Notes

¹ By contrast, and to anticipate something closer to the turn of Agamben's thought perhaps, the generalized apostrophe "Beware of the dog"—as speech act rather than common noun in clausal context—absents the animal's presence (regardless of its visibility at the moment) but under precisely the sign of its potential (as threat). The imperative is to "be" in a state of expectation, in the form of wariness.
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² See Brandreth, where the phenomenon is placed under the sign of the quizzical in the subheading "What Did You Say?" (58-59). Brandreth's obscure and unexplained coinage (alluding to an either/or ambiguity, perhaps, rather than to the technical term "oronymy" for the onomastic class "names of mountains"), a term which has nonetheless had considerable circulation since, is defined as follows: "Oronyms are sentences that can be read in two ways with the same sound"—as in the rather self-exampling 'Are you aware of the words you have just uttered' vs. '. . . just stuttered.' Or more fully discrepant: 'The stuffy nose can lead to problems / The stuff he knows can lead to problems." All of his examples, however, turn in this way on the junctural equivocation of two (or three) abutting words, so that such phrasal alternatives (rather than full-sentence variants) are predominantly dependent on what I have called the wavering phonemic juncture of a "transegmental drift." See Stewart passim.
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³ Both for her spirited send-off to our panel when it was composed of talks rather than articles (where, even then, I was borrowing formulations off the cuff as fast as I could remember them or jot them down), and for her brilliant advice since in overseeing the expansion of my paper into an actual essay, I compound my longstanding debt to the private as well as printed wisdom of Susan Wolfson.
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⁴ "Between Shakespeare and Joyce," writes William H. Gass in an essay called "The Sentence Seeks its Form," "there is no one but Dickens who has an equal command of the English language" (275)—and he means by this to stress the aural dimension of the novelist's effects. "Language is born in the lungs and is shaped by the lips, palate, teeth, and tongue out of spent breath. . . . It therefore must be listened to while it is being written" (273). Written—and then read, its origins thus recovered in its destination. There is nothing undeconstructed in this. As Dolar would agree, and before him Agamben, and of course Kittler too, speech is not the work of spirit but strictly enunciation, "spent breath" and its articulated blockages. In Dickens, long before he reaches the podium with it, such printed language waits to be audited, precisely by being silently released from, typography's pent breath. Gass's most striking evidence from Dickens is a sentence that carries a slight additional interest for the present essay, rather than for his, in the way it is sustained upon the nonapostrophic and recursive lower-case moan of o. David Copperfield's lament is given here with my further typographical highlights on the kinds of anaphoric returns and alphabetic reversals by which Gass is intrigued: "From Monday morning until Saturday night, I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support, of any kind, from any one. . . ." (275). Gass's own stress falls not on the negative trailing off of the non-echoic "one" (with its slant reprise of the opening "Monday") but rather, before that syllabic denouement, on the overt graphic flips from "no" to "on" and the alphabetic and half phonic return of the latter twice over, after the aggrieved "no counsel," in the impacted nugatory parallel of "no consolation."
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⁵ Quoted in Jameson, where the lines are treated for their lyric reification of the sea voyage, but without attention to the phonetic wavelets that serves to swamp the turmoil of below-deck labor—or at least float euphonically above it.
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⁶ See other examples in The Mill on the Floss in Reading Voices (above n. 2), 212.
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⁷ This is a relationality of subordinate phrasing on which no one writes more grippingly than Christopher Ricks. See "William Wordsworth (2): 'A Sinking Inward into Ourselves from Thought to Thought.'"
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⁸ The way this redirected expectation—from "being someone," or "being something or other" (as, say, "intuitive" or "munificent") to simply the named fact of her existence as a force for change—the way this might, in Eliot's manner of putting it, "vibrate to" the being present of potentiality itself in Agamben's writings (the existence of nonexistence as a positive rather than a negative force) anticipates the remaining direction of the essay.
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⁹ See also the separate treatment of the mediations in Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
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¹⁰ See Jean-Claude Milner, Introduction à une science du langage.
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¹¹ The point is not an easy one—this relation of thought to non-voice: "We can only think if language is not our voice, only if we reach our own aphonia at its very bottom (but in reality there is no bottom). What we call the world is this abyss" (Agamben, Language and Death 108). Cognition is distance. Among the several reiterations of this central Heidegerrian inference, here in Agamben's own italics: "Thinking death is simply thinking the Voice. Turning radically back, in death, from its having been thrown into Da, Dasein's negative retrieves its own aphonia" (60). It is not just, after Hegel, that things come to consciousness only by being the negation of what they are not. Further, the consciousness to which they come is the negation of exactly that voice which is negated in their naming. For this philosophical tradition derived from Hegel, the only way, in any sense, to be "positive" about the world is through such double negations. Agamben's self-appointed task, always by definition provisional, is to forge another route.
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¹² The world emerges from the infinite regress of speech (or thought) tracking down "its" voice to the impossible "there" of its being. To think the condition of being that is indexed, rather than ever truly uttered, by voice requires a medium other than that voice. But if the realized world is defined in this way as the sheer negation of voice, as all that remains outside that voice, signified by the very language that cancels its sound in the enounced sense of other things, then the recognized distance of thought from voice is an essential ethical as well as a philosophical idea: route of the only proper descent from self-enclosed logos into the groundless but no less immanent reality of ethos, where one must share a non-individuated space with others.
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¹³ Certainly, in this closing high note of Agamben's, one can hear overtones of a pervasive Deleuzian intuition—most obvious or clear-cut, perhaps, in the latter's engagement (so different from Kittler's Lacanian application) with the "imaginary" of film: namely, that the virtual, as part of the real, may be the opposite of the actual, but not its negation. See Deleuze 7.
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¹⁴ Percy Bysshe Shelley, "A Defence of Poetry," in Wolfson and Manning 874.
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¹⁵ In "Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe)," Stanley Cavell sees (hears) Poe's prose as "a parody's of philosophy's" (111) in just this respect, its iterative paranoia and "impish" wordplay as the mad antithesis of any overcome skepticism about the credited and signified world. In Poe's story "The Imp of the Perverse," on which Cavell focuses, the stray phoneme "imp" breaks into discourse as invasive prefix as if it manifests the return of a linguistic repressed that must be patrolled by a normative everyday discourse. Recall in this disruptive sense the rising visionary stress of a phrase like Shelley's from Ode to the West Wind: his triple impish pun on fused subjectivity released from the monosyllabic trigger of "imp-et/you/us/one."
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