THE FICTIONAL AND THE FIGURAL: ON DERRIDA, KANT, AND THE TEXTUAL EVENT

Karen S. Feldman INTRODUCTION The practice of fiction always runs the risk of believing in it or having us believe in it.1 This claim from Jacques Derridas The Truth in Painting seems to propose an alternative between believing in a fiction and not believing in iti.e., taking a fiction as fiction. But what about the relationship between fiction and figurality in a philosophical text that presents itself as a non-fiction, i.e., in the mode of inquiry into what truly is the case? When a figure is offered in a philosophical text in order to represent something which cannot be presented directly, is that figure a fiction? Or must we in a certain, very crucial, sense believe in it in order for the truth-seeking inquiry to proceed? The distinction between fiction and non-fiction does not adequately convey the range of possibilities for approaching figurality in philosophy. To put it in terms again indebted to Derrida, fiction and figurality have an insecure status in straightforward philosophical texts; for where apparently fictional images and figures appear, they are truly offeredthey truly appear. The fact or event of their appearance in the text renders it impossible to fully disavow them as provisional figures or fictions while simultaneously accepting them as part of an argument. They appear there in a mode that is not covered by the two modes of belief and nonbelief, for we recognize them as mere figures but in some sense must believe in them nonetheless. In light of the limitations of this distinction between fiction and nonfiction, and between belief and nonbelief, Derridas discussion of the text-event and event-machine in Typewriter Ribbon is instructive.2 Responding to Paul de Mans discussions of the textual event, Derrida therein asks more broadly how unwitting, quasi-mechanical effects
Departments of Rhetoric and German, University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to James Martel for his many useful suggestions for this article. 1 JACQUES DERRIDA, THE TRUTH IN PAINTING 81 (Geoff Bennington & Ian McLeod trans., 1987) (emphasis added). 2 JACQUES DERRIDA, Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2), in WITHOUT ALIBI (Peggy Kamuf trans., 2002).

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unintentionally and automatically take place in texts.3 In the following pages I will take up Derridas insights into the questions of figurality, fictionality, and the text-event with regard to three figural moments in Kants Critique of Practical Reason.4 For where these figures, images, or scenarios appear there, they seem to beg belief, even where Kant announces the figural, exemplary, or rhetorical character of the fiction proffered. In this regard, I will argue, the risks of believing in a practice of fiction and of taking figures literally can be characterized as a constant and inevitable condition of inadequate accompaniment between figurality and discursivity. Kants apparent contravention, in the three instances I will examine, of his own procedures for proper philosophical inquiry does not take us into the realm of mere performative contradiction, but instead evokes a shift to a view of the text as an event rather than as something to be merely believed or not believed; it is precisely this shift that is at stake in Derridas analyses of figurality and the event-machine. I. SEEING THE SUPERSENSIBLE: STARRY HEAVENS AND MORAL LAW The conclusion of the Critique of Practical Reason opens with an oft-cited line: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and the more steadily [they are contemplated]: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.5 This conjunction gives us in a nutshell the difference between the Critique of Judgment and the Critique of Practical Reason: the starry sky above me is something intuited, an aesthetic phenomenonnot in the first instance because it is nice to look at, but because it is an object of sensory perception;6 in contrast, the moral law within me is not an aesthetic matterfor it is not intuited in sensory form, which is the central criterion for aesthetic experience.7
3 Derrida is referring, presumably, to de Mans inquiry into something which is no longer a cognition but which is to some extent an occurrence, which has the materiality of something that actually happens, that actually occurs. PAUL DE MAN, Kant and Schiller, in AESTHETIC IDEOLOGY 129, 132 (Andrzej Warminski ed., 1997). 4 IMMANUEL KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON (Lewis White Beck trans., 1993) [hereinafter KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON] 5 Id. at 169. 6 The starry heavens are discussed in some detail in the Critique of Judgment in the context of the judgment of the sublime, as an infinity to which our cognitive powers are inadequate. IMMANUEL KANT, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT 130 (Werner S. Pluhar trans., 1987) (1790) [hereinafter KANT, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT]. 7 To put it more starkly: The third critique, the Critique of Judgment, begins with the matter of sensory intuitions for which there is no conceptas in the infinite starry heavens above me. The second critique, the Critique of Practical Reason, is in contrast about concepts for which there is no sensory intuitionthe freedom that is evidenced by the moral law that I am aware of within me.

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This famous line of Kants offers us a nice imagean eminently quotable one. But in the context of the second critique this image is perhaps strange, given that the second critique is the critique which inquires into pure concepts for which there is no direct sensory intuition and thus no image. It is strange that the conclusion depicts Kantit puts him before us as emphasized by the shift from the passive and impersonal they are contemplated to the pronominal reference to me;8 Kant thereby represents himself undergoing the contemplative experience. In other words the sentence renders aesthetically for us Kants contemplation of the sublime starry sky and the compelling moral law. What is more, within this image of Kant contemplating starry sky and moral law, not only the starry skyindeed something phenomenalbut also the moral law is in Kants next sentence described as appearing visually to Kant. That is, Kant depicts himself as seeing the moral law. We might easily read past this visual element, presuming that it is merely a figure for nonsensory awareness, but Kant insists on its literality: I do not merely conjecture [the starry heaven and moral law] and seek them as though obscured in darkness or in the transcendent region beyond my horizon: I see them before me. For the context of the second critiquenot the first and third critiques with their concerns for sensory intuitionsthis is a strangely aesthetic moment. Kant depicts himselfusing the first person pronoun in contrast to the impersonal reflection originally evokedas seeing the moral law before him. This is remarkable, insofar as much of the second critique is precisely aimed at the question of how we are able at all to be conscious of the moral law for which there is no sensory intuition.9 If transcendental freedom, and its presentation to us by way of our feeling of respect for the moral law, are nonaesthetic and nonsensory, then it is peculiar that Kant offers a visual image of himself seeing the moral law and insists that it appears before him. Does this not undermine the point of the second critique: that freedom is not a matter of sensory intuition, and moreover neither is the moral law by means of which we are aware of freedom?
8 The German is helpful for seeing the contrast in the sentence between the impersonal formulation of the reflection upon starry sky and moral law and the me that places Kant more directly into the scenario: Zwei Dinge erfllen das Gemt mit immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung und Ehrfurcht, je fter und anhaltender sich das Nachdenken damit beschftigt: Der bestirnte Himmel ber mir und das moralische Gesetz in mir. IMMANUEL KANT, KRITIK DER PRAKTISCHEN VERNUNFT 253 (1961). 9 In the second critique Kant belabors the question of how we are conscious of the moral law respecting our moral feeling, which according to Kant is produced solely by reason. KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON, supra note 4, at 79. Kant argues that no schema and no symbol, no presentation to the senses whatsoever, can exist to represent supersensuous, transcendental freedom. Instead there is only moral lawnot the law with its determinate content, but the form of the law as discussed in the well-known treatments of the categorical imperative, for instance. Id. at 72.

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We could account for this closing image of the Critique of Practical Reason with reference to the classical figure of hypotyposis, to which Kant refers in 59 of the Critique of Judgment. Kant there describes how beauty symbolizes morality, and thus in a more general way how sensory intuitions can indirectly stand for the supersensible. Rodolphe Gasch explains in an article on hypotyposis that it is a rhetorical figure (for the most part considered synonymous with energeia, evidentia, illustratio, and demonstratio) that renders visible what can otherwise only be understood abstractly.10 For Gasch, hypotyposis is recuperated in Kant as a precognitive, transcendental means of presentation of pure concepts by a priori intuition.11 For J. Hillis Miller, hypotyposis is another word for catachresis, the figure that Derridas White Mythology famously reexamines, based on its characterization in nineteenth-century rhetoric as the substitution of a word from another realm to fill in a vocabular lacuna.12 Rei Terada, in her discussion of Kant, de Man, and Derrida, argues that Kantian hypotyposis is the way to understand what de Man means by materialitynamely a figure for the analogy to which we rightly resort when dealing with speculative propositions about cognition. She explains that for Derridas reading of de Man in Typewriter Ribbon, materiality is, like hypotyposis, a word to put down when one can go no further.13 Howard Caygill claims that hypotyposis constitutes a central function in and for Kant; Caygill suggests that the orientational activity of hypotyposis becomes the end of human life; Kant finds in this activity the summum bonum or justification of creation.14 In light of these analyses of 59 of the third critique, the image of Kant contemplating starry sky and moral law could be read as a classical hypotyposis, presenting in narrative and imagistic form the abstractions at stake in the critical text. First, it renders visual for us what is otherwise an abstraction, namely Kants experience of awe and wonder in the face of the sublime starry sky and the manifestation of the Idea of reason in the moral law. Second, and more curiously, he portrays as visual to himself the heavens and the moral law, the latter of
RODOLPHE GASCH, THE IDEA OF FORM: RETHINKING KANTS AESTHETICS 207 (2003). Because it is about figurality and its profound connections to philosophical thought, Kants discussion of hypotyposis has proved central to several analyses of the Critique of Judgment that have been influenced by Derridas White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy, Parergon in The Truth in Painting and Economimesis. For other useful accounts of Kantian hypotyposis, see HENRY E. ALLISON, KANTS THEORY OF TASTE: A READING OF THE CRITIQUE OF AESTHETIC JUDGMENT 254-63 (2001); ANGELICA NUZZO, KANT AND THE UNITY OF REASON 328-26 (2005). 12 J. HILLIS MILLER, THE ETHICS OF READING: KANT, DE MAN, ELIOT, TROLLOPE, JAMES, AND BENJAMIN 21 (1987). 13 Rei Terada, Seeing is Reading, LEGACIES OF PAUL DE MAN, May 2005, at 15, http://www.rc.umd.edu/ praxis/deman/terada/terada.html. 14 HOWARD CAYGILL, ART OF JUDGMENT 367 (1989).
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which is not a visual matter, as Kants own discussions of respect in the second critique make clear. At first glance it is surprising that Kant produces an image of himself seeing the moral lawsurprising since the thrust of the second critique, which also indicates the need of the third critique, is that pure concepts of understanding and the Ideas of reason have no sensory presentation. On the other hand, from the point of view of the consideration of Kants own reference to symbolic hypotyposis in the Critique of Judgment, and reading the critiques through the lens of Derrida and those influenced by him, it is thoroughly unsurprising that Kant produces an image of seeing the moral law. The image of Kant seeing the moral law has a certain force as an event-machine, to return to Derridas term, that is not a matter of belief or nonbelief for it evidences the connection that the second critique has to the third critique: that the sublime is a symbol of the supersensible and thus of Reason as the faculty of morality, and the infinite starry heaven is an appearance that indirectly offers us access to what cannot be experienced directly with the senses. To see the starry heavens is to undergo the failure of imagination to conceptualize its infinity and thus is to see, indirectly by analogy, the presence in us of a supersensible whose demands cannot be met by the syntheses of imagination and understanding. The image of Kant seeing the moral law thus phenomenalizes that figurative seeing of a supersensible; we see an image of Kant seeing something that cannot be seenan image that cannot be believed but that can be assimilated to the concept of a textual event, where not belief, but occurrence and effectivity, are at stake. II. ILLUSTRATING A DISCURSIVE DIFFERENCE: THE POET AND THE ORATOR While hypotyposis presents or exhibits something (either schematically [directly] or symbolically [by way of analogy]), Kant contrasts hypotyposis in the Critique of Judgment to what he refers to in a note to 59 as discursive language. Discursive language operates neither symbolically nor schematically but instead, according to Kant, it merely designates a concept.15 Kant writes in 59: For [intuitive presentation] can be divided into schematic and symbolic presentation: both are hypotyposes, i.e., exhibitions (exhibitiones), not mere characterizations, i.e., designations of concepts by accompanying sensible signs. . . . [Designations, in contrast,] are either words, or
15 For a useful and detailed explanation of discursivity, see CLAUDIA J. BRODSKY, THE IMPOSITION OF FORM: STUDIES IN NARRATIVE REPRESENTATION AND KNOWLEDGE 21-52 (1987).

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visible (algebraic or even mimetic) signs, and they merely express concepts.16 Designation and discursivity would seem to be the sine qua non of the second critique, in which the supersensible and its removal from intuition is at stake. Perhaps the most sheerly discursive moment in the second critique is where Kant offers (as he does elsewhere in his critiques) a table of words, namely a Table of the Categories of Freedom with Reference to the Concepts of Good and Evil.17 The table looks more like an outline or a list than a tableit is in any case sheer discourse, disembedded from grammatical context, narrative, or other presentative techniquesa list of designations to put it in terms of the contrast provided in 59 of the third critique. The table lists, in a typically compact Kantian fashion, categories of quality, quantity, relation, and modality having to do with freedom. But it is not, based on Kants own hesitations, clear that designation and discursivity are adequate on their own for his purposes. Immediately following the table of categories, Kant presents himself as confident of its purely discursive, word-by-word medium. He writes, I add nothing here to elucidate the table, for it is sufficiently understandable in itself.18 But in contrast to that confidence in the transparency of the sheer discourse in the table of categories, Kant expresses in a footnote in the preface a worry about whether the table to come is in fact self-explanatory. He then proceeds to marshal hypotyposis, analogy, and examplethe very mechanisms that Derrida has put under examination and that would stand, for Kant, in direct contrast to designationin order, I would suggest, to accompany the free-floating expressions that merely designate, i.e., in order to control their vulnerability to misunderstanding by embedding them in a more imagistic and narrative mode. Let us turn to this footnote that anticipates, and attempts fifty pages in advance to clarify, the table of categories. Kant admits to worries concerning how certain expressions in his text will be read. Expression is, again, the word used in the Critique of Judgment to name the designating sign that accompanies a concept, which is contrasted with hypotyposis.19 He explains that in that table, the pair of expressions permitted and forbidden is followed by the pair duty and contrary to duty [pflichtwidrig], each pair constituting a modality of freedom.20 Kant writes that he is worried about how the distinction
KANT, CRITIQUE OF JUDGMENT, supra note 6, at 227. KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON, supra note 4, at 69. Id. at 70. I fear some misinterpretations, here and there, of expressions which I have sought out with the greatest care in order that the concepts which they mean may not be missed. Id. at 11 n.*. 20 Thus, under the heading modality, in the table of categories of practical reason, the permitted and the forbidden . . . have almost the same significance, in popular usage, as the
16 17 18 19

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between permitted and forbidden might appear to be the same as the distinction between duty and contrary to duty, although in fact it is not. He explains that permitted/forbidden involves relationships to what he calls a merely possible precept. Such merely possible precepts relate to understanding, namely to concepts and objects that may exist in the world and have restrictions or capacities. He then explains that duty and contrary to duty, in contrast, indicate what is in such a relation to a law actually lying in reason as such, which means that they belong to the realm of ideas that is exclusive to reason, and in particular to the realm of the idea of freedom. Kant worries that the distinction in the table of categories between permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty will not be apparent to popular thinking, because, he writes, it is an unusual distinction to make in ordinary language. After his explanation Kant adds an illustration but not of the difference between permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty, although he has said that that difference is his worry. Rather he illustrates only the difference between permitted and forbidden: For instance, an orator is not permitted to forge new words or constructions, but this is permitted, to some extent, to a poet. In neither case, though, is there any thought of duty, for if anyone wishes to forfeit his reputation as a speaker, no one can prevent him.21 The poet and the orator serve here as figures for the binary permitted/forbidden. But according to Kant himself, they do not illustrate duty/contrary to duty nor do they illustrate the difference between permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty, which was the difference that worried Kant from the start. Nonetheless, the latter difference, i.e., the one between permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty, does appear in a way in the figures of poet and orator, when Kant writes that for them, with respect to inventing words, there is no thought of duty. The figures of poet and orator (whether we want to consider them in terms of analogy, hypotyposis, or metaphor) that were supposed to clarify the discursive table of categories with its mere designations, offer a negative presentation of what they were called upon to illustrate, namely the difference between duty and contrary to dutywhich in turn would make clear the difference between duty/contrary to duty and permitted/forbidden. Again, the question in Kants footnote about the poet and the orator is whether readers will be able to apprehend that
categories which immediately follow them, namely, duty and contrary to duty. Id. 21 Id. In his essay Economimesis, Derrida writes about the poet/orator pair as they appear in another context, namely in the Critique of Judgments distinction between free play that produces understanding and understanding that conducts itself as if it were free play. Jacques Derrida, Economimesis, DIACRITICS, Summer 1981, at 2, 17. On this and related points, see Hager Weslaty, Aporias of the As If: Derridas Kant and the Question of Experience, in KANT AFTER DERRIDA 17 (Philip Rothfield ed., 2003).

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difference, the one between permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty. Will they see that duty/contrary to duty is a distinction that has to do with the supersensible and with reason, unlike permitted/forbidden? How will they know that they have seen it, if the distinction is only presented as not appearing to them? There is, after all, no second pair of professionals that Kant marshals who would illustrate the difference in their professional norms the duty/contrary to duty distinction as the poet and orator do in their professional norms illustrate the permitted/forbidden distinction. So how do we know that we have seen the distinction? In fact, if we have seen it, it is not because Kant has shown it to us; rather we have seen it only insofar as it does not appear in Kants illustration. The mere designations of the modalities of freedom, as in the table of categories, seem in Kants prefatory footnote to need the accompaniment of the vivid illustration of poet and orator; but this accompaniment offers only a lacking presentation of what it should explain, and it is thus unclear what it has accomplished. There seems to be no guarantee that we remain properly between the ready comprehension of the poet and orator and the indirect cognition of the difference between duty and contrary to duty in the realm of the supersensible. Can we be certain that we have not too quickly taken the poet/orator to represent a difference that does not appear in the illustration that Kant providesor that appears there, at most, only insofar as the characters evoked give no thought to it? As a figure that should solidify our belief in Kants claims for the modalities of freedom, the poet/orator pair fails. But as an element in a textual event, the nonappearance of the distinction to the poet and the orator of duty/contrary to duty and permitted/forbidden precisely illustrates the difficulty at stake in the table of categories. III. THE APOSTROPHE TO DUTY There is a moment in the second critique where the presentation of one single word, a word that would seem under most circumstances to be a mere designation rather than a hypotypotic presentation, seems to confound the categories of representation and mere designation. Just after condemning novelists for promoting cultish enthusiasm [Schwaermerei] rather than sheer dutifulness as a means to encourage morality, Kant breaks into high rhetorical mode. Duty! Thou sublime and mighty name that dost embrace nothing charming or insinuating but requirest submission . . . . Although the word duty might in some contexts constitute a designation, insofar as it belongs to the realm of concepts rather than intuitions, this exclamation is neither hypotyposis

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nor mere designation. It is instead an addressan address to a name, a name that is at the center of the indirect presentation of the second critique.22 It is certainly strange that throughout the second critique Kant has emphasized unpresentability and indirectness in approaching transcendental freedom, and yet here in the apostrophe there seems to be a direct relationa practice of direct relationto a pure concept for which there is no directly sensory intuition. But then, is this passage even serious? It seems implausible that Kant would genuinely burst forth with this rhetorical amalgam of apostrophe, exclamation, and personification of the sort that he has disdained from the Schwaermerei of novelists everywhere. It is entirely unclear from the text alone what we are to make of this. Perhaps it is a parody, but there is no accompaniment to indicate whether this apostrophe is offered truly, i.e., to be believed as a genuine practice, or as a practice of fiction or figuration. This moment is not designated as anything in the textnot accompanied by any designation as apostrophic moment or parody of Schwaermerei or performance of submission to the name of duty. The apostrophe appears there, without an accompanying designation, without a delimitation of its function, and without telling us how to understand itas mere rhetoric or parody? This passage thus returns us to the question of figurality and fictionality. What are we to make of this exclamationthis address? How would we know if it is ironic?23 It is, once again, striking that throughout the second critique the emphasis is on the indirect evidence (moral feeling) for the Idea of reason (transcendental freedom) which bears no direct intuition; yet, in this apostrophic event there seems to be a direct relation to that indirect evidence (namely duty) for the Idea of reason (namely freedom) which bears no direct intuition. In other words, while it would seem on one hand that words can never reach the supersensible, on the other hand Kant presents one word that does reach the supersensible in the mode of address. The reach is not accomplished by representation, not by schematic nor symbolic hypotyposis, and it is not merely a matter of designation. It is instead accomplished by apostrophea figure, to be sure, but not a fiction. Even more obviously than the text-events in
22 Peter Fenves offers an insightful analysis of Kants apostrophe that is relevant to my argument here. See PETER FENVES, ARRESTING LANGUAGE: FROM LEIBNIZ TO BENJAMIN 11011 (2001). He suggests that [b]y interrupting the course of a philosophical analytic, the apostrophe may not associate Kants program with novel writing, but it nevertheless shows that the discourse by which human reason justifies its practices is itself grounded in a prior discourse, the language of hymnic address. Id. at 111. 23 Do we even know whether to read it primarily as a prosopopeia or as an antiprosopopeia, since it depersonifies duty by reducing it to a mere nameThou sublime and mighty name while at the same time addressing it and rendering it a proper name? See id. at 110-11; KANT, CRITIQUE OF PRACTICAL REASON, supra note 4, at 89.

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which Kant sees what cannot be seen (the moral law within him) and in which he presents a difference as not appearing (permitted/forbidden and duty/contrary to duty), the apostrophe to duty is no matter of belief or nonbelief, but of event. IV. CONCLUSION: FICTION WITHOUT DESIGNATION I began with the oddity of the visual image of Kant contemplating the moral law, considering that it is a sensory image of what is supposed to be supersensible. The image must be taken figuratively if we are not to fall prey to the risk of believing in the sensory appearance of the moral law. Insofar as the hypotyposis discussion accompanies our serious consideration of the image Kant presents, the image is safe from contravening what Kant writes in the second critique concerning the nonintuitability of the supersensible. But can we, or Kant, or the book be so secure? Could the image not be a little too convincing; could it not, taken at least locally, seem to suggest that in fact Kant sees the moral law, and thus that the moral law is something to see? There is no sign or expression accompanying the narrative to designate it as a mere image for the purposes of indirectly presenting the supersensible or Kants relationship to it. There is no accompanying sign to designate it as a hypotyposis, a figure, a tableau. Likewise can we be sure that we have read properly the footnote about the poet and orator that accompanies, albeit at a distance of fifty pages, the table of categories in its sheer discursivity? Can we be sure that we have read the footnote as not presenting to us the difference between duty/contrary to duty and permitted/forbidden? The image of Kant contemplating the starry sky and moral law requires the accompaniment of an understanding, even implicitly, of hypotyposis in order to remain merely an image, a fiction, and not a proper representation of the supersensible. The designations in the table of categories require the accompaniment of the poet/orator images, and yet the images nonetheless do not render present the difference for the sake of which they were evoked. The apostrophe to duty rhetorically practices direct relation to a designationone that itself stands as evidence of supersensible freedombut the supersensible is precisely what should escape direct access. In each case, accompaniment would seem to be required to tell us what is at stake, how the formulations are to be taken, and how the relations are accomplished; but such accompaniment is lacking. Such accompanimentse.g., of designation by hypotyposis and hypotyposis by designationshould keep us properly between the world of knowledge and the world of experience so that the supersensible is not

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genuinely presented to Kant visually, and duty/contrary to duty is not represented by an empirical professional norm. And yet, as I have shown, each of these instances might be said to suffer from inadequate accompaniment. There is no constant accompaniment of designatione.g., Here is a hypotyposis in the marginto set us right at the end of the second critique and to tell us that the image is to be taken as a hypotyposis instead of as an instance of Kant contravening the law of the nonintuitability of the supersensible. There is also no adequate accompaniment to the table of categories to explain it, nor to the partially explanatory footnote that might keep us from thinking that the poet and orator vividly present the difference between duty and contrary to duty. And yet it would be just such accompaniment that would keep us in mind of the differences that we would need to remain properly between the intuitive and supersensible so that we could never mistakenly presume that they had been genuinely, or even apostrophically, bridgede.g., so that we might never presume that we really do see moral law, or that the poet and the orator illustrate the level of duty/contrary to duty (instead of permitted/forbidden) in the sheerly discursive terms of the table of categories. Of course there is no accompanying sign at each step of the way, alongside each word or passage, that might properly designate it marking it as hypotyposis, or as negative presentation of a difference that does not appear, or as rhetorical flourish. Hence there is no designation, no conceptual marker for where Kants critique is definitely imagistic, indirect, and symbolic, nor for where it is definitely discursive. The risk of believing in fiction to which Derrida refers cannot be fully controlled because there cannot be an endlessly recursive accompaniment that reliably tells us what is sheerly discursive, what is hypotyposis, and what is flourish. The textual events to which Derrida points in his readings take the question of figurality out of the plane of where to believe, or where not to believe. Instead he points to a proper lacuna for something that cannot definitively appearnamely the difference between the practices of philosophy and the practices of fiction.