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Mise en abyme is a term developed from literary theory denoting a work that doubles itself within itself—a story placed within a story or a play within a play. The term flourished in experimental fiction in midcentury France, having not only a strong impact on contemporary literary theory but also on post-structuralist philosophy. The Little Crystalline Seed focuses on how thinkers invoke the concept of mise en abyme in order to establish ontologies that deviate from that of Heidegger. Iddo Dickmann demonstrates how the concept served in modeling Jacques Derrida's logic of supplementarity; Maurice Blanchot's mechanism of désouvrement; Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of repetition; Emmanuel Levinas's concept of "proximity," and in further circuit: the philosophies of Bergson, Kant, Leibniz, Heidegger himself, and more. Exploring the interpretative and generative potential of the mise en abyme for continental thought, Dickmann reveals new points of resonance between various philosophical topics including, aesthetics, ethics, time, logic, mirroring, play, and signification.
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction

1. The Literary Theory of Mise en abyme and its Philosophical Meaning
Mise en abyme and mirroring
The double-bind of the mise en abyme
Strata and undercurrents in the typology of the mise en abyme
Mise en abyme in the new New Novel: Reversing mimetologism “in one fell swoop”
Mise en abyme in reader-response criticism
Mise en abyme in analytic and possible-worlds semantics

2. Jacques Derrida: Mise en abyme and the logic of supplementarity
Mise en abyme and the infrastructural difference
Derrida’s denouncement of mise en abyme
Iterability and the “lacunal” conception of mise en abyme
Misconception of the mise en abyme and its consequences
On second thoughts: Intentionality and the “invagination” of text

3. Maurice Blanchot: Heading Toward Death as Mise en abyme
Death and “ambiguity”
Mise en abyme and the “night itself ”
“Worklessness” and Gide’s mechanism of retroaction
Worklessness and Iser’s “acts of fictionalization”
Mise en abyme and the “fatality of the day”

4. Gilles Deleuze: Repetition and Time as Mise en abyme
Mise en abyme and the ground of difference
Mise en abyme and the philosophy of affirmation
The prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the present
The retro-prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the past
Mise en abyme and “schema” in Kant and Bergson
The Klein-bottle and the synthesis of the future

5. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift I: From Mirror to “Labyrinth of Mirrors”
The “mirror of nature” and the principle of adequatio
Three paradigms of imagination
Deleuze on Bergson: Crystallines, convex mirrors and double mirrors
Gasche on Derrida: The tain of the mirror
Borges and the “monstrosity of mirrors”

6. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift II: From Play to “Divine Play”
The play of the world and the play of Being
Gadamer: Play and the hermeneutic circle
Eugen Fink: Play as the “symbol of world”
Caillois and Levinas: Play and the other-than-Being
Deleuze: The divine game and the ethics of becoming

7. The Rhizomatic Book and the Centrifugal Mise en abyme
“Minor literature” and the semiotics of “expression”
The rhizomatic book and its reader
The rhizomatic book as mise en abyme
An empirical example: The Jewish scripture as a rhizomatic book
“Diagrammatical” reality and the “sheaf ” of transcodation

Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

Philosophy

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Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	31 mai 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438474014
Langue	English

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THE LITTLE CRYSTALLINE SEED
SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory

Rodolphe Gasché, editor
THE LITTLE CRYSTALLINE SEED
THE ONTOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF MISE EN ABYME IN POST-HEIDEGGERIAN THOUGHT
IDDO DICKMANN
Cover image: Alexis Arnold, Untitled (Crystallized Book) , © 2018 Alexis Arnold
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2019 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Dickmann, Iddo, 1972– author.
Title: The little crystalline seed : the ontological significance of mise en abyme in post-Heideggerian thought / Iddo Dickmann.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2019] | Series: SUNY series, intersections : philosophy and critical theory | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027703 | ISBN 9781438473994 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438474014 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Poststructuralism. | Mise en abyme (Narration) | Derrida Jacques. | Blanchot, Maurice. | Deleuze, Gilles, 1925–1995.
Classification: LCC B841.4 .D55 2019 | DDC 190.9/04—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027703
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To my beloved daughters Hadar Miryam and Talya
CONTENTS
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Literary Theory of Mise en abyme and its Philosophical Meaning
Mise en abyme and mirroring
The double-bind of the mise en abyme
Strata and undercurrents in the typology of the mise en abyme
Mise en abyme in the new New Novel: Reversing mimetologism “in one fell swoop”
Mise en abyme in reader-response criticism
Mise en abyme in analytic and possible-worlds semantics
2. Jacques Derrida: Mise en abyme and the logic of supplementarity
Mise en abyme and the infrastructural difference
Derrida’s denouncement of mise en abyme
Iterability and the “lacunal” conception of mise en abyme
Misconception of the mise en abyme and its consequences
On second thoughts: Intentionality and the “invagination” of text
3. Maurice Blanchot: Heading Toward Death as Mise en abyme
Death and “ambiguity”
Mise en abyme and the “night itself”
“Worklessness” and Gide’s mechanism of retroaction
Worklessness and Iser’s “acts of fictionalization”
Mise en abyme and the “fatality of the day”
4. Gilles Deleuze: Repetition and Time as Mise en abyme
Mise en abyme and the ground of difference
Mise en abyme and the philosophy of affirmation
The prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the present
The retro-prospective mise en abyme and the synthesis of the past
Mise en abyme and “schema” in Kant and Bergson
The Klein-bottle and the synthesis of the future
5. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift I: From Mirror to “Labyrinth of Mirrors”
The “mirror of nature” and the principle of adequatio
Three paradigms of imagination
Deleuze on Bergson: Crystallines, convex mirrors and double mirrors
Gasché on Derrida: The tain of the mirror
Borges and the “monstrosity of mirrors”
6. Mise en abyme as a Paradigm Shift II: From Play to “Divine Play”
The play of the world and the play of Being
Gadamer: Play and the hermeneutic circle
Eugen Fink: Play as the “symbol of world”
Caillois and Levinas: Play and the other-than-Being
Deleuze: The divine game and the ethics of becoming
7. The Rhizomatic Book and the Centrifugal Mise en abyme
“Minor literature” and the semiotics of “expression”
The rhizomatic book and its reader
The rhizomatic book as mise en abyme
An empirical example: The Jewish scripture as a rhizomatic book
“Diagrammatical” reality and the “sheaf” of transcodation
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS Figure I.1 Gide’s escutcheon. Figure 1.1 Triptyque . Figure 1.2 Klein bottle. Figure 4.1 Bergson’s cone of memory.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Warmest thanks to my colleagues and mentors in the recent years (in alphabetical order): Benoît Bourgine (Catholic University of Louvain), Régis Burnet (Catholic University of Louvain), Sylvain Camilleri (Catholic University of Louvain), Paul Cobley (Middlesex University London), Tim Crane (Cambridge University), Kir Kuiken (University at Albany, SUNY), Len Lawlor (Pennsylvania State University), Walter Lesch (Catholic University of Louvain), Didier Luciani (Catholic University of Louvain), Dorothea Olkowski (University of Colorado at Colorado Springs), Susannah Pearce (Cambridge University), Olivier Riaudel (Catholic University of Louvain), Kristupas Sabolius (Vilnius University), Avi Sagi (Bar-Ilan University), Rita Šerpytytė (Vilnius University), Jean-Pierre Sonnet (Pontifical Gregorian University), Ted Toadvine (Pennsylvania State University) and Nathan Widder (Royal Holloway, University of London). It was through intensive dialogue with these inspiring women and men, and thanks to their good advice and support, that this book has come to light.
INTRODUCTION
Mise en abyme is a narratological concept, (but sometimes pictorial or even musical) denoting a segment of the work that resembles, mimics or is even identical to the literary work of art as a whole, “a rebellion against scale … a small part carrying ‘as much’ significance as the whole that contains it.” 1 It was christened by André Gide in 1893 2 after a type of a heraldic escutcheon—fictive, argues Bruce Morrissette—comprising a small-scale duplication of its own emblem and contours ( Figure I.1 ). Though sharing much with neighboring terms such as “metalepsis,” “metafiction,” “surfiction,” and many others, “mise en abyme” is reserved for cases where duplication is “immanent” to the text, performed “at the level of the characters” alone, to exclude, for instance, a personal intervention by the author within the narrative. An example of a “simple type” of mise en abyme is Hamlet, where the play within the play repeats the King’s crime and the Queen’s infidelity. Infinite-aporetic examples, with which mise en abyme is more commonly associated, include night 602 in 1001 Nights , as understood by J. L. Borges (1962), in which Scheherezade tells of the entire 1001 nights’ tales including night 602 itself, the Droste cocoa box depicting a lady carrying the very box upon which she is depicted, and Diderot’s The Nun , where Suzanne explains the history and reception of a letter within the letter itself.

Figure I.1. Gide’s escutcheon.
Though found at the dawn of Western literature (for example, in Book 8 of the Odyssey , where Demodocus’s songs outline the content and poetic form of the Odyssey in its entirety), 3 and despite already being prominent in baroque and romantic texts, it was only with the nouveau roman that mise en abyme was “associated from the start and immediately became a distinctive element.” 4 Constantine Toloudis provides an illuminating set of examples:
In Robbe-Grillet’s Le Voyeur , announcing the rape scene and the nature of Mathias’s guilt, a movie poster depicts a scene of violence—a man strangling a young girl, the latter kneeling beside a doll that was ripped. The novel that A began to read in La Jalousie , which is about a jealous husband and an unfaithful wife, sketches a situation which parallels that of the story central to Robbe-Grillet’s book, involving A herself and alluded to by the book’s title. Also in Robbe-Grillet’s Dans le Labyrinthe, an engraving is described as depicting a place and a situation identical or analogous to those of the scene in the café, the latter becoming the point where all the “threads of Ariadne” lead. In Claude Simon’s La Route des Flandres, the “fissured” portrait of Captain Reixach’s ancestor tells a story that seems to duplicate that of Reixach himself; in his L’Herbe, the lid of the cookie tin … is decorated by a woman dressed in white who holds an identical box in her hand and is lying in the grass, thus metaphorizing a major aspect of the novel, through a sort of continuous fission of the focal repetition pattern. In Butor’s Passage de Milan , the canvas being painted by DeVere during the fateful party on the fourth floor is presaging coming events, and as such stands as a metaphor for “passage,” the process that the entire book is all about. In his L’Emploi du temps , a detective novel being read by Revel ( The Murder of Bleston ), tapestries in the museum and stained-glass windows in the cathedral can all be perceived as vehicles for the device, since they are reflections of one another and at the same time reflections o