If observed through Derrida’s philosophy of death and mourning, we might see O’Hara’s aesthetics of immediacy as a form of thanatography, the writing of death. And through such thanatographicality the poetics of the present should be understood as the poetics of the
spacing of the present.
Photo-thanato-graphy
In order to understand O’Hara’s poetics as that of the spacing of the present, my project in the present study will be roughly composed of two analytical moves. The first move investigates O’Hara’s poetics as a form of photo-thanato-graphy. The resemblances between O’Hara’s poetry and photography have been noticed by many critics, yet in the present study I would argue that the analytical possibility of probing the ontological (or hauntological) nature of the aesthetics of presence in O’Hara’s poetry lies in seeing the poems as the verbal version of photographic images. The suggestion I am venturing here is that such alikeness between the two art forms does not affirm the immediacy in O’Hara but rather ushers in the working of spectrality to O’Hara’s poetics. And the way to see this, I would propose, is by
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taking a route through Derrida’s analytical observations of the ghostly nature of photography.
Seeing the immediate moments in O’Hara as being captured photographically is an analytical strategy not only because of the resemblances between the two but also because Derrida’s contemplation on photography to some extent encapsulates his thematization of hauntology.
The idiomatic logic of photography, as Gerhard Richter contends, “can be seen as an operational network and a metalanguage through which larger philosophical, historical, aesthetic, and political questions can be brought into focus” (Richter xxiii). Michael Naas has made a similar suggestion that Derrida’s views on photography in fact take up many of his central philosophical themes, including time, death, mourning, singularity, repetition, the archive, event, etc. (Naas 206).
Derrida’s view on photography has in fact also opened up a significant dialogue between words and images. In an interview Derrida points out the crucial fact that there is a certain translative relationship between words and image, in which both are pushed to the limit deconstructively that “the nonverbal appears in the verbal,” and the nondiscursive art forms such as painting and photography can come to resemble or “correspond to the linguistic scene.” The “graphy” part in photography might helpfully hint at such interrelation. There seems to be a middle ground in which the strict boundary between discourse and image starts to blur. And this blurring of boundary has to do with Derrida’s persistent deconstructive concerns with exploring the nondiscursive in the discourse (see Derrida, Copy, Archive,
Signature). What Derrida finds as the originary ground of writing, the archi-writing or
proto-writing that rests on differance, trace, supplementation, deferral, difference, repetition, iterability, memory, archive, inscription, death, and mourning, is also the essence and nature of photographic images. Photography to some degrees encompasses Derrida’s majorphilosophical engagements to the extent that he even sees it as an alternate name for deconstruction.
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Indeed, it is in Derrida’s remarks on photography that the full force of his critical explorations of many central philosophical themes becomes apparent. The force of this point lies in that in some ways photography witnesses and exhibits in a different manner the
spectrality that underlies all words and writing, which Derrida has endeavored to make
manifest. Such spectrality is the infinite process of self-differentiation in both writing and photography. The scope, or the philosophical radicality, Derrida claims for his theorization of spectrality can to a great extent shatters the façade of presence as the most privileged value of metaphysics and further interrogates all the metaphysical assumptions that saturate it. For Derrida, the philosophical value of writing and photography does not root in their ability to sustain being as presence, but in their status as hauntological practices. Thus Derrida’s contemplation of photography and its ghostly nature can have an important bearing on the complication of Frank O’Hara’s poetics of the present and can be deemed fertile instimulating new perspective on O’Hara’s poetry.
As noted previously, Derrida have suggested that when explored radically in a deconstructive manner, words and discourses will start to show a certain nondiscursive qualities that might blur the boundary of word and image. And O’Hara’s style evidences such deconstructive blurring of boundary between the two seemingly incompatible media. It is O’Hara’s poetics of the present that makes text transform into materialized textile that resembles the presentation of image. The poet records in detail the moments that happen to enter his conscious observations and thereby making his poetry highly image-driven. The surface of his poetry is often composed of what seem like the spur-of-the-moment feelings inspired by the miscellaneous elements in a given instant, and the tension between such sometimes incompatible elements has prompted Marjorie Perloff to see the surface of his poetry as that of the Abstract Expressionist paintings in which the tension comes from the
“push and pull” of spatial arrangements (Perloff, Aesthetics 174-5). This is one obvious example showing that there already have been critical endeavors to explore O’Hara’s poetics
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through comparing it to other forms of art and image.
However, in her comparing O’Hara’s style to the Abstract Expressionist painting, Perloff claims O’Hara’s verbal images are more like those in the motion pictures than as static
photography and monuments. This is the point I am here intended to contest by ushering in Derrida’s theorization of the archive. I argue that any such preservation of experience takes some form of medium, and such medium always inevitably already turns the active present moments and action into static and iterable archival documents. This archived experience is always already detached from the lived moments it has recorded, and this is true even in terms of motion picture. The archive always indicates the survival which witnesses and mourns for the death and loss of a genuine moment. Hence capturing and then eternalizing the present in both O’Hara’s aesthetics and in photographic images is in fact an act of monumentalization. Thus while Perloff’s likening O’Hara’s technique to that of Abstract Expressionist might explain the effect of the sometimes abstract use of image that causes tension in O’Hara’s poems, it would seem to be overly simplistic to suppose that the immediate gesture in O’Hara can be treated as genuine ongoing motion.
The desire to pursue the structure of the present and the suspension of the instant exist in both photography and O’Hara’s poetics. This is achieved by interrupting and arresting time respectively through releasing the shutter and the poet’s intentional capturing of what comes to his realm of consciousness. But such a present, a suspended instant, is always already pre-inscribed by a certain self-division and thus can be far from achieving a full presence of the “now,” for it has been through the process of representation. The authentic is dead at the moment it is captured. What is left is only its corpse, the iterable archive. Whether the present is preserved by the technicality of photography or by verbal documentation, the
“thanatographical” nature of such time arresting cannot be obscured. This is the critical place in which one encounters the captured present as bearing witness to the problematic of time,
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truth, singularity, repetition, death, mourning, and survival (living-on). It is the moment of giving birth to inscription, to signature, and at the same time taking away the life of its authenticity. O’Hara, like the photographer, is in a position of eternal mourning; the city becomes the figure of ruin which, as Derrida notes in Demeure, Athenes, “watch[es] over all that is non-contemporaneous within it.” It is the spectral nature and the concept of “originary mourning” of photographic images that is embedded in the hauntological landscape in O’Hara’s poetry of the present.
Auto-bio-hetero-thanato-graphy
My second analytical move that brings forth the hauntological nature in O’Hara’s aesthetics of presence will begin by paying close attention to the Derridean
auto-bio-hetero-thanato-graphy in O’Hara. The thanatographicality here lies in O’Hara’s attempt to establish his own idiosyncratic signature: the whimsical use of proper name and the performing of the autobiographical “I-ness” in his poetry. It is my purpose to illustrate that such idiosyncratic signature does not concretize the sense of presentness but is always already divided and expropriated by the alterity embedded within it.
Critical literature that has referred in passing to the use of proper name as O’Hara’s prominent poetic device seems to treat it as part of the referential framework pointing to a larger context according to which the metonymic web is built up (Shaw, 2006; Lowney, 1991;
Smith, 2000). And there have also been critical opinions which see the proper names as O’Hara’s peculiar means to infuse the emotionally intense moment with the fullness of presence (Perloff, 1998; Mattix, 2011). Here Micah Mattix’s analysis is worthy of further consideration, for it is one of the few accounts that provide a systematic treatment of
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O’Hara’s use of proper name. According to Mattix’s analysis, O’Hara’s loading his poetry with proper names is an act attempting to provide the trivial experiences with a concrete form, and it is also “part of an effort to stop time itself, thus allowing us to experience time in its fullness rather than as a moment of loss.” O’Hara uses proper name to ward off the feeling of loss and to cease the act of mourning for the bygone. Mattix also suggests that by providing experience with a temporal form through naming, the poet is thus able to capture and achieve the fullness of the present (Mattix 74-84).
However, although Mattix’s account here is insightful, my argument in the present study runs an opposite trajectory. If one attends to the issue of proper name by pursuing the
Derridean notion on death and mourning, it would appear that the act of preserving the presence through naming is in fact an act of announcing the death of the named.
Metaphysical thinking has always been characterized by a desire for the absolutely pure singularity. The status of proper name can be seen to bear witness to this desire. However, what is absolutely singular cannot be understood or read unless it participates in a larger context of generality, and such generality which renders the singular understandable paradoxically compromises the uniqueness of the singularity. The name always has its
inscription in language that gives it meaning and at the same time deprives it of its singularity.
And in a more Hegelian (and perhaps Blanchotian) sense naming is also less an act of creation than that of annihilation. In one way or another naming suppresses what is named and deprives the latter of its particularity. The name renders the named subjected to language and representation. Hence the ontological status of the name is always spectral. The name is always the other’s name, something other to itself.
In this case the proper name bears witness to alterity and death on two levels: first, the properness and the singularity of the name cannot make sense unless they participate in a universalizable context. Yet such context, which is constitutive of the properness of the name, paradoxically deprives the name of its propriety, and makes it something other than itself.
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Second, Derrida believes that the law of the name is always related to death because it is destined to outlive its bearer. When one dies the name persists. The act of calling one’s or a thing’s name is always haunted by the understanding that this name will survive the bearer and can be active even when the bearer is absent. The name announces death even while the bearer is still living; it is an originary death that is prior to all death. This is, therefore, a work of mourning even at the initial stage of nomination.
What I attempt to propose here is the fact that observed through the Derridean logic of death and mourning, the proper name in O’Hara does not work to achieve or to grasp the moment’s fullness but to once again mourn for the loss of the named. Since naming is also a form of monumentalization by eternally iterable language that is destined to witness the death of the named. The more specific the proper name, the stronger the feeling of loss that one feels. What this monumentality indicates is that the names do not provide a concrete form for the immediate experiences, but serve as the reminder/remainder of the present that is
irretrievably gone. Like the moment captured in photographic image, all that is preserved by the names is less the freshly suspend presence than the mummification of memory. The name effaces as much as it eternalizes.
If the absolutely singular autobiographical presence O’Hara attempts to achieve through the use of proper name is always already compromised by a sense of alterity, the immediate autobiographical “I-ness” is also predicated upon Derrida’s notion of the originary death and mourning, since it too presents a desire to concretize the autobiographical presentness by establishing some sort of signature that is essentially singular to the poet. The prevailing
“I-ness” in O’Hara’s “I do this, I do that” scenarios, however, is a signature that will never be immediately present to itself, for no matter how immediate the experience seems to be, at the moment the poet transcribes the emotionally intense instant into language the “I” is destined to depart from itself and becomes an entire other. A hiatus appears in the poet’s subjectivity;
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the poet transcribing the experience of the instant has already witnessed the loss of that instant and the death of the subject experiencing the moment. This is a consequence of the impossibility to escape from, or to be freed of, signs and representation. The spectrality, the haunting effect that upsets the purity of signature is a radical inevitability as long as that signature itself belongs to the realm of language that paradoxically makes it possible and impossible at the same time.
Following the analytical moves discussed above, the thesis will consist of three main chapters.
Chapter 1 offers an examination of Jacques Derrida’s hauntological discourse and its deconstructive force for dismantling the metaphysics of presence. Such examination will illustrate that what is central to the thematization of hauntology is Derrida’s philosophization of death (the thanatographical). Special attention here will thus be devoted to the three interrelated philosophical themes upon which the Derridean hauntology rests, namely, death, mourning, and spectre. The second part of this chapter then introduces Frank O’Hara’s aesthetics of presence and demonstrates how it can be critically problematized by Derridean hauntological discourse. I argue that this problematization can be productive in bringing philosophical sophistication to the understanding of O’Hara’s poetics of the present.
Chapter 2 embarks on the investigation of O’Hara’s poetics of the present as a form of photo-thanato-graphy. The poet’s presentation of the immediate presence and the Derridean notion of the spectre are examined through their intimacy with Derrida’s view on the spectral nature of photography. The purpose of such investigation is to illustrate that O’Hara’s poetics of the present, if observed through the philosophical lamp of hauntology, is
photo-thanato-graphical: the capturing of immediate present does not solidify self-presence
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but is in fact predicated upon the spectral temporal structure of death and mourning.
Chapter 3 approaches the Derridean notion of spectrality in the establishing of signature by analyzing O’Hara’s use of proper name and its relation to the poet’s autobiographical presentation. Following Derrida’s designation of autobiography as heterothanatography, the analytical move in this chapter is twofold: first, I will observe the “autobiographicality” in O’Hara, which lies in the poet’s peculiar forming of an intimate coterie structure through the obsessive use of names. The radical singularity of such autobiographicality, as I will argue, in fact contains the seeds of its own deconstruction. The idiosyncrasy of the autobiographical is always already spectralized by a sense of otherness, that which is not “proper,” and thus is deprived of its singularity. Second, that the properness of signature is always already compromised by alterity which spectralizes the autobiographical account and turns it into what Derrida designates as auto-bio-hetero-thanato-graphy leads toward a reconsideration of the use of proper name and the autobiographical subject in O’Hara. I will argue that the proper name in O’Hara’s poetics of the present does not concretize the immediate
autobiographical presentness but serves as an act of monumentalization that announces the death of the present. The signature erases as much as it concretizes. And such
thanatographical “constitutive erasure” of the signature, as I will demonstrate in the last part of Chapter 3, can further inspire a reevaluation of the autobiographical subject whose “I-ness”
is always already spectralized and “expropriated” by a thanatographical division of the auto-bio-hetero-thanato-graphy.
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CHAPTER 1.
Derrida’s Thematization of Hauntology and the Spectral Nature of Frank O’Hara’s Poetics of the Present
In the Derridean philosophy, hauntology is the arche-experience originarily embedded in all perceived forms of presence. The effect of haunting and spectrality precedes and disturbs the metaphysical attempts to consolidate being as presence, turning such attempts into mere ontological illusions. The force of hauntology, therefore, lies in its emphasis on a state of ontological impurity upon which presence is predicated. Presence is always already
contaminated by something other than itself and thus divided from within. In order to grasp how Derrida approaches the thematization of hauntology as the counter-strategy to the metaphysical presence, one needs to begin with a consideration of the formation of
hauntological discourse, which roots decisively in Derrida’s earlier discussion of differance and culminates in his later engagement with the politics of death and mourning. Thus it is the purpose of this chapter to trace this formation of hauntology and the ways in which it, as the catalyst, exposes problematics of the effect of presence in Frank O’Hara’s poetics of the present.
1.1 Hauntology: The Primordial Spectrality
Hauntology, coined by Jacques Derrida to supplant its near-homonym, ontology, is less a reductive philosophical term than a synthesized theme encapsulating the effects of numerous related philosophical concerns in the Derridean theoretical formulations. Most vital among these concerns are Derrida’s lifelong engagement with the politics of death and mourning (this point will be clarified in due course). If one were to inject a privileged point of orientation into the understanding of hauntology, or to seek for it a possible form of simplification, it can be said that hauntology is precisely a particular (if not peculiar) Derridean discourse that ushers in a politics of ghosts to the dominant tradition of
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metaphysics. If hauntology still belongs to the realm of metaphysics (a point of view which Derrida would certainly have rejected), then instead of presenting the metaphysics of being and presence, it introduces quite paradoxically the metaphysics of the nonbeing and absence, and with such a paradox it disturbs from within the essence of metaphysics and everything
metaphysics. If hauntology still belongs to the realm of metaphysics (a point of view which Derrida would certainly have rejected), then instead of presenting the metaphysics of being and presence, it introduces quite paradoxically the metaphysics of the nonbeing and absence, and with such a paradox it disturbs from within the essence of metaphysics and everything