Infinite and Finite Turns: Apostrophe in de Man, Derrida, and Lőrinc Szabó

Abstract

This article reconstructs conceptions of apostrophe and tests their explanatory force through close readings of two poems of Hungarian late modernism: Lőrinc Szabó’s “Materialism” (1928) and “For Nothing, Entirely” (1931).

It distinguishes three configurations of apostrophe. In the triadic model taken up from classical rhetoric by Heinz Schlaffer and Jonathan Culler, apostrophe presupposes speaker, addressee, and witness: by turning from the audience to an absent or non-human “you,” it installs a third position as observer. De Man, by contrast, designates apostrophe as prosopopeia: an asymmetrical positing that gives a perceptible face to an imperceptible addressee and sets in motion an infinite specular exchange without external reference or witnessing third. Derrida proceeds from this account but shifts its emphasis: the potentially infinite substitutions of prosopopeia must be interrupted by a finite other whose finitude—its mortality, its quasi-death, its being as if already dead—renders it at once enclosed within this specular movement and excluded from it. The contrast between “infinite” and “finite” turns marks the decisive difference between de Man and Derrida.

The readings show that Szabó’s poems stage not only the inescapability of prosopopeia’s specular logic—within which the subject is irretrievably enclosed and from which no appeal to a third position can provide release—but, precisely for that reason, the subject’s simultaneous exclusion from itself. Finitude understood as the simultaneity of enclosure within and exclusion from oneself—as a non-coincidence with oneself—is not a loss but the condition of an unconditional turning toward the other.