The Rhetoric of the Impossible

Is it possible, it thinks, that one has not yet seen, known and said anything real or important?

—Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

It’s damn near impossible to write about Marcel Bénabou’s books. They present a limpid, armored surface where the kind of handholds one normally looks for in a text are rare and extraordinarily precarious. Every utterance in them is so deeply bound up in irony and doubt that the prospect of saying anything frank and valid about them appears dim at best. Every gesture the critic might be tempted to make seems to have been anticipated by the author, and parried in advance as it were, as if Bénabou had deliberately followed the script for the puzzle-maker that Georges Perec laid out in Life: A User’s Manual. ¹ In short, if reading Marcel Bénabou’s books is consistently—indeed extravagantly—pleasurable, writing about them is hell on wheels. That bit of whining aside (there will be no more, or not very much more), let me begin. But I would like to say in passing that it is the inalienable right of every academic to whine. Moreover, it is a right we must also accord to Bénabou himself as we try to come to some sort of terms with his books (for he, too, is an academic, and a distinguished one at that). Allow me then to start with something relatively easy in order to work my way, crab-like, toward the impossible.