Critical Inquiry vol. 31 no. 3 is currently on-line, and features an interesting, here in the sense of peculiar, “special section” edited by Dragan Kujundzic, a member of the Advisory Board for the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California at Irvine. The section, entitled “J”, offers a selection from Jacques Derrida and one from J. Hillis Miller. (Miller holds a place on the Executive Board of the ICWT, and Derrida did until his death. They were friends.) The Miller text [excerpt here] seems to be about the literary kiss, and the Derrida text [excerpt here] contends to begin with the following oneirism:

"How does J. Hillis Miller himself feel himself ?": this is a reverie that I would like to share with you today. What is it to feel oneself [se sentir]? To feel oneself, to sense oneself in the sense in which one lets oneself be affected also by a feeling or a sensation? One cannot imagine this affect without the figure of some contact with oneself, without an auto-affection of touching and, more precisely, without the kind of intimate tactile sensitivity that is enigmatically called taste .

Without having read the article, and as such knowing basically nothing about the text aside from the question in the above excerpt of an excerpt, I immediately thought of Part III of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, ¶403-410, The Feeling Soul. As this is almost certainly not the path that the article took, let me just point out something about sub-part a, The feeling soul in its immediacy.

Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is, because immediate, not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of its true self is a different subject from it … a subject which may even exist as another individual. [my italics]

Basically, Hegel here is thinking of a situation which is commonly exemplified by the mother-child situation, but in a sort of three-ring coup de grâce, he turns the problem over to hypnotism in ¶406.

Writing about this almost surreal moment in Hegel, Jean-Luc Nancy notes that, “In this state, the disesased subject is ’selfless’: which is as much as to say that there is no subject, that this state is not its own. It is … vacant … devoid of presence and actuality.” That is, a subject essentially constructed by its self-presence, in fact the occasion for presence in general, is suddenly devoid of its constituting factor and is left to exist “formally” as simply the da- of existence.

Nancy also makes the following observation: “If in this way it is presence, it is as a pure presence, which for itself has no present and neither presents nor represents anything to itself, but is merely offered to the other’s representation.” (Identity and Trembling)

Indeed, how might (another) Derrida (in another universe) perhaps flex his mantic musculature, recognizing as he certainly does the knowledge that resists knowledge, recognizing the self-constituting other knowledge, and actually write how "J. Hillis Miller himself feel[s] himself ?" Might I suggest hypnosis?