Unflappable

Abstract

Taking off from the Flügelschlag or coup d’aile in Trakl’s poem to which the ‘ Ein’ of ‘Ein Geschlecht’ responds with the Grundton (fundamental or tonic) of the Gedicht (poem), the article tracks the figure of this noisy wing-flap as a metaphor for the force of reading (aloud) from Geschlecht III to exchanges between Derrida and Cixous in Voiles, Insister, ‘ Fourmis’ and other texts. Alongside figures of take-off, there are also repeated images in these texts of frozen flights and broken or belimed wings which may be connected with the quasi-methodological remarks about the irreducible violence of reading in Glas. This more rigorously deconstructive thought of the coup d’aile moreover implicates a certain sonorousness in reading and thus ought to be understood in tension with the silencing of the gathering ‘Ein Geschlecht’. In conclusion — making a series of leaps within Derrida’s writing — a connection is made between this force of reading and the Cixousian puisse that Derrida analyses as the deconstruction of possibility.