CHAPTER 1

The Law of Genre

Translated by Avital Ronell

Genres are not to be mixed.

I will not mix genres.

I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mixthem.

Now suppose I let these utterances resonate all bythemselves.

Suppose: I abandon them to their fate, I set free theirrandom virtualities and turn them over to my audience—or, rather, to your audience, to your auditory grasp, towhatever mobility they retain and you bestow upon themto engender effects of all kinds without my having tostand behind them.

I merely said, and then repeated: genres are not to bemixed; I will not mix them.

As long as I release these utterances (which othersmight call speech acts) in a form yet scarcely determined,given the open context out of which I have just let thembe grasped from "my" language—as long as I do this,you may find it difficult to choose among several interpretativeoptions. They are legion, as I could demonstrate.They form an open and essentially unpredictable series.But you may be tempted by at least two types of audience,two modes of interpretation, or, if you prefer to give thesewords more of a chance, then you may be tempted by two differentgenres of hypothesis. Which ones?

On the one hand, it could be a matter of a fragmentary discoursewhose propositions would be of the descriptive, constative, and neutralgenre. In such a case, I would have named the operation which consistsof "genres are not to be mixed." I would have designated this operationin a neutral fashion without evaluating it, without recommending or advisingagainst it, certainly without binding anyone to it. Without claimingto lay down the law or to make this an act of law, I merely wouldhave summoned up, in a fragmentary utterance, the sense of a practice,an act or event, as you wish: which is what sometimes happens when werevert to "genres are not to be mixed." With reference to the same case,and to a hypothesis of the same type, same mode, same genre—or sameorder: when I said, "I will not mix genres," you may have discerned aforeshadowing description—I am not saying a prescription—the descriptivedesignation telling in advance what will transpire, predictingit in the constative mode or genre, that is, it will happen thus, I willnot mix genres. The future tense describes, then, what will surely takeplace, as you yourselves can judge; but for my part it does not constitutea commitment. I am not making you a promise here, nor am I issuingmyself an order or invoking the authority of some law to which I amresolved to submit myself. In this case, the future tense does not set thetime of a performative speech act of a promising or ordering type.

But another hypothesis, another type of audience, and another interpretationwould have been no less legitimate. "Genres are not to bemixed" could strike you as a sharp order. You might have heard it resoundthe elliptical but all the more authoritarian summons to a law ofa "do" or "do not" which, as everyone knows, occupies the concept orconstitutes the value of genre. As soon as the word "genre" is sounded,as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit isdrawn. And when a limit is established, norms and interdictions arenot far behind: "Do," "Do not" says "genre," the word "genre," thefigure, the voice, or the law of genre. And this can be said of genre in allgenres, be it a question of a generic or a general determination of whatone calls "nature" or physis (for example, a biological genre in the senseof gender, or the human genre, a genre of all that is in general), or beit a question of a typology designated as nonnatural and depending onlaws or orders which were once held to be opposed to physis accordingto those values associated with technè, thesis, nomos (for example, anartistic, poetic, or literary genre). But the whole enigma of genre springsperhaps most closely from within this limit between the two genres ofgenre which, neither separable nor inseparable, form an odd couple ofone without the other in which each evenly serves the other a citation toappear in the figure of the other, simultaneously and indiscernibly saying"I" and "we," me the genre, we genres, without it being possible tothink that the "I" is a species of the genre "we." For who would have usbelieve that we, we two, for example, would form a genre or belong toone? Thus, as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm,one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity,anomaly, or monstrosity. And so it goes in all cases, whether or not thislaw of genre be interpreted as a determination or perhaps even as a destinationof physis, and regardless of the weight or range imputed to physis.If a genre is what it is, or if it is supposed to be what it is destined to beby virtue of its telos, then "genres are not to be mixed"; one should notmix genres, one owes it to oneself not to get mixed up in mixing genres.Or, more rigorously: genres should not intermix. And if it should happenthat they do intermix, by accident or through transgression, by mistakeor through a lapse, then this should confirm, since, after all, we arespeaking of "mixing," the essential purity of their identity. This puritybelongs to the typical axiom: it is a law of the law of genre, whether ornot the law is, as one feels justified in saying, "natural." This normativeposition and this evaluation are inscribed and prescribed even at thethreshold of the "thing itself," if something of the genre "genre" can beso named. And so it follows that you might have taken the second sentencein the first person, "I will not mix genres," as a vow of obedience,as a docile response to the injunction emanating from the law of genre.In place of a constative description, you would then hear a promise, anoath; you would grasp the following respectful commitment: I promiseyou that I will not mix genres, and, through this act of pledging utterfaithfulness to my commitment, I will be faithful to the law of genre,since, by its very nature, the law invites and commits me in advance notto mix genres. By publishing my response to the imperious call of thelaw, I would correspondingly commit myself to be responsible.

Unless, of course, I were actually implicated in a wager, a challenge,an impossible bet—in short, a situation that would exceed the matterof merely engaging a commitment from me. And suppose for a momentthat it were impossible not to mix genres. What if there were, lodgedwithin the heart of the law itself, a law of impurity or a principle ofcontamination? And suppose the condition for the possibility of the lawwere the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility that wouldconfound its sense, order, and reason?

I have just proposed an alternative between two interpretations. Idid not do so, as you can imagine, in order to check myself. The lineor trait that seemed to separate the two bodies of interpretation is affectedstraight away by an essential disruption that, for the time being,I shall let you name or qualify in any way you care to: as internal divisionof the trait, impurity, corruption, contamination, decomposition,perversion, deformation, even cancerization, generous proliferation, ordegenerescence. All these disruptive "anomalies" are engendered—andthis is their common law, the lot or site they share—by repetition. Onemight even say by citation or re-citation (ré-cit), provided that the restricteduse of these two words is not a call to strict generic order. A citationin the strict sense implies all sorts of contextual conventions, precautions,and protocols in the mode of reiteration, of coded signs, suchas quotation marks or other typographical devices used for writing acitation. The same holds no doubt for the récit as a form, mode, or genreof discourse, even—and I shall return to this—as a literary type. Andyet the law that protects the usage, in stricto sensu, of the words "citation"and "récit" is threatened intimately and in advance by a counter-lawthat constitutes this very law, renders it possible, conditions it andthereby renders it impossible—for reasons of edges on which we shallrun aground in just a moment—to edge through, to edge away from,or to hedge around the counter-law itself. The law and the counter-lawserve each other citations summoning each other to appear, and eachrecites the other in this proceeding (procès). There would be no causefor concern if one were rigorously assured of being able to distinguishwith rigor between a citation and a non-citation, a récit and a non-récitor a repetition within the form of one or the other.

I shall not undertake to demonstrate, assuming it is still possible, whyyou were unable to decide whether the sentences with which I openedthis presentation and marked this context were or were not repetitionsof a citational type; or whether they were or were not of the performativetype; or certainly whether they were, both of them, together—andeach time together—the one or the other. For perhaps someone has noticedthat, from one repetition to the next, a change had insinuated itselfinto the relationship between the two initial utterances. The punctuationhad been slightly modified, as had the content of the second independentclause. Theoretically, this barely noticeable shift could have created amutual independency between the interpretative alternatives that mighthave tempted you to opt for one or the other, or for one and the otherof these two sentences. A particularly rich combinatory of possibilitieswould thus ensue, which, in order not to exceed my time limit and outof respect for the law of genre and of the audience, I shall abstain fromrecounting. I am simply going to assume a certain relationship betweenwhat has just now happened and the origin of literature, as well as itsaborigine or its abortion, to quote Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

Provisionally claiming for myself the authority of such an assumption,I shall let our field of vision contract as I limit myself to a sort ofspecies of the genre "genre." I shall focus on this genre of genre whichis generally supposed, and always a bit too rashly, not to be part ofnature, of physis, but rather of technè, of the arts, still more narrowly ofpoetry, and most particularly of literature. But at the same time, I takethe liberty to think that, while limiting myself thus, I exclude nothing,at least in principle and de jure—the relationships here no longer beingthose of extension, from exemplary individual to species, from speciesto genre as genus or from the genre of genre to genre in general; rather,as we shall see, these relationships are a whole order apart. What is atstake, in effect, is exemplarity and its whole enigma—in other words, asthe word "enigma" indicates, exemplarity and the récit—which worksthrough the logic of the example.

Before going about putting a certain example to the test, I shall attemptto formulate, in a manner as elliptical, economical, and formalas possible, what I shall call the law of the law of genre. It is preciselya principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy.In the code of set theories, if I may use it at least figuratively, I wouldspeak of a sort of participation without belonging—a taking part inwithout being part of, without having membership in a set. With theinevitable dividing of the trait that marks membership, the boundaryof the set comes to form, by invagination, an internal pocket largerthan the whole; and the outcome of this division and of this aboundingremains as singular as it is limitless.

To demonstrate this, I shall hold to the leanest generalities. But Ishould like to justify this initial indigence or asceticism as well as possible.For example, I shall not enter into the passionate debate that poeticshas brought forth on the theory and the history of genre-theory, onthe critical history of the concept of genre from Plato to the present. Mystance is motivated by these considerations: in the first place, we nowhave at our disposal some remarkable and, of late, handsomely enrichedworks dealing either with primary texts or critical analyses. I am thinkingespecially of the journal Poétique, of its issue entitled "Genres" (32)and of Genette's opening essay, "Genres, 'Types,' Modes." From yetanother point of view, L'Absolu littéraire [The literary absolute] has alreadycreated quite a stir in this context, and everything that I shall riskhere should perhaps resolve itself in a modest annotation on the marginsof this magistral work which I assume some of you have already read.I could further justify my abstention or my abstinence here simply byacknowledging the terminological luxury or rapture as well as the taxonomicexuberance which debates of this kind, in a manner by no meansfortuitous, have sparked: I feel completely powerless to contain thisfertile proliferation—and not only because of time constraints. I shallput forth, instead, two principal motives, hoping thereby to justify mykeeping to scant preliminary generalities at the edge of this problematic.

To what do these two motives essentially relate? In its most recentphase—and this much is certainly clear in Genette's propositions—themost advanced critical axis has led to a rereading of the entire history ofgenre-theory. This rereading has been inspired by the perception—andit must be said, despite the initial denial, by the correction—of two typesof misconstruing or confusion. On the one hand, and this will be thefirst motive or ground for my abstention, Plato and Aristotle have beensubjected to considerable deformation, as Genette reminds us, insofaras they have been viewed in terms alien to their thinking, and even interms that they themselves would have rejected; but this deformationhas usually taken on the form of naturalization. Following a classicalprecedent, one has deemed natural structures or typical forms whosehistory is hardly natural but, rather, quite to the contrary, complex andheterogeneous. These forms have been treated as natural—and let usbear in mind the entire semantic scale of this difficult word whose spanis so far-ranging and open-ended that it extends as far as the expression"natural language," by which term everyone agrees tacitly to opposenatural language only to a formal or artificial language without therebyimplying that this natural language is a simple physical or biologicalproduction. Genette insists at length on this naturalization of genres:"The history of genre-theory is strewn with these fascinating outlinesthat inform and deform reality, a reality often heterogenous to the literaryfield, and that claim to discover a natural 'system' wherein theyconstruct a factitious symmetry heavily reinforced by fake windows"(p. 408, italics added). In its most efficacious and legitimate aspect, thiscritical reading of the history (and) of genre-theory is based on an oppositionbetween nature and history and, more generally—as the allusionto an artificial construct indicates ("... wherein they construct afactitious symmetry....")—on an opposition between nature and whatcan be called the series of all its others. Such an opposition seems togo without saying; placed within this critical perspective, it is neverquestioned. Even if it has been tucked away discretely in some passagethat has escaped my attention, this barely visible suspicion clearly hadno effect on the general organization of the problematic. This does notdiminish the relevance or fecundity of a reading such as Genette's. Buta place remains open for some preliminary questions concerning hispresuppositions, for some questions concerning the boundaries whereit begins to take hold or take place. The form of these boundaries willcontain me and rein me in. These general propositions whose numberis always open and indeterminable for whatever critical interpretationwill not be dealt with here. What however seems to me to require moreurgent attention is the relationship of nature to history, of nature to itsothers, precisely when genre is on the line.

(Continues...)