This article is a prolonged meditation on the last four lines of Shelley’s The Triumph of Life, composed between May and June 1822, lines which begin to fragment with the occurrence of two ellipses, until the final “Of” that begins the fifth, uncompleted line midway though the final stanza Shelley wrote, leaving the poem unfinished at his death.

The Triumph asks us to extend, extemporize, dwell in the dizzying rapidity of movement of life’s march of time. Rather than imagining this “triumph” as a slowed version of suffering and humiliation, enslavement to the imperial corporate body, Shelley imagines a vertigo of motion, a sweeping up of humanity into the vortex of a fateful present. This sense of intense movement begins with the first lines: “Swift as a spirit hastening to his task / . . . the Sun sprang forth” (1–2). Even though the imagery is apparently bright, it is darkened by the “mask / Of darkness,” which though falling with the Sun’s speedy approach, also prevaricates. For far from a mere masking of what is essentially bright with the dark, this mask is both the masque of darkness that will be the triumphal march of the Poet’s vision as a hideous parody of human life controlled by ideological oppressions, and a prelude to the dark imagery of the poem throughout. It is not long before the Poet’s vision, “that trance of wondrous thought” (41) which is a blind seeing rather than insight (for the Poet-I is confused by the spectacle until his guide, Rousseau, provides an interpretive key), beholds “a great stream / Of people . . . hurrying to and fro,”

All hastening onward, yet none seemed to know

Whither he went, or whence he came, or why

He made one of the multitude, yet so

Was borne amide the crowd as through the sky

One of the million leaves of summer’s bier. (44–45, 47–51)5

This is the temporality spaced by Derrida’s différance, the spacing of time best articulated through writing (and writing’s necessarily ideological inscription of our experience) that wards off the possibility of futurity through infinite recursion to the past. Later I will discuss how metalepsis functions in the poem to break from this recursive bondage to a blind historicity in which nothing is learned, only repeated. What the triumph represents is a veritable negative or negating infinity of time that wards off a possible future-to-come, not just l’avenir but “the urgency and imminence of an à-venir, a to-come. . . inflecting or turning into an injunction as well as into messianic waiting the a of a différance in disjunction” (Derrida, Rogues 108).

The problem the poem poses and begins to attempt to resolve is that of breaking the frame created by such a negative spacing, a spacing envisioned as an insane flight hemmed in by chaos and fear, so as to stage an eventfulness that could usher in a post-Anthropocenic seeing. Such seeing-without-distortion would mean a sightedness that is blind to the distortions of a self-serving logocentrism.

History, Shelley suggests, tells us nothing about the forces that corral us along this flightpath that turns back on itself in a temporality that goes nowhere, because we do not learn its lessons. But it is this horizon determined by the past—the horizon of finitude instantiated by différance and the automaticity of human reaction to anything finite—that Shelley puts in doubt by way of the poem’s dream state. Such doubt opens up the Enlightenment frame, with its insistently finite horizon developed from the history of western epistemology and political ideologies, to other possibilities, and I read Shelley’s unfinished poem as already enmeshed in a post-human turn. The poem’s project becomes, in the end, to discover a way out of the scientifism that had stalled thought in its seeking of an alternative to the negative structure of logical postulates, and to chart a path between Humean skepticism and a Kantian walling off of being—two philosophical attitudes that mark Shelley’s intellectual thought thus far, but against which the Triumph finally crashes in its last stanzas. It is in the poem’s provisional ending that an overleaping of the two positions begins to manifest.

My interpretation of the question provisionally prompting the poem’s ending—a poem foreshadowed by the Poet asking “And what is this? / Whose shape is that within the car?” and Rousseau’s answer, “Life” (177–78, 180)—rests on a Derridean reading of the ghostly presence of its guide. Rousseau is marked by his “disguise” of “an old root” of “strange distortion”—recalling the “mask of darkness” that hides another version of what is there at the poem’s beginning (204, 182–83), but also indicating his having been marked by the distortions of the Derridean trace, the writing that rewrote Rousseau as a misguided corpus. In revisiting Derrida’s reading of Rousseau I hope to illuminate why it is this philosopher Shelley finally singles out from those he had considered equally as important in earlier drafts.

Although Rousseau had indeed been part “of that deluded crew” following the triumphal car, he asks the Poet to “forbear / To join the dance, which I had well forborne” through a “deep scorn” (the scars of which he bears on his corpse-corpus) which “Led me and my companions” to resist the mad dance of Life (188–89, 191). Or rather, Rousseau and his few companions have scorned the machinations of the arche-trace, the insistent rewriting of which the poem accuses “those spoilers spoiled, Voltaire, / Frederic, and Kant, Catherine, and Leopold, / Chained hoary anarchs, demagogue and sage” (235–37). In Of Grammatology Derrida is less kind to Rousseau, seeing him as being one of the spoilers, but nevertheless granting the philosopher pride of place as the middle term between Plato and Hegel for his foreseeing analysis of logocentrism as the erasure of presence through writing, the animal-machine of reading and rewriting that is our automaticity, our reactive blindness. Écriture allies us in our auto-blindness with the four-faced, eye-banded charioteer of Shelley’s triumphal car, the figuration of Life itself, since like him we cannot see beyond the perimeter of our own insistent spacing and deferrals of any possible future.

Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s importance rests on a grammatology as all that can be thought within the limits of the scientific épistémè; indeed, within the limits of the Anthropocene. But I suggest that The Triumph of Life asks Rousseau to help move the dream vision beyond such perimeters, into a different plane with a different horizonal potential. In The Triumph Rousseau acts as the speaker’s Virgil, interpreting the pageant, discovering its trace and spectrally pointing a finger to a different horizon unconditioned by scientifism’s rejection of passion as way of knowing. But for Derrida, Rousseau is always unsettled by his incorporation of the supplement into a theory of human nature, always undone by passion’s unsettling priority over need. Despite Rousseau’s attempts to settle passion into its place, passion’s prewriting in the business of survival and articulation becomes, in Rousseau’s anthropological scheme, inverted (articulation as subdivision of sound and meaning, understanding and reason, that is “the opening and closure of a cleft” [Johnson 128], according to Derrida, or the making of a judgment). The “Essay on the Origin of Languages” (1743) asserts love’s role in the immediacy of touch (versus the mediacy of gesture), and love’s role in inventing drawing as well as, plausibly, language (“Love might also have invented speech”)—but if it is need that in general motivates language, “Dissatisfied with speech, love disdains it” (Rousseau 240–41). However, pity is the passion more befitting Shelley’s Rousseau; pity is the moderation of amour-propre (self-love, which is a corruption of amour de soi, love of self) into compassion. If the “Essay” places judgment before pity, the Second Discourse (1754) makes pity anterior to reflection. Thus need (in which reflection prompts the preservation of the species) follows passion (love of self, self-love, and pity), communication displaces sympathetic communion. Shelley’s spectral vision shows the detrimental effects of not following this scheme—of species preservation distorted by language’s death-grip, of self-love’s violence absorbed into linguistic warping. Rousseau makes this point explicit: “What the ancients said most forcefully they expressed not in words, but in signs; they did not say it, they showed it” ( “Essay” 241). Language as the first social institution, according to Rousseau, is founded as a distancing trope, as not just sign but metaphoricity, with the need to communicate by gesture logically displacing the passion of an immediate touch and voice, following after it (“the needs dictated the first gestures, and the passions wrung the first utterings [voix]” [245]). This unsettling, in which need overrides passion only to install death into language as distance and metaphor rather than touching intimacy, disturbs the provenance and authority of signs (articulation and writing are the malady of language, it’s “fatal advantage,”

and if “the most vigorous speech is that in which the Sign has said everything before a single word is spoken,” too often symbols lose their meaning and power to the condemning inefficacy of “circumlocutions” [241]). Rousseau therefore distrusts words as he does not the accentuation of music, and the musical intonation of poetic speech, both of which are more originary and less dangerous than writing because less destructive of presence (the very thing “Life” robs from human being in The Triumph): “The speech of the first men . . . were Poet’s languages” (245). But for Shelley, if poetics is grounded in musical intonation, poesis is grounded in the affiliation of sound with metaphoricity, in the sound’s affinity in relation to the sign’s differential potency, its gesticulatory capacity—indeed, in its imaginative intimacy. Poesis as allegory—as resounding metaphoricity—provides the only recuperation of presentful meaning possible in the face of language’s onto-theological death-grip (a fate Shelley sees as written on Rousseau’s body/corpus before his conversion by confession).

That Shelley, an astute deconstructionist before the fact, would choose Rousseau to interpret life’s pageant puts into question Rousseau’s idealization of love’s power, of life’s perverting evil, and of shadows. In Derrida’s terms the first two are eidos and ousia, ideality and substantiality; shadows encompass the enfolding of one with the other, the space-time of otherness.

What is less doubtful than Rousseau’s idealizations is his facility with the legible, with locating and reading (interpreting rather than deciphering) the trace at the site of supplementarity. This is the site for Rousseau, Derrida argues, of unease, suture, inversion, and perversion. But Shelley’s Rousseau offers a different instruction; rather than point back to origins, his ghostly finger-pointing gestures not toward so much as beyond current epistemic limits; predictive, pre-vocative, provoking an elsewhere as a way out of the metaphysical trap of signs and beyond the Anthropocene. If Rousseau himself saw gesture as less meaningful than either touching voice or metaphor, it is because it is also less immediate, but Shelley’s Rousseau points intimately and tellingly otherwise—at once confessional and prophetic. The lines, “Before the chariot had begun to climb / The opposing steep of that mysterious dell, / Behold a wonder worthy of the rhyme” (469–71), indicate the nature of this beyondness which is not the supplement but rather its abolishment; the wonderment of rhyme is exactly its inscription of accentuation, music, and most importantly, passion—“the wondrous story / How all things are transfigured, except Love” (476). Shelley asks us to follow the index of this passionate trace as it avoids inversion, perversion, transfiguration, and supplementation, since it names the absorptive beyondness that the poem’s breaking off cannot or does not yet know how to inscribe, but toward which, with Rousseau’s help, it gestures.

In the auto-immunitary machine epitomized in the Car of Life, suffering is the predominant human experience. Rousseau, hovering in the ectoplasm of Triumph and bearing the marks of that suffering on his body, represents by his oeuvre the lawfulness of the understanding interceding in the unlawful freedom of the imagination. Such remediation is of course problematized by the autobiographical Rousseau’s unaccountable outrages of taste in his ongoing self-psychoanalysis, but these disappear along with his fleshly form in the poem, where his corpus stands in for a Derridean “auto-immune auto-indemnification” that authorizes sovereignty at every level (Derrida, Acts of Religion 78).

But dead, ghost-like, Rousseau’s role in sacrificial indemnification is revised by way of his own dead body marginalized from the multitudes in Shelley’s dream-vision. This vision produces an altered state, a poetic possibility in which sovereignty is unveiled as a mad careen destined to slam up against the walls of its own horizon; the alteration makes possible a different plane in which doors might open, in which an unconditional hospitality does not usher others in to the spaces of the proper, but rather welcomes the ground of the possibility of a futurity not yet imagined. The unlawfulness of the imagination is not, as Kant believed, an ugliness not subject to the dictates of taste, but rather the dismissal of a necessary adjudication of justice by law. For Shelley, law can only be evil by referring justice to the dictates of pragmatism, the proper of the subject self, and sovereignty. How can what might only be called an immunitary rationale for limiting the application of justice ever ground a futurity at all? We might view this as the difference between a marriage that necessarily mediates love by way of pragmatism, and a free love that opens the door to an unimagined relation, to a commingling without adjudication, to a truth without a past. Such an analogy might indeed sit behind the inexplicable poor taste of the poem to Jane probably written before two-thirds of The Triumph had been completed.

The implications of a new plane of immanence—inaugurated by the evental idea as having to do, for Shelley, with freedom, democracy, and the unconditional (perhaps a democracy-at-hand),—and the possibilities for a post-human turn in such a plane; this is a prospect at which language falters and poetic sound and metaphor can only carry partially inscribed meanings. However, in these falterings I believe Shelley is struggling to sound out his vision for a more humane, if less logo-onto-anthropocentric, futurity. To think the ending of the poem, I want to return to the implications of The Triumph of Life’s maddened and dizzying progress. That speed is essential to a new plane of immanence developing. One of the ways to speed up while still inhabiting the structures of the past is metalepsis, the two-at-once of metaphoric achievement. If metaphor provides an analogous relation, a side-by-side correspondence of idea and impression,

metalepsis imposes an inverted correspondence in which logic skews otherwise. The possibility opened up by the dizzying movement of the triumph, by way of its reversion to the past, begins to dissolve not into a metonymy but into a metalepsis, in which two tropes at once—a doubled metaphoricity (the fading coal and the mind’s inconstant wind of the poetic imagination in Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry [1821] [531])—oppose the double finitude of écriture by “reconfiguring the relationship between a ‘before’ and an ‘after,’ an anteriority and what this anteriority makes possible or forecloses,” as Kir Kuiken explains, allowing the imagination, or we might say the poetic dream state, to be the site-source of “ever-changing future alterations” (171). Metalepsis as the poetic device by which the future can open up by way of the past—rather than via metonymy’s side-by-side logic—becomes in The Triumph the condition of the possibility of a new plane with a new horizonal opening to the future. I am imagining Shelley imagining Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence, wherein the speed of thought is made possible by the constellation of the event to come configured in the evental concept.

It is this concept, this eventful thought, which opens the poem’s horizon to a positive infinite, to a futurity that can be thought without the trace, albeit not without a repurposing of the past and its necessary conceptual contributions. The dizzying vision of the pageant is accessible to the speaker-poet as insight, so that “speed in the van and blindness in the rear” which brings the suffering multitudes so “little profit” offers the speaker a way into an undistorted and thus possible futurity (Shelley 101, 100).

Access to this futurity requires a variant eye, for blindness is the cancellation of what makes representation possible. Not blindedness, as in the charioteer, but the cancelling of sight, like Rousseau’s hollowed eyes, is the condition of seeing out of this world, Life as it is. Although Rousseau gestures toward the past, he is the guiding hand in the poem toward an as-yet to be represented future. As Derrida notes, portraits of the blind are “prey to allegory,” the allegory of drawing as a “specular folding” or “withdrawal [retrait] in meaning of itself,” whereas language “always speaks to us from / of the blindness that constitutes it” (Memoirs of the Blind 2–4).

Shelley makes clear that such blindness—specular folding or blindfoldedness—is the condition of life as well as of language. For Rousseau, as Derrida reads him in Of Grammatology, the contamination of nature’s purity is already enfolded within nature; thus, everything associated with the human that Rousseau designates a supplement is already enfolded in nature, including the sign. Similarly, the possibility of a future, not as a blind acquiescence and error in judgment, but rather as the sublime yes of an unconditional welcoming of the yet-to-come is also enfolded, a repli of the outside/future is always folding over into the origin of life. But Shelley does not “read” Rousseau: in allowing him to tell his recursive tale of conversion, he portrays him allegorically, allowing him the specular folding of seeing otherwise. He does so because the problem for Shelley is how to welcome such a future without deferral, without supplement—or at least, with a different relation to the outside and otherness. For this, the Rousseau who Shelley depicts is helpful. What Derrida calls spacing, or the endless deferral of meaning, is a scuttling back and forth in the differentiating machine of language that, if unattended, also blinds us to just how non-meaningful a life lived can be; it enables the headlong careen of the pageant of Shelley’s allegory of unmeaning life. The differentiating machine can only under extraordinary circumstances leverage the scuttling of meaning into the dizzy rapidity of thought that energizes a new plan of thought, a plane of immanence.

It is such a plane, such an immanence, that Shelley’s poem invokes but cannot see in its last elliptical lines. But it is what Rousseau, by gesturing toward the past, helps Shelley’s speaker metaleptically envision, if only in its barest contours, as the cliff walls of wondrous rhyme.

“What is Life?” Shelley’s speaker asks, struggling blindly with the repli of death into Life, the supplemental sacrifice that protects and indemnifies life.

Reiman notes that the “Essay on Life” was “perhaps the most important single document of Shelley’s intellectual development” (Shelley’s The Triumph 12). The essay divides the immutable celestial realm from the terrestrial, necessity-driven world; it provides a cosmology to house Shelley’s purposefully chosen array of symbols, but The Triumph asks about a different conception of life: what is Life? This is the question the post-human turn posits, since there is no longer possible an illusory tying of origin and life to certain biological forms, while sentience itself has become less definable. Shelley’s possible future, predicated on opening the door to a new plane of immanence, holds open the possibility that a just world without suffering might be possible. Shelley the vegetarian might have embodied such a world with non-objectified subjects that, regardless of their species, would not be required to supplement the idea of justice with their suffering. Such a world, however, would have to be free of the deferral or spacing of writing. Of the endless play of differentiation that inscribes the world we know. To depict a different world, one not yet visible, would require a new writing without deferral, hierarchy, origin fables, distinctions that wound. For Shelley, such a world could not yet be written—but the ellipses, the “. . .” that punctuate the last portion of the poem he did write, mark where the leaping off into a new writing might occur, where a new concept might gather itself for an event to come of wondrous rhyme and otherness without distortion.

Significantly, the Poet’s encounter with Rousseau, and Rousseau’s narrative take up the majority of the poem. As the Poet and reader learn about Rousseau’s encounters with the “Shape all light” (308–433), we also learn that he has been translated by that shape, becoming increasingly hollowed out. He is metamorphosed, in de Man’s words, to a state “in which his brain, the center of his consciousness, is transformed” ( “Shelley Disfigured” 99). Whereas Rousseau’s recurring focus is on the “Shape all light,” de Man reads the Poet as avoiding the shape-light through his narrative fragmentation at the unsubstantial end or leaving off of the poem. Such a reading suggests the ending might be unsubstantial in the sense of a dissolving substance akin to what de Man describes as the light’s “hovering motion” ( “Shelley Disfigured” 105), or it might be insubstantial (not a fading dissolve but an incorporeality). While both are plausibly true, and the poem itself plausibly readable as a problem of the specular fold that enables rather than prohibits insight (“Happy those for whom the fold / Of” are the last words of the poem),

the ending also contains the kernel of the whole poem—not as fragment but as ellipses, as points of departure for a leaping out of the spatio-temporal horizon of the poem. De Man is largely concerned with language in the poem, both as rhetorical figure and as disfiguration, but as Rousseau himself points out in his essays on language, time is the essential medium of language creation. De Man recalls Rousseau’s (and Levi-Strauss’s) theories of language in writing about the violent linguistic acts that occur in the poem, each more damaging than the violence depicted in the triumphal parade itself; the poem is eventually revealed to be a “mutilated textual model [that] exposes the wound of a fracture” ( “Shelley Disfigured” 120). It is a wound that de Man finds at the heart of all texts, although Shelley might want the fracture traced back to the collusion of writing and ideology rather than mitigate the potential for poetic language to burst its bounds. But Rousseau and Levi-Strauss were more of de Man’s opinion; as Derrida notes, what the father of Romanticism and the father of structuralist anthropology (who declared himself to be “Rousseau’s modern disciple”) comprehend in their fraught relation to writing and presence is that the violence that language suffers in writing is not a “disease” inherent in speech and not separable from it that precipitates its fall, but rather “the original violence of a language which is always already a writing” (Of Grammatology 105–6). But the violence is in itself a disease, a genetic self-destruct mechanism and it is this disease that Shelley’s poem narrates. Neither Rousseau’s writings nor the voiced narrative embedded in the poem remain, or rather count, by The Triumph’s end. Counting is how Shelley’s fragmentary ending records language’s demise; its self-violence is played out neither as the figure of a hollowed-out (diseased) Rousseau nor as his “recapitulative” narrative in which logic dissipates,

but as language’s final failure to capture through anything but its own erasure—its ellipses—what might speak itself beyond “Life”’s horizon.

This ellipses is related to Rousseau’s hollowing out: diseased by the light’s erasure of his self-consciousness, of his presence as writing and as predecessor figure, Rousseau himself is reduced to a periodic gesture, like beats in a measure rather than Cartesian stopping points (for Descartes, points stop things dead; Shelley’s Rousseau continues to move after death). Translated by the light into an ellipsis of himself, Rousseau’s hollowing is of his self-presence, his consciousness as center of self; he thus sets the stage in the poem for the transfiguration (not translation) of the narrative at the end into ellipses. Derrida writes that the “other ellipsis of the metaphysics or onto-theology of the logos” is the “effort to master absence by reducing metaphor within the absolute parousia of sense” (Of Grammatology 106). “Onto-theology” is, importantly, the very beast Shelley is trying to eradicate in The Triumph; for Shelley this is the real disease of language, subjectivity, self-consciousness, and knowledge that creates the horizonal parameters of a “Life” that enslaves us. To imagine reducing or dissolving metaphor into sensory presence (absolute parousia) is to elide the pronunciative function of language, its rhythms and beats matching the rhythms and movement of sensory presence. In the Essay Rousseau had pronounced language to be the first social institution (219), but as such it is a disfiguration that cannot hold in its literalization of meaning, its denial of language’s capacity for metaphoricity, for figuring truth. As de Man notes in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” “truth is a trope.”

Rousseau’s translation from self-consciousness into a forgotten selfhood is accompanied by metaphors for light that offer little narrative reason; their illogic exposes the absence language covers over, stripping away the onto-theology Rousseau himself had come to figure and revealing another truth.

Without making a connection between the effacement of history and of self-consciousness and that of counting in language, de Man does suggest that the Shape all light is inextricably bound to the natural beats of human consciousness, as we know these through the hovering, glimmering intermodal qualities of light and water, and the rhythms of measure and poetic language. The first two phenomena signify the “birth of form as the interference of light and water passes” (de Man, “Shelley Disfigured” 107), whereas the second two signify formalization. Counting (or natural rhythm or energy and movement as periodic units) is what is common to all four modalities; and counting is a way of signifying without the representational limits of signs or a blindness to metaphor. Shelley goes further, with measure in The Triumph obliterating thought, as de Man notes (114). For Rousseau in the Second Discourse, measure or counting functions in both dance and music as a more primary and primitive medium than the sight/light medium of the image and sign, which comes later as touching is replaced by the distance of gesture and then drawing.

Counting comes down to points of measure, of comprehension, of community. In The Triumph Shelley shows light as the scene of what de Man calls “optical confusion” (106), which we might call image confusion, in echo of the vision that is delusory for its participants, diffusive for community, and difficult for the spectator Poet to interpret. “The thematization of language in The Triumph of Life occurs,” de Man notes, “when ‘measure’ separates from the phenomenal aspects of signification as a specular representation, and stresses instead the literal and material aspects of language,” adding that “it is precisely these ‘feet’ [of the terza rima] which extinguish and bury the poetic and philosophical light” (113). This literalization of language that ignores metaphor, this death of poetic capacity and of an originary communication, is precisely what Rousseau finds to be the history of language as a whole. For Shelley it is the history of western political ideology as well.

What is it that can get The Triumph back from the edge of a vertiginous loss of meaningful vision (Rousseau’s hollow-eyed seeing; the spectacular triumph’s mad careen into meaninglessness)? Hollow-eyed, hollowing out, and the root that is no root (of language, of origin

) but rather a man after all (the unrecognizable image of Rousseau when the Poet first encounters him), provide spectral figurations for the failure of both sight and language in the poem, or rather, for the disfiguration that de Man locates there.

Describing Levi-Strauss’ focus on the split between nature and culture, Derrida refers to “the originality of a scandalous suture” (Of Grammatogy 105). This might well also describe the chasm wall inscribed with hieroglyphs or “rhymes of wonder” in The Triumph (105). The “rhymes of wonder” are both the failure of logocentric writing and the eradication of presentful voice, already dissimulated by Rousseau’s incoherent narrative. Derrida refers to iterability as repetition with a difference;

rhymes of wonder would then be writing with a difference, writing beyond the trace or after the points of departure have been taken. Shelley is envisioning a different kind of writing then, one still necessitating an enabling violence against the chasm wall of horizonal or spatio-temporal limitation—but a writing that would not require the trace, the play of difference and of arche-writing. This is a writing that cannot be said, but can be felt in the beats, the counts of the ellipses that measure out the poem’s partial ending.

I have not yet alluded to The Triumph’s allegorical form. Despite its clear allegiance to Dante’s Divine Comedy (1320) and Petrarch’s own Triumph, the Trionfi (c. 1350-74), another allegory sits behind the poem, Plato’s allegory of the cave. Shelley’s Platonism is well known, but I believe that in his last major poem he overleaps Plato’s vision just as he does Dante’s. Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s allegory in Memoirs of the Blind is helpful here because it reveals the difficulty at the heart of the cave analogy: human passivity as the condition for seeing differently. Plato describes his allegorical cave as peopled by humans chained to the walls by their various kinds of blindness, caused when opinion is valued over the logic of ideas. Unable even to move their heads, these prisoners mistake shadows for real things. They are passive while chained, but even what frees them is not due to their own agency: “A conversion will free them . . . But before this dazzling ascent, an anabasis that is also an anamensis,” a journey through previous lives must take place (Derrida, Memoirs 15). This “passion of memory . . . will turn the soul’s gaze towards the ‘intelligible place’ . . . .” Far from being an act of will, however, Plato’s prisoners are represented as motionless through this process; Rousseau’s conversion is a rewriting of this allegory, his repeated retracings of his life as a philosophe prompted by the “Shape all light” rather than by his own initiative, and like the prisoners, the process produces a second kind of blindness, as Derrida notes, that Plato attributes to the exchange of dark shadows for intelligible light, where otherness might indeed be perceived otherwise and without blinding distortion. Thus Rousseau must see through eyes hollowed out of their prior blindnesses. Part of what Rousseau, and the Poet who he instructs, must forget is the blinding opinions of epistemic thought—constrained by postulates, skepticism, and Kantian critique—which rejects any stretching out to the thing-in-itself. Clearly Rousseau’s finger stretches in just such a way to point to the in-itself, the triumphal march as the essence of ideologically bound and blinded Life. Derrida notes that Plato’s prisoners never stretch their hands even toward the shadows on the cave’s walls, they are motionless in their inability even to touch the representations of things, let alone things-in-themselves. Shelley rejects such rejection, insisting that Rousseau can see blindly, can point to verities and intelligibilities. De Man disagreed with Derrida’s interpretation of Rousseau’s blindness, remarking in a letter that “The desire to exempt Rousseau (as you say) at all costs from blindness is therefore, for me, a gesture of fidelity to my own itinerary . . . that, on the specific question of the rhetoricity of his writing, he was not blinded.”

The truth-tropes of poetic language, for de Man, Derrida and Shelley, were accessible to Rousseau under certain conditions: when his metaphors overtook him, as does the Shape all light. The intelligible place he points to is off the map, of course, just as is Plato’s ideality.