PREPARING FOR AN IMPOSSIBLE EVENT: LINGUISTIC PERFORMATIVITY AND POETIC ADDRESS TO THE ABSOLUTE OTHER — READING RILKE WITH DERRIDA

Abstract

The essay argues that an event, if it deserves the name, is singular, unrepeatable, and thus unmediable: It cannot be represented or secured by prior conventions. It can only be prepared for through an unconditional turning-toward. Following Derrida, I propose that lyric apostrophe is the figure of this preparation: Not a mechanism that enables the event but an exposure that keeps the future (the to-come) open to whatever arrives. Reading Rilke’s Ninth Duino Elegy, I analyze the poem’s address to the Earth as an exemplary scene. The apostrophe singled out from the elegy does not merely illustrate praise;
it presents, within the conventional act of concluding a covenant, the once-only character of a life’s traces — the singular marks of a singular life — which require attestation. Reframing apostrophe as preparation rather than mediation, the essay departs from standard accounts of lyric address. Here apostrophe does not establish a symmetrical exchange with a responsive addressee, nor does it fold time back into a reversible ‘now’. It stages an irreversible call in which the mortal addresses the mortal, and this address requires a witness: The Angel, who both threatens with erasure and promises the survival of the very trace it attests. Contrary to readings that construe the Angel as a timeless, undivided transcendence, I read — by bringing de Man and Gadamer into tension — the Angel as a real witness at once inner and outer, intra- and extratextual, not a guarantor of presence but the instance that exposes the trace and attests — without guaranteeing — to its survival.