makes a direct connection between the stylistic "modesty" that characterizes the writing of his récits, and the crucial role that illness plays in them. Indeed, for Blanchot, it is the key to their narrative dynamics: "I don't, therefore, need to dwell on the fact that it is through a modesty of vocabulary, which is moreover an effect of the same movement effacement) that this name 'illness' is proposed, protected by its lack of seriousness not admitting anything irreversible), instead of the word capable— is it in fact capable? — of ending all words" ("Ease," 126).

How, then, do we understand the relationship of illness, or the figure of reversibility, to death, which seems to put an end to all rhetorical transformations, and to mark a moment of irreversibility, the point of no return? The best answer is perhaps provided by Paulhan's récit, La guérison sévere [The Severe Recovery], from which Blanchot takes the title of his essay. La guérison sévère is the more or less autobiographical account of an illness and a difficult recovery. Jacques Maast, who is seriously ill with pneumonia and a recurrence of malaria, is perilously close to death, but just manages to recover after his wife, Juliette (who is clearly based on Paulhan's first wife, Sala Prusak), discovers the secret affair he has been having with Simone (Germaine in real life, whom Paulhan eventually married after divorcing Sala). Juliette exhorts Jacques to forget Simone, and in spite of his critical condition, she forces him to make a painful "exchange," in which he admits the guilt of his actions, while Juliette conversely takes upon herself Jacques's illness (and in fact she ends up having the same kinds of hallucinations and violent contractions, and even — in a chapter she herself narrates in the first person — complains of " a pain in my side, which I took to be sciatica") (8). It is this painful and traumatic exchange that seems to reconcile Jacques and Juliette, and make the recovery possible (the "severe recovery" of the title). This is summed up in the final paragraph of the récit:

But through this despair whose ravaging traces I now see on her - ah, when will I be able to feel sorry for her? I am not yet able to feel things - it seems to me that she is henceforth taking responsibility, in return, for my slowness, for so many wasted ideas, whose lack I feel strongly today - and for my initial awkwardness in defending myself against the ease which one takes in dying. (Recovery, 62)

In Blanchot's terms, it is not death "itself" (if such a thing is possible, in itself) that is the danger to be feared, and against which one has to defend oneself. In fact, this discontinuous leap, or sudden moment of reversal, the impossibility that is the condition of possibility of the leap, is precisely the means by which Jacques is able to recover. As Blanchot goes on to explain, in a passage that makes clearer the narrative tension in Paulhan's text, and the relationship of illness to death: "if it is certain that such a leap passes through what one would have to name (and how else would we name it?) death itself, we could conclude that it is the 'ease of dying' which, in every death, hides us from death, or makes us neglect, or forget, to die" ("Ease", 132). It is thus the "ease of dying" that is the real danger, since we risk, as Blanchot puts it, "dying almost inadvertently" ("Ease", 133).

Illness and death are thus set in an indissociable and necessarily dissymmetrical relationship. On the one hand we have continuity, reversibility, repetition, possibility, and on the other, discontinuity, irreversibility, singularity, impossibility. Each is unavoidably implicated in the other, yet they are at the same time absolutely distinct from each other. It is in fact impossible to say which of the two commands the other; whether it is illness (or the metaleptic reversal and merging of two contradictory terms into a relationship of indifference) or death (absolute separation, the passage that is by definition impossible), and Blanchot traces this (nondialectical) dialectic between inditterence and difference with admirable elegance throughout his essay. The central void or abyss, this impossible passage at the heart of almost all of Paulhan's récits, which transforms the elements that at first seem radically opposed (such as, for example, illness and cure), cannot be "death itself," which is impossible, but the narrator can only call it, provisionally, and for example, illness. It is, however, an illness that has more to do with writing and reading than with any "real" experience of physical pain, or any weakness or failing of the body.

The "severe recovery" of the eponymous récit is in fact associated throughout with writing and reading (which is, it seems, inherently difficult and painful). In the course of his illness Jacques covers his bedroom walls with what are termed "useful inscriptions," such as "I'm not coughing any more," "I'm breathing well," "I am cured just as 2 and 2 make 4," all of which require an exceptional effort to write. And the exchange at the end is precipitated by the compromising love letter from Simone that Juliette finds, and which, we are led to suspect, Jacques left lying around on purpose. The almost unbearably painful recovery, or "crossed bridge" (Le pont traversé, the title of another récit by Paulhan, ostensibly about this very same episode, but narrated as a series of dreams), is doubtless one that Paulhan himself had to go through. Translating it into rhetorical terms is not in any sense to deny its physical reality, and the actual pain that Paulhan must have experienced. What happens, though, is that the passage through writing and reading undoes the means by which we are able to distinguish and separate real from imaginary, essential from inessential, illness from cure. As readers of Paulhan we are also irresistibly caught within the shifting ground of his text, and are powerless to protect ourselves against the "illness" from which his language suffers, or which it undergoes, with a kind of endless patience. Ann Smock explains this unpleasant and rather dizzying sensation quite succinctly when she comments upon Blanchot's perception that the reader, having finished Les fleurs de Tarbes, looks back over the abyss he or she has just crossed, without realizing it, or even knowing how it happened: "Making it safely across resembles coming down with an illness. The vitality of the person who has trusted Paulhan's book is liable to be diminished as a result." (9) We are as profoundly altered by his récits as are his characters, just as one is changed or transformed by an illness. To be otherwise ill is not simply to act as host to an illness, an infection, a virus, or some other foreign body, but to welcome alterity as such (again, if such a thing is possible). Blanchot explains it thus in "The Ease of Dying:"

This single world in which we are merged together is coextensive with us, and thus exceeds us in every way, or rather, is radically foreign to us, being the absolute exteriority of thought... since what is affirmed in this case is the overwhelming surprise of the outside itself, overwhelming because it is introduced, as if by chance, into our own coherence, and withdraws us from it, withdraws us from ourselves and, in this withdrawal, relieving us of an "I which is All," transports us — a pure transport or trance or trans —into the One. ("Ease", 134)

This is why, at the end of Les douleurs imaginaires, Paulhan affirms that despite the satisfying reversal that has taken place in the course of the récit, and despite the fact that his illness "disappears with age," he is not for all that cured, and his illness persists: "I am not completely cured. This is the strange flaw, and (if you like) the mystery and the obscure part of illnesses, that they persist even when they have nothing left to teach us" (Douleurs, 56). One of Paulhan's early récits, Le guerrier appliqué (The Diligent Soldier), a fictionalized account of a serious injury he received when a shell exploded close to him during trench warfare in 1914, contains a description of a quasi-epiphanic experience, very similar to the one he associates with illness. Believing he is going to die, he suddenly has the sensation of an extraordinary feeling of lightness and freedom:

Then a new feeling of freedom begins to rise up in me and go through me. It turns into thousands and thousands of ideas: I realize that I am liberated by them from all effort, from time, from this earth. A joy which seems longer to me than any existence. In the trench I am then carried into.... I find myself at first disappointed. It's over now, the door is closed. (10)

There is no doubt that this is an instant of "rapture, absence of boredom," even of ecstasy or transport, or of "trance." Yet it is also anything but a transcendental experience, a religious or mystical ecstasy, since it is an experience that, for Paulhan, literature (more exactly, the récit) alone is capable of repeating and accommodating. One of Paulhan's famous definitions of literature is a fête publique, a public festival. In his text devoted to his dying friend, Groethuysen, he finds himself led to ask the very same question about death: "Just what is it about death that is like a festival?": After all, I too have been to war, I was wounded (too quickly, it is true), I had two particularly serious illnesses, I was arrested during the German occupation and was very close to being tortured. Well, I had the sensation each time of being on the verge of a rapture, the like of which I have never known a rapture that I was perhaps not able to contain, that I would die precisely from not being able to contain. What an odd feeling. But I can do nothing about it [Mais je n'y puis rien faire]. ("Mort de Groethuysen, " 959) Paulhan's answer to his own question thus underlines how for him the joyous intimation of an irrecuperable alterity that he associates with death is coextensive with a kind of extreme powerlessness ("jen'y puis rien faire"). This apparent passivity and indifference is often read, particularly in light of the ways in which Blanchot puts these terms to work, as a lack of political commitment, or an ideological weakness on Paulhan's part. We might well ask about the ethios of this homage to Groethuysen, and how the solemn and respectful tone appropriate to such a testimony sits alongside the more incongruous moments of this text, in which he not only talks a great deal about his own experiences, but also about the pleasures of driving around with their mutual friend, Jean Dubuffet, about Groethuysen's sexual promiscuity, and about male sexuality in general. (11) To understand how illness and rhetoric are indissociably bound together for Paulhan in fact opens up the ethical dimension of his commitment to others, to which I alluded at the beginning of the essay. It is one that we would, however, be hard pressed to account for in Levinasian terms, for example, despite obvious resemblances to the latter's ethical imperative that defines human community. It would require instead, I would argue, a more radically deconstructive perspective, one that Derrida articulates precisely in his early critique of Emmanuel Levinas, "Violence and Metaphysics," in Writing and Difference. (12) As with the logic of archi-writing or archi-violence in Of Grammatology, his argument turns on the question of how one can conceive of a relation to the other that retains the other as other, and he comes up against this necessary aporia: that the condition of possibility of the ethical, of how "I" am bound to others, has to be itself unethical; ethics, in other words, has to begin with a kind of "archi-betrayal." This may seem a rather perverse way of thinking about ethics, but in fact, as Geoffrey Bennington has succinctly put it, ethics has to be "pervertible," otherwise it is reduced to a mere administrative or bureaucratic application of cognitive rules. Or, put otherwise, it has to be inventive and not simply dutiful. (13) This is one way of articulating what one might call the ethico-political imperative of a deconstructive reading, one that is elsewhere figured by Derrida as a question of forgiveness (the necessity of forgiving the unforgivable, otherwise it falls into a kind of calculated or calculable economy); or of unconditional hospitality (which is only hospitality if it accepts the risk of welcoming the other as other). (14) Paulhan's own sense of how we risk ourselves in opening ourselves to language, and therefore necessarily to others, and to the other, could be seen as a more commonplace version of exactly this same dynamic.

Furthermore, when transferred to the political domain, his contentious argument in De la paille et du grain [Of Chaff and Wheat] about the need in any true democracy to make room for its failings and imperfections, in short its illness, which is the "illness of language," is perhaps a timely reminder to us all. As Paulhan puts it, antipatriots are the sign and guarantee of a healthy democracy, just as the illness of language is ultimately the most reliable indicator of its well-being the danger comes when we try to stabilize meanings of words and expressions once and for all, thereby merely reimposing, all the more insidiously, another kind of repressive, tyrannical power. (15) In the context of today's dreary and all too predictable political rhetoric surrounding the so-called "war on Terror, " Paulhan's insights into the relationship between language and the urgent ethico-political questions of the day were perhaps more prescient than most people suspected, and a dose of his "rhetoric of illness" could do us all a power of good.

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1. Jean Paulhan, Les incertitudes du langage (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 41.
2. Paulhan, Mort de Groethuysen à Luxembourg, Nrf 197 (May 1969): 960.
3. Paulhan, Les fleurs de Tarbes, ou la Terreur dans les lettres (Paris: Folio Essais, 1990), 43. Subsequent references in the text, abbreviated as Fleurs. Forthcoming English translation by Michael Syrotinski, The Flowers of Tarbes, or Terror in Literature, to be published by the University of Illinois Press.
4. Paulhan, Lettre au médecin, OC, 1, 267-68. Subsequent references appear in the text, abbreviated as Lettre.
5. Paulhan, Les douleurs imaginaires, OC, III, 37. Subsequent references appear in the text, abbreviated as Douleurs.
6. Jacques Derrida, La dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 145. My translation.
7. Maurice Blanchot, "The Ease of Dying," trans. Michael Syrotinski, in Progress in Love on the Slow Side (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 138-139. Subsequent references in the text abbreviated as "Ease".
8. Paulhan, The Severe Recovery, trans. Christine Laennec and Michael Syrotinski, Progress in Love on the Slow Side, 58. Subsequent references in the text to this translation, abbreviated as Recovery.
9. Ann Smock, "On Jean Paulhan's récits," Qui Parle 8/1 [Fall/Winter 1994]:3.
10. Paulhan, Le guerrier appliqué (Paris: Gallimard, 1982), 87. The experience is remarkably similar to the one Blanchot narrates in his short récit published in 1994, L'instant de ma mort, which appeared subsequently in English, along with Derrida's commentary, as The Instant of My Death and Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). There is much to say about the relationship between the narrator's experience in Blanchot's text and the one in Paulhan's text in terms of writing (particularly the récit) as itself a limit-experience. Although I plan to address this question more fully in a future essay, some pointers can be found in the chapter "Blanchot reading Paulhan" of my Defying Gravity: Jean Paulhan's Interventions in Twentieth Century French Intellectual History (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998) and my translation of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of Blanchot's text, "Fidelities," in the Oxford Literary Review 22 (2000): 132-51. Eric Trudel's subtle and insightful reading, in the present volume, of Paulhan's short text describing his arrest and near-torture by the Germans, "Une semaine au secret," would make a case for including it also within this particular constellation.
11. See Anna-Louise Milne's essay in the present volume, The Power of Dissimulation" in which she also discusses this aspect of Paulhan's homage to Groethuysen in relation to the problematic homosociality in Aytré qui perd l'habitude, and in terms of Paulhan's thinking about the arbitrariness of social conventions generally.
12. Derrida, Writing and Difference (1967), trans. Alan Bass (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978).
13. Geoffrey Bennington, "Deconstruction and Ethics," in Nicholas Royle, ed., Deconstructions; A User's Guide (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 73.
14. See On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2001), and Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
15. *De la paille et du grain, *OC**, vol.5, 329.