That interesting patience

A return to some statements in a post from last summer, "The Untimely Geoffrey Hartman," in light of the fact that I had the opportunity to see Professor Hartman today give a wonderful talk:

I wouldn't say ... that what has kept Hartman so fresh is that he resists, on the one hand, lending a sort of authority to interpretation (once it is interpreted, the text is killed off, closed, not needed to be opened again), and, on the other, lending a sort of [absolute] authority to the interpreter [my statements are as good as the text's] ... I fear even this ... does not do justice to the the way Hartman is indeed other to his times. I find his continual freshness, rather, in the interesting patience one encounters in Hartman's writings, which does not have the anxious tone of a critic in this sort of double bind. To me, it seems to come from an unbelievable confidence that a responsiveness to history can produce. I mean history in its hugest, almost inhuman sense...

I would rather replace "confidence" in the next to last sentence here, now, with something like "determinedness:" I am talking about his tone, though, and this does not mean that Hartman himself is either confident or determined--indeed, his points are highly speculative and highly eccentric. On this note I'll put in here a passage from his memoirs:

I tend to prefer instances of eccentric interpretation to the task of chastening these by criteria of correctness. It is not so much a libertarian attitude that motivates me as the pleasure of allowing texts to lead my thoughts, and to work them through collectively in class. When deciding among interpretive choice, I abandon the rejected or marginal ones only reluctantly.
-A Scholar's Tale: The Intellectual Journey of a Displaced Child of Europe

But because he is so aware of eccentricity, of the pleasure of the marginal or half-thought, because he senses it to well, this makes him weigh the cost of this speculation all the more, continually, and makes his tone one that conveys each step involves an immense process of selection, of weighing one's words, of pushing forward, indeed, in the way I describe below--that is, in a way that is beyond the perceivable limit of historicity's (and not just history's) presence:

Open up 1980's Criticism in the Wilderness, and you will find issues there that, of course, are not perennially relevant, but come just about as close to this as possible--precisely because they are so much of their time. Hartman has a knack for what will be of interest in a situation, because he is always attentive to the duration, the historicity, of any event, and sees criticism as the attempt to interpret only beyond this horizon, this perceivable limit of historicity's presence. Interpretation beyond experience: this is what he praises in Derrida in Saving the Text, and (in an earlier text) this is why he sees it as so urgent (and so nearly impossible) to move "beyond formalism." What is "The Voice of the Shuttle" but an attempt at this impossible phenomenology? As he says in "Criticism, Indeterminacy, Irony:" "The seduction of understanding through a fiction should provoke something more active than bemusement or suspended disbelief: it should provoke me to break, however provisionally, the very frame of meaning I bring to the text."

I should also note that this untimeliness or timelines of Hartman is precisely what brings him into the extremely difficult act of recording and theorizing testimony--and into asserting vigorously testimony's relevance and the need for greater concentration upon its immense challenges.