To write as I shall do now about the work and pedagogy of a man who was my teacher, to write in his absence—what is more—to ascribe meaning to his everyday transactions with a group of people that were his students, can only be some kind of betrayal: an acknowledgment that Bill is dead, that having faded in the real, he now appears in the symbolic as meaning for me, and perhaps for others. I write, nevertheless, in the hope that what actually gets produced is not meaning as such but a "metonymic prolongation" of the encounter that this class was, or of my relation to the person I then called "Uncle Bill"—an English uncle! Bill Readings is not simply a horizon of meaning, a name that indexes a body of work, let me say this and have done, but the very materiality, the embodiment of a collective affection. He affects us still that is, and—at that—as a member of a community that avows nothing, except the fact that it has encountered its openness in his death: not its limit, but the possibility of maintaining him as a phantasmatic materiality.

/pp. 5-6/

A great deal of critical energy has been expended on discussing the historical minutiae of Milton's life and works. This is ironic given that Milton himself expressed total contempt for footnotes, consistently privileging historical argument over historical scholarship. This course will try to examine the relation of the oeuvre of Milton (an historian himself) to the question of history and of historical time. We'll look at the timeliness of Milton's own writings as both a historical and a theoretical question. Milton does not simply write in history but theorizes historical time as a problem of and for writing and reading, a problem that recurs throughout the tradition of criticism and commentary upon Miltonic writings. (Readings, "Milton, History and Psychoanalysis")

In this introductory paragraph to his syllabus for English 766, "Milton, History and Psychoanalysis," Bill Readings outlined the issue that was to be the focus of our class, the same one finds in the first chapter of his unfinished book on Milton, and the one that defines what I have come to see as Bill Readings' relation to Milton. Milton taken up with the issue of history, favoring "historical argument over historical scholarship," becomes an object of historical scholarship himself; nevertheless, as Bill Readings put it in "An Age Too Late," the first chapter of his unfinished book on Milton, "the flagrant anachronism of literary history is grounded in Milton's own flagrant anachronism"(2). Already in that first paragraph Bill Readings brings Milton's contempt for /pp. 6-7/ footnotes to bear on his thought about Milton's relation to history.1 1

In fact Bill Readings could not have been more right to make this association between a thought about history and a thought about footnotes. My own research brought forth the rather systematic thought deriving from Marxism on the question of footnotes and their relation to history: Fredric Jameson cites a paragraph by Adorno as an example of "a complete footnote" (Jameson, Marxism and Form, 9). Being a Marxist, Jameson sees the footnote as a means of inserting history in philosophical speculation; in it he sees the possibility of allowing context to enter the text. In addition, Kenneth Burke—not a marxist but certainly someone who has engaged marxism in his work—in a footnote at the end of his Introduction to Attitudes Toward History suggests that if his text was made up entirely out of footnotes it would acquire a form "better suited to [its] material."

The following quote from "The Reason of Church Government" is an example of Milton's condemnation of scholarhip that consisted of "marginal" commentary:

Milton is referring to Biblical commentary and a whole body of theological works dating from the time of Catholic Church dominance, which not only had eclipsed the Bible but authorized the prelatic law of Church government that Puritans like Milton fought against. Here is how Bill Readings comments on this quote and on Milton's general aversion to supplementarity as well as the general tendency of critics to practice exactly what Milton was chastising:

The main argument of "An Age Too Late" is that Milton inaugurates literary history as the condition by which his own text, Paradise Lost, may be read, while he is also inventing history as an object of speculation for a subject separated from and thereby able to survey history from a distance. After Milton, scholars are forced to resort to commentary if they are to speak of Milton or his work at all. Miltonic self-reflexivity, as Bill Readings discusses it in this quote, is the means by which literary and other contexts become part of the text of Paradise Lost, the way Milton secures for his text the impossibility of a margin. Properly understood, Milton's intention was to make classical texts allude to Paradise Lost, and not the inverse. Literary history begins with Paradise Lost precisely because Paradise Lost itself rewrites it own position in literature, preceding yet not predating the texts of classical literature.

Bill Readings has taken note of the fact that "Milton exerted an almost unprecedented degree of control over the publication of his manuscripts ... to the extent that textual editors have had to invent topics of controversy in the absence of stimulating variant readings"(4-5). Milton's attitude towards his own texts indicates, according to Bill Readings, an attempt to preempt any future attempt not only to date his work, but also to establish the process by which it came about.

Paradise Lost situates the bar between signifier and signified as a historical event, the Fall. The Fall is the event that inaugurates history as the concatenation of signifiers that approximate but never reach the Incarnate meaning that is Christ—the Word; language reduces us to the anticipation of a Second Coming that will put the period to our sentence. The bar between signifier and signified is infinitely mirrored in the impossibility of the text to authorize itself except at the margin that infinitely divides it from its own authority. In a tour-de-force of signification Milton inverts the allegory of the Fall as fall into language, thereby subordinating the Biblical narrative to the event of language that allows us access to it.

The elimination of the process of the signifier, is entirely consistent with Milton's view of the Bible which, as Bill Readings pointed out repeatedly, maintains that the Biblical text makes ecclesiastical commentary entirely superfluous.3 3

In Of Grammatology Derrida defines the supplement as both a "surplus" and a "substitute," "a plenitude enriching another plenitude" (Derrida, 144-5). Another equally pertinent quote given Milton's project is the following: According to Rousseau, the negativity of evil will always have the form of supplementarity. Evil is exterior to nature, to what is by nature innocent and good. It supervenes upon nature. But always by way of compensation for ... what ought to lack nothing at all in itself. (Derrida, 145)

The Bible, according to Milton, reads itself out to us, it allegorizes itself in the written text, which is nothing but a distorted version mediated by writing. The written version of the Bible becomes an allegory of the transcendent Bible; Milton claims that the allegorical and the literal meanings are inverted. By extension, writing constitutes the supplement to the Bible's identity. Miltonic scholarship, according to Bill Readings, invariably affirms Milton's desire to have signified an unsupplemented language, and also to have produced a text that allegorizes itself as "incarnate meaning." The effects of Paradise Lost position critics vis-à-vis the text at the other side of the divide of language; fallen themselves, they have to affirm the Miltonic text at the expense of their own project.4 4

Oddly, this was also the fate of the paper I wrote for Bill Readings' seminar: I was hopelessly deadlocked between a deconstructive reading gone awry and the almost hysterical desire to prove that the linguistic project of Paradise Lost had failed. As I was struggling with the obdurate text, Bill offered no consolation: he predicted, and was confirmed, that so long as I continued fighting Milton my paper would not finish.

/pp. 11-12/

Bill Readings approached the issue of writing after Milton as a fundamental ethical challenge: having suggested that after Milton "there will be no more poetry, only footnotes to the historical object: literature"(33), Bill Readings laid out the possibility of a reading and a writing that will not be a supplement to the literary object, necessary and yet superfluous.

A series of observations that need not bear a hierarchical relation to the text above or below, peripheral or central, a parataxis of text and context, this is the kind of reading Bill Readings envisaged as the means by which he could encounter Milton in the face of an enormous body of scholarship. Reading as a "metonymic prolongation" of the text5 5

"Metonymic prolongation" was a phrase for which Bill had had to endure relentless teasing, from some of us. I recall that at some point Bill, a little exasperated, suggested that maybe it was an unfortunate phrase. Unfortunate, manquée, the phrase is perhaps a mistake, but certainly not an error, as such it is the best phrase to describe Bill's project.

Bill Readings tries to forge a relation to Milton that does not fall prey to the conditions by which Milton wished to circumscribe the condition of writing after him. Bill Readings does not choose to approach Milton's text as though his reading might be the meaning of Milton's text; on the contrary, he wishes to come to terms with his exclusion from Paradise Lost, to come to terms that respect yet do not succumb to Milton's demand.

As we begin to hear the inflections of Bill Readings inimitable "style" we begin to measure the insistence of the word "just" in his sentences—a reference, undoubtedly to Jean-François /pp. 13-14/ Lyotard's Au Juste (translated in English as Just Gaming).6 6

For the sake of accuracy, I should say here that credit for the book equally goes to Jean-Loup Thébaud, the other party to the singular dialogue that Just Gaming is. The book was a definite favorite of the two twins, Bill Readings and Bennet Schaber—inseparable, dressed identically, co-teachers, co-authors, they even had their own secret language. In that secret language, "Just Gaming" was always rendered "Just Naming" with conspiratorial delight, undoubtedly as a reference to the infamous punning and name-dropping practices of theoreticians.

From "metonymic prolongation" to "answerable style," the transition that Bill Readings effects is not simply one of elaboration. "Metonymic prolongation" refers in a sense to the effects of the encounter with the text, a negotiation of the demands of meaning that are invariably placed on the critic. "Answerable style" is an attempt to couch this metonymic extension in terms of authority, to make the encounter with Milton, and his demand to have circumscribed everything that can be said about his text, an other authority, one which authorizes a conversation.

The supplement holds a peculiar fascination, a fascination that Milton was wont to curtail by proliferating the kind of wordplay that deprives the pun of pleasure; neither morbid, nor funny, Milton's puns were invariably serious, however clever. Milton's linguistic virtuosity lay in perfecting a kind of chiasmatic pun that inverted allegorical and literal meanings to suggest a prelapsarian language; this overdetermination of meaning is precisely the reason for the inability of literary critics to escape merely footnoting the Miltonic text. Bill Readings, however, met "Milton at the Movies,"7 7

The reference is to an essay that Bill Readings wrote for Postmodernism Across the Ages, a collection of essays he co-edited with Bennet Schaber.

Characteristic of Bill Readings as this quote is, lugubrious and hilarious at the same time, it should not simply serve as a reminder, or as "the usual" reference to a deceased person's charming qualities, a solitus, a solace! On the contrary, let us note that in this very move, Bill Readings reveals his own peculiar relationship with the supplement; true to his own injunction for a metonymic prolongation of the text that carries a reading too far, Bill Readings exacerbates the supplement through a false etymology, that brings him inevitably to the bar of the linguistic sign, the bar of history, and to a bar8 8

To the bar is also where Bill used to take his students quite often, and not because he, or any of us for that matter, needed a drink that badly—Milton can conceivably reduce people to this condition—but just so, because it was the Bill Readings thing to do.

In the context of a course intensely taken up with issues of supplementarity, it is doubtful that Bill Readings might have escaped a thought or two about the supplements to and of his own teaching. Such training for his students as the rudimentary knowledge of using concordances and dictionaries, examining varieties of sources, and preparing class presentations and applications for grants, must have been clearly indicated as means to displace authority in a classroom that could have become suffocatingly teacher-centered—especially given the extent of Bill Readings knowledge and scholarship on Milton. However, I seriously doubt that Bill Readings consciously chose to supplement his teaching presence with all the other supplements that enable human relations: dinner parties, excursions to local bars, participating in group sports and attending conferences en masse. I detect in this constant proliferation of supplements to the teacher-student encounter an emergent ethics that also indicates a modesty, for which Bill is not customarily known.

In making the class an occasion for also doing Milton, in foregrounding the community, as opposed to the object of study, Bill Readings put into action his "answerable style"; rather than subordinating the class to the text, the text occasioned the class and our conversations. We learned a lot about Milton that semester, but at no time were we required to make Milton our project in the way that it must have been for Bill Readings—engaged as he was in writing his book at that point. Hence, the supplements to scholarship which were intended to enable us to think as incipient scholars, the supplements to the classroom relation which were instrumental in developing friendships, these supplements constitute in my mind a decision on Bill Readings' part to understand the classroom not as a place where ideas interact, but as the site of a relation among people, and this not under the guise of /pp. 17-18/ an ideological humanism—"We are all people! Let us relate as people!"—but in the very specificity of a group that was not as harmonious as one might imagine. I say this not to suggest that some of the participants were more or less devoted to the class, to Bill Readings or to Milton—that goes without saying; I say this not having been the most devoted of them all to the class, to Bill Readings, and, most especially, to Milton. On the contrary, I want to suggest that when Bill Readings started formulating his "metonymic prolongation" of a reading, which he insisted had nothing to do with idealistic argumentation but on the contrary with a certain materialism, he was indeed going further than he may have imagined, he was setting up the terms by which his own classroom functioned, and also the terms by which, in retrospect, I would come to understand that classroom.

Bill Readings repeatedly suggested that a reading should go too far, and that this is the condition by which it may actually say something.9 9

This was in fact not only a phrase from his chapter but also one of the comments that he wrote on the back of one of my papers, to admonish me, for having become too squeamish of my own conclusions. Rather the opposite of what a teacher usually suggests to a student, the comment demonstrates that Bill Readings was formulating a set of practices rather than a theory of reading when he wrote "An Age Too Late."

I never heard Bill Readings pun on his name, or it may be that I was too fresh a graduate student then to catch the nuanced wordplay that such an obvious pun requires. Nevertheless, I do not doubt that Bill Readings must have felt that at least as far as names went he had a distinct advantage over Jacques Lacan's fairly suggestive "à la cantonade," and Jacques Derrida's rather cumbersome "J'accuse de rideau." However, the signifier in this case affords little room for humor, as the following quote demonstrates:

Hence a series of theoretical tropes: A name that signifies only when written, différance for beginners! What is more a signified which allegorizes itself in the act of signifying, chiasmus worthy of Milton! The very "instance of the letter in the unconscious," and "the-name-of-the-father" combined! Derrideans and Lacanians alike could get a little of their own back, if they were inclined to hold a grudge for the aforementioned advantage Bill Readings holds over the two Jacques. However explanatory of Bill Readings' course of studies and scholarship, however indicative of why the book on Milton was never finished over the course of five years, this paragraph still says "something more than nothing"—as Bill himself would have remarked: Having read Bill Readings' name in this quote, there still remains for us to read the quote, and then to read and write after it.

/pp. 20-21/