In his work on the dialectical exigency on being before language, Maurice Blanchot argues that “the limit experience is the response that the ultimate man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question”.(1) I shall argue that Stephen in Ulysses is the Nietzschian “ultimate man” that puts his being into question as he searches for an origin before death.(2) The subject’s experience with his mother’s death manifests itself into his mimicking Hamlet’s encounter with death. The thought of the dead father’s ghost begs the subject to question who signs, who signs “what” in the name of Hamlet? The subject’s confrontation with death in life leads to a crisis in being otherness as he faces the fragmentation of being: “Names! He is all in all”. The thought of being in relation to language manifests itself into an ethical decision as Stephen refuses to form a unity with the image of the “Father” that was not “Himself” or his “Son”. The problem of being in relation to language will be examined alongside Maurice Blanchot’s writing on the “limit-experience”. I will explore the subject’s ethical decision to be separated from the other that attests to the step outside (absence/ presence) which affirms a double relation for being in relation to negativity, central to Jewish thought, and pertinent to the dialogic of alterity.

Stephen Heath states that “one of the key stresses of Nietzsche’s work may be summarised by the following: ‘Because we have to be stable in our beliefs if we are to prosper, we have made the ‘real’ world a world not of change and becoming, but one of being’”.(3) He proceeds to argue that Joyce shatters the stability of being fixed with the displacement of “multiplicity” in the image of being fragmented. Indeed the thought of fragmentation unveils in the opening scene of “The Tower” whereby the image of the “razor” and the “mirror lay crossed” (U 1). The displacement of the word unfolds in the thought of negativity, as Stephen hears a call from outside that puts his being into question: “Come up Kinch. Come up you fearful Jesuit” (U 1). Mulligan interrogates Stephen about the origin of his name: “Your absurd name, an ancient name . . . The jejune Jesuit” (U 2). The two subjects are from the outset, juxtaposed with the image of crossing, as Stephen’s being is concealed behind the “absurd” “ancient Greek name” and Malachi’s being is concealed behind the Hebrew name for “my messenger”.(4) Each subject stands in relation to separation from the name, as the Greek/ Jew echo each other in a style that Ira, B. Nadel notes uses in the negative dialectics of “question and answer” form Joyce deploys to unite the “Jew Greek”.(5)

Using the play of Socratic dialectics, Stephen and Mulligan speak in a double dialogue with the exterior, as they circle around the last question of being linked to death. Indeed, Jacques Derrida regards language as the “dangerous supplement” which operates as a power of death that “supplements” the origin of being with an anterior presence.(6) Here too, the presence of the razor that sits in the background “dislocates the subject that it constructs”.(7) Thus, the image of the cutting space between the subjects makes up a scene that is never complete, due to the distance of separation. Mulligan tells Stephen that his aunt thinks that Stephen killed his mother. This cutting remark ushers in memories associated with the trauma of death: “Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart” (U 4). Neil Davidson identifies Stephen’s trauma with the “crisis” of Catholicism as the subject is unable to reconcile his separation from the Church nor his mother’s belief in Jesus Christ.(8) This problem haunts him because “there is no substitute for the first origin”.(9) Stephen is tormented by Mulligan who states that “he kills his mother but can’t wear grey trousers” (U 5). As Stephen gazes at absence he begs to know the final answer to the question of being before death: “Who chose this face for me? This dogsbody to rid of vermin” (U 5).

Stephen’s presence becomes “afflicted” by the image of his dead mother that haunts him as he faces the dead word. The dream scene recalls Hamlet’s dead father that revisits the tragic hero after death as a ghost: “In a dream, silently, she had come to him . . . . her breath bent over him with mute secret words” (U 10). He imagines the past in the present as he encounters the desolation of the “hoarse loud breathe” (U 11). The corpse does not speak to him directly but evokes the image of the “desert where there reigns absence”.(10) His affliction depicts the “loss of the dwelling place” as he confronts the materiality of the word.(11) Blanchot states that “in affliction we approach the limit . . . where we are not”.(12) The subject searches for an origin only to be displaced by a dead womb that returns as he struggles to shake off the dead corpse associated with self-exile: “Ghoul! Chewer of corpses! No mother. Let me be and let me live” (U 11). The power of death stigmatises the subject that faces the anguish of awakening to the ethical decision of Abraham, to separate his being from “what is”.(13) His mother calls him a chewer of corpses as the self-reflective portrait faces the dead image. He uses negativity to question the resurrected image of Lazarus, just as Blanchot sees words as copses of things dead and Mallarmé sees the book as a tomb.(14)

In “Proteus” the narrator takes on a secondary presence as the sound of movement in time takes precedence in the ghostly observation. Stephen’s exodus is described as “being without its own existence, speaking from nowhere, suspended in the tale”.(15) The narrator tells the reader: “Am I walking into eternity . . . Crash, crack, crick, crick” (U 45). The sound of the rhythm carries the unknown words into mediation on Nietzsche’s fragment: “Rhythm begins, you see. I hear. A catalectic tetra-meter of iambs marching” (U 46). The “nerve stimulus” doubles over into image then metaphor of symbol.(16) For Nietzsche each time a thought is affirmed, the affirmation is put in relation to the one opposing it to equate the unequal, just as the subject’s double relation questions the thought of genesis in “creation from nothing”.(17) The obscurity of the subject’s being in relation to death returns to destruction in creation: “wombed sin of darkness . . . made not begotten” (U 46). The mystery of the origin of being “lies in his tomb”(18) just as the voice confesses “he willed me and now may not will me away” (U 47). The subject interprets his action doubly as he see being in the “world as a passage”.(19) However, the unknown voice opens up a different kind of relation for the subject that is now in a dialogue with language. Stephen is in relation with what excludes all relation: the infinitely distant.

The narrator that dons a sacerdotal cloak begins to mimic “rabbinic exegesis which forms the core of Judaism”.(20) This method interprets texts via constant intertextuality”.(21) According to Nadel, “the Talmud for Joyce also demonstrated the importance of maieutic or Socratic reading, interrogating the text while closely studying the language”.(22) He proceeds to argue that Joyce “wanted all his readers to enact” this form of Talmudic reading.(23) Accordingly, the narrator provides a platform for the subject’s presence to be doubled over in language that now questions being in the return. Nadel states that: “Joyce’s texts are Talmudic not only in the sense of the scrupulous attention to detail and the intellectual debate” but also “the constant self-consciousness and analysis of his protagonists”.(24) Similarly, the portrait of Stephen that becomes a question for language begs to know where the divine substance lies in the war between “Father and Son” (U 47). The act of withdrawing that silently erases presence opens up being in relation to a presence that questions some thing radically other. This haunting is identified by Leslie Hill as an alterity that lies beyond ontology, which stems from a discursive strategy of movement in withdrawal and re-inscription. (25)> Here Joyce presents the “radical demand that comes from the other”.(26)

This radical thought can be understood via Blanchot’s writing on the “neuter” that questions Stephen’s being in parenthesis. The neuter is an important concept for Blanchot as it occupies the space of language that circles the being of the subject from the position of the “Outside”. (27) The neuter states: “Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint. . . . You preyed to the Blessed Virgin . . . You preyed to the devil” (U 49-50). Ironically, Stephen is read as a double by the neuter as if he were reading the Torah: “reading two pages apiece of seven books every night, eh” (U 50). The neuter interrogates the subject in the double dialogue: “You bowed to yourself in the mirror . . . books you were going to write with letters” (U 50). Stephen’s past haunts him in the present as history returns with a kick in “sardonic recollections”.(28) The neuter uses negative dialectics to question the being that is judged: “you were a student, weren’t you? Of what I the other devil’s name? (U 51) While Stephen’s being is cross examined Christian guilt manifest in the redemptive need for purification in enunciation. The desire for communion is encountered at the limit to being in the text as Stephen faces his limit before the word of the unknown, just like K in The Trial.(29) Indeed, Stephen is arrested and prosecuted by an inaccessible authority as if on trial. However smashing images interrupt the breakage that follows: “form of forms (U 55).

The thought of death is disseminated by Stephen who now calls language into question in “Scylla and Charybdis” as the story of Hamlet is cross examined. Stephen asks: “What is a ghost . . . who has faded into impalpability through death, though absence” (U 240). The question is a response to being in relation to language that is akin to being dead: “The word is the absence of that being, its nothingness, what is left of it when it has lost being”. (30) The question of authenticity is asked for a second time as the “redoubling constitutes” repetition in the “non-origin”.(31) “Who is the ghost . . . returning to the world that has forgotten him? Who is king Hamlet?” (U 24) Stephen strips back the title foreseeing Roland Barthes theory of “Death of the Author”. Barthes claims: “it is language which speaks, not the author”.(32) Stephen draws attention to the text that stands separate to the name crossed out. This thought runs in accord with Blanchot’s theory of being and the “impossibility of dying”, because language is like a “deferred assassination”.(33) The subject is killed by the word and being is resurrected as death speaks.(34) Likewise Derrida proclaims: “death as the possibility of the impossible as such, is a figure of the aporia in which ‘death’ and death can replace—and this is a metonymy that carries the name beyond” being.(35)

The story of Hamlet retold by Stephen is a ruin “redoubling” in the repetition of frames of being in duplicity: “The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow” (U 241). The story is reappropriated by another copy that provides another fragment to being ruptured: “It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king” (U 241). The story recalls God’s call to Adam, the Oedipal drama, whereby the son is called into question to answer for the absent presence: “Hamlet, I am thy father’s spirit bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul” (U 241). The desire to know the real text sublimated in the story is retraced to the author’s principle biography, as the critics try to locate a point of comparison.(36) The critic’s desire for unity with the origin of being is enacted in the retracing of presence back to the author’s life that is examined as a “possibility of impossibility”(37) to limits in being: “Is it possible that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son’s name” (U 241). The search for the “moment that precedes literature” returns to a search for an origin which Blanchot argues is a problem that leads to loss of knowledge: “How can I turn around and look at what exists before, if all my power consists of making it into what exists after”.(38)

The text that stands in as a fragment of paternity is destroyed in the language built upon its own ruin.(39) Indeed, Nadel argues that “Moses destruction of the first set of tables” is aligned with the substitution of false idols with a “new set of commandments”.(40) Accordingly, Nietzsche’s project set out to smash with heavy hammer false idols as he pulled texts apart as a means to “revaluation of values”.(41) Stephen’s negative dialectics resembles Zarathustra’s critique of false idols as he too shatters truth: “I seek God! . . . Why is he lost? . . . Or does he keep himself hidden? . . . We have killed him—you and I . . . God is dead! God remains dead!” (42) So too, the critical theorist in the library suggest that Hamlet’s dead father is akin to the dead God.<(43) The name is displaced in a reversal of positions as a means to re-evaluating positions. The subject states: “I want to know . . . that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion . . . you are the dispossessed son. I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen (U 241). However, destroying the text in order to measure perspective is envisaged in the “infinite movement that relates to nothing but to itself”.(44) Ironically, this method of inquiry reverts to skepticism as the question turns back to the text where meaning is resurrected in between the space of the reading: “this preying into the family life . . . what it is to us how the poet lived?” (U 242)

Stephen’s re-reading of Hamlet reveals further signs of the limit-experience at work in his emphasis of interpretation. This is marked in the “displacement of language rupturing its original writing and exiling the word”.(45) Nadel argues that: “for the Jew—and Joyce—signification is inseparable from the text” and meaning lies “within the boundaries of the text and not the discovery of the mind of the author”.(46) For the Jew, the text is the sacred space of “rest and recovery” revealed in the spoken word that recovers the mark of “breakage”. Indeed Christopher Fynsk notes that Blanchot attests to a “Jewish truth” that honors the separation of language from being.(47) This thought returns to the metaphoric image of the Jew being in the exodus of the desert, which marks the place of exodus where language is seen as the “negation” of the “possible” registered as dislocation.(48) Thus, the retelling of the script by Stephen can be seen as an act of estrangement and desertion he uncovers in a return to the desert. Admittedly, Nadel notes: “the word is the promised land where exile establishes a dwelling’ writes Maurice Blanchot”.(49) Ironically, the narrative becomes fragments of dispersion in the breaks: “I am other. I now . . . form of forms, am I by memory because under everchanging forms . . . I. A. E. I. O. U” (U 242).

Stephen’s being runs into fragmentary speech as he falls prey to the vanishing act of being erasure in difference: “if the father who has not a son be not a father can the son who has not a father be a son?” (U 267) The thought of the fragment runs into multiplicity as the subject searches for an origin in the word that escapes totality: “Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare (U 267). Stephen re-evaluates positions in a reversal of perspective as he states that “he was not the father of his own son merely but, being no more a son, he was and felt himself the father of all” (U 267). The creator and the created face each other as the problem of genesis leads to a response.(50) The subject confronts the thought of being responsible for the other as he takes an ethical step outside: “Himself his own father” (U 267). The more the subject’s identity is reversed in multiple positions, the more the subject’s image becomes a fragmented part in the Nietzschian dance of transvaluation.(51) The act of transferring the image to the other allows the critic to read within the text and not refer back to the author, because each time Stephen tries to locate a centre outside the text the question returns to the text: “He has hidden his own name, a fair name William, in the plays, a super hero, and a clown there, as a painter of old Italy set his face in a dark corner” (U 269).

The question of “who” signs in the name of the text repeats itself in the “doubling and recrossing” movement of the “repetitive displacements and detours”.(52) MAGEEGLINJOHN asks “Names! What’s in a name?” (U 268) QUAKERLYSTER repeats that question: “What’s in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours” (U 269). Admittedly, during the writing of the Wake, Joyce too “would ask pointedly to be told who” had written Ulysses.(53) The power of contestation haunts Stephen’s theory, just as it haunts Derrida who begs to know: “Who signs? Who signs what in Joyce’s name?”(54) The neuter responds: “Read the skies . . . Stephn, Stephen, cut the bread even (U 269). The question of the name is broken down to the initials of the subject that confronts an inelimanable excess that points to the unknown “Whereto?” (U 270) The thought reframed as an open question mark circles around an absent centre in the act of erasure that constitutes effacing discourse. Indeed, Shakespeare is perceived as the “infinite variety everywhere in the world” as the outside comes to occupy the inside as “infinite separation becomes union with the infinite”(55): “He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all” (U 272). Justifying so, breaking down the limits becomes an ethical problem in the act of betrayal for responsibility now shifts from one to the all.

The exigency of Stephen’s limit-experience is bound to “religion without religion” because the limits are literally declared “off limits”.(56) The dead mother’s ghost returns in “Circe” and begs Stephen to ask for forgiveness: “Repent, Stephen” (U 682). But, Stephen ethically rejects the command from the dead “ghoul” that cries out: “Repent! O, the fire of hell! . . . Beware! God’s hand! (U 682) Stephen is filled with “passion of negative thought” as he revolts against the dead corpse.(57) The mother’s death is central to Stephen’s problem with the dead word. The subject recognises being separated from an infinite God byway of a “theology of absence”.(58) He can only achieve this ethical project by adopting Nietzsche’s thought of smashing up the whole into fragments, as a means to seeing things from a “new origin” a non origin as he reminds readers that they are fragmentary. The confrontation with the dead culminates in a violent act as he picks up the “ashplant” and “smashes the chandelier” (U 683). The imagery described parodies Stephen’s vision of smashing up the text as space and time collide with his being that becomes a fragmentation of limitlessness: “Time’s livid final flame leaps . . . ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry” (U 683). Admittedly, Blanchot suggests that the “fragmentation is god himself, that which has no relation whatsoever with a centre” or “an origin”.(59)

Ultimately, the more Stephen runs away from the death of God the more he runs towards a hidden God in the word. This is reflected in Stephen’s reference to Sisyphus. Blanchot states that the extreme limit of hell is seen in “Sisyphus, happy-unhappy man of hell” that is “not on the side of nothingness”, but a “man who still works but uselessly” because he is “given over by this absence to the measurelessness of an eternal rebeginning”.(60) This image coincides with Stephen’s being that repetitiously puts its being into question as he returns to the absence of an origin. Sisyphus is a man that encounters “extreme suffering” by “extreme affliction” in the “desolation of shadows” as he is caught between “being and nothingness”.(61) Likewise, Blanchot argues that being and nothingness can be crossed out too, which coincides with the thought that it is “impossible to die” because of the question that remains at the limit.(62) The final question coincides with Nietzsche ultimate man that confronts being in a state of eternal return. Blanchot states that Nietzsche’s thesis(63) consists of a system: “first the death of God, its consequences (in) nihilism, and finally the eternal return, and this is a consequence” in “overturning” being at the limit.(64) So too, Stephen is the ultimate man in question that faces death in the extreme limit in alterity as he is “left leaning over an empty hole” outside without relation even to himself.(65)

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