Adorno's "Comment C'est"

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Adorno's Comment c'est Author(s): JONATHAN ULLYOT Source: Comparative Literature, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 416-431Published by: on behalf of the Duke University Press University of OregonStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40600338Accessed: 25-09-2015 18:44 UTC

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JONATHAN ULLYOT

Adorno's Comment c'est

MODERN ARTWORK, according to Theodor Adorno, refuses to "affirm the miserable course of the world as the iron law of nature" {Aesthetic The-

ory 49). 1 It makes the beholder shudder and reflect, purging his habit of over- conceptualizing by offering an experience of the "nonconceptual whole."2 The artwork seems incomprehensible and foreign to the beholder, but it expresses only a simple message: "this is how it is." The artwork is not in itself an imposition, demand, or confrontation, though it may have all of these effects. Ontologically, the artwork is an expression: "It is thus," a resignation that it "announces with the gesture of letting oneself fall" (112).

To avoid the trap of conceptualization, the concept-name of this simple expression changes throughout Aesthetic Theory - from Sosein (or So-und-nicht-anders-Seins, 77) to So ist es (112) (with some variations, for example the "Here I am" or "This is what I am" of Etruscan vases, 112), and finally to "Comment c'est," which Adorno equates with "that's what it's like out there" (223; "so geht es zu, so ist es draussen," 331) as well as with "how it is" (133; "wie es ist," 200). This concept-name at times appears demonstrative - "It is thus" - at times general - "how it is" - and at times self-referential - "here I am." Adorno's English translator Robert Hullot-Kentor alludes to this in a somewhat cryptic footnote to the first appearance of Sosein, which he translates "thus-and-only-thus." He notes that, unlike the "whatness, or essence of an object as opposed to its existence," which is the regular German meaning of Sosein, " Sosein in Adorno's work becomes the equivalent of Beckett's 'Comment c'est'" (77 n. 16). This footnote is puzzling not simply because Hullot- Kentor does not explain himself further (his footnote to "So ist es" on page 112 merely states "see note 16 on Sosein") or because he neglects to mention that in Aesthetic Theory Adorno elongates Sosein to So-und-nicht-anders-Seins {Ästhetische Theo- rie 77, 121), but because he refers to "Comment c'est" as though it were a theoretical concept instead of the title of a prose work by Samuel Beckett published in 1961. What does it mean to say that Sosein, So ist es, and all of its other manifestations "become" equivalents of "Comment c'est"? As is the case with other quotations or

1 All English quotations from this text are taken from Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Passages in German are quoted from Ästhetische Theorie.

2 For Adorno, only the artwork (and negative dialectics) offers this experience of the non-conceptual whole. "That the concept is a concept even when dealing with things in being does not change the fact that on its part it is entwined with a nonconceptual whole. Its only insulation from that whole is its reification - that which establishes it as a concept To change this direction of conceptuality, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics" ("Negative Dialects" 63).

Comparative Literature 61:4 DOI 10.1215/00104124-2009-024 © 2009 by University of Oregon



ADORNO'S COMMENT C'EST / 417

works in foreign languages, Adorno puts "Comment c'est" in guillements (», «) throughout Aesthetic Theory. (He neither italicizes German titles nor uses punc- tuation.) In what follows I will explore Hullot-Kentor's observation, first by looking at those instances when Adorno seems to be using "Comment c'est" as a concept- name instead of the title of Beckett's piece, and then by unfolding Adorno's idea of the simple ontology of the artwork alongside Beckett's work of the same name.

Adorno always granted Beckett a special place in his philosophy. He planned to dedicate the completed text of Aesthetic Theory to Beckett, and his reading of End- game began a whole tradition of reading Beckett as philosophy (such as Chrich- tley's Very Little. . . Almost Nothing) . Adorno has also written about the significance of the "title" as a concept internal to the modern artwork with special attention to Beckett, arguing that "the unnamable" of Beckett's LInnommable does not refer to anything in the book, but performs the same "gesture" as the book itself - namely, it claims that the work of art cannot be named (Notes to Literature 3-12) . The title of LInnommable therefore "embodies the truth about the namelessness of contemporary literature" (12). "Comment c'est," likewise, embodies what Adorno's Aesthetic Theory identifies as the fundamental expression or gesture of all modern art.3

"Comment c'est"

The most developed explanation of "Comment c'est" occurs in the chapter "Universal and Particular," in which Adorno discusses the "intrigue and development" of the modern artwork. I've separated the text into three units: [1.] Intrigue, Durchführung sind nicht nur subjektive Tätigkeit, zeitliches Werden für sich. [2.] Nicht weniger repräsentieren sie in den Werken entbundenes, blindes und sich verzehrendes Leben. Gegen es sind die Kunstwerke nicht länger ein Bollwerk. Jede Intrige, im wörtlichen und über- tragenen Verstande, sagt: so geht es zu, so ist es draussen. [3.] In der Darstellung von solchem "Com- ment c'est" werden die ahnungslosen Kunstwerke von ihrem Anderen durchdrungen, ihr Eigenes, die Bewegung zur Objektivation, von jenem Heterogenen motiviert. (331) [1.] Intrigue and development are not only subjective activity, temporal development for itself. [2.] They also represent unleashed, blind, and self-consuming life in the works. Against it, artworks are no longer a bulwark. Every intrigue, literally and figuratively, says, This is how things are, this is what it's like out there. [3.] In the portrayal of this "Comment c'est" the unwitting artwork is permeated by its other, its own essence, the movement toward objectivation, and is motivated by the het- erogeneous other. (223)

1) Intrigue - in the sense of "an underhanded plot or plotting," as opposed to "intriguing," which would he faszinierend - and development are first defined as "subjective activity, temporal development for itself": the self-referential and

3 See Shierry Weber Nicholsen's important work on what she calls the "configurational form" of Adorno's aesthetic writings: "this complex structuring of the relationship between the conceptual and the concrete is, I believe, the key to the aesthetic dimension in Adorno's critical-aesthetic essays" ("Toward a More Adequate Reception" 43). The conclusion "is not grounded through explicit argument using discursive logic; rather, its grounds are embodied in the configurational mass, the whole of which forms a presentation or demonstration of the conclusion rather than an argument for it" (51) . Nicholson's more recent Exact Imagination, Late Work has a section devoted to the way Adorno's style in Aesthetic Theory mirrors his descriptions of modern art (89-102). Shapiro also comments - albeit more critically - on the literary quality of Aesthetic Theory: "The book, in truth, resembles one of Samuel Beckett's novels, in which page upon page of desperately dense gloom threatens the reader's stamina and sanity. Yet, in Beckett and Adorno, something suddenly lights up in the jungle every once in a while" ("Review" 288-89).



COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 418

enmeshed quality of the artwork. Compare this to the first lines of Beckett's Com- ment c'est: "comment c'étaitje cite avant Pini avec Pirn après Pirn comment c'est trois parties je le dis comme je l'entends" (9; "how it was I quote before Pirn with Pirn after Pirn how it is three parts I say it as I hear it," 7) .4 The narrator recounts a story that he apparently already knows, but is also trapped within and (re-) enacting. The text is neither a recollection nor an impromptu monologue. The narrator "hears" the story as he says it - that is, he repeats the story as he acts it out; or, as he acts it out, he hears himself saying it. The story of before, with, and after Pirn is "comment c'était," but all together, in the self-telling, self-acting, and self-listening, it is "comment c'est": an endless repetition of crawling to Pirn, being (with) Pirn, and leaving Pirn. Comment c'est, in other words, hears itself and tells itself. It seems to take Adorno's criteria for intrigue and development, "subjective activity, temporal development for itself," literally. I want to stress literally because Comment c'est doesn't exemplify a work of intrigue and development in the way Adorno seems to mean it here. Adorno offers the example of the "thematic frenzy" of Les liaisons dangereuses, in which the intrigue is so excessive that it "absorbs all inter- est" and calls attention to itself (223). In Comment c'est the plotting is self-referential right from the start.

2) Adorno's second group of criteria for intrigue and development are entbunden (literally, delivered, as in childbirth, or relieved/released from something that binds), blindes, and sich verzehrendes (literally living off one's self or self-consuming, but normally used in an emotional sense). In Comment c'est the narrator's freedom from "the old blue world," the former burden of his wife, Pam, and his father, Krim, suggest the second meaning of entbunden ("released"). However, entbunden as "delivered" also applies to Comment c'est, which plays repeatedly on the idea of the sack, the burst sack, and the cord as placenta/umbilical cord, as well as the motif of hot mud as a "second womb" or a state of limbo. Beckett's characters are "delivered" from the past but also have never been born. "Blind" is manifested literally by a narrator groping through the darkness of the mud. Indeed, when Pirn begins to sing, the narrator reports, "my right hand seeks his lips let us try and see this pretty movement more clearly," as if he could only see with his hands (62). Finally, Comment c'est is "self-consuming" (sich verzehrendes): it is one sustained cry, a thren- ody on something that is always again being lost. Or - once again to take the verb literally - not only does the narrator eat from a sack tied to his back, but he also tries to "open himself" with a can opener: tant de boîtes encore là quelque chose qui m'échappe je les sors une à une dans la boue main gauche toujours jusqu'à l'ouvre-boîte enfin le mets dans ma bouche rentre les boîtes je ne dis pas toutes et mon bras droit pendant ce temps (82) so many tins still remaining something there that escapes me I take them out left hand one by one in the mud till at last the opener put it in my mouth put back the tins I don't say all and my right arm all this time (73) 5

4 1 usually cite both the French and the English text of Comment c'est because Beckett often made interesting changes translating it into English. Not only was Comment c'est very difficult for Beckett to write, but the English translation took him an entire year, and he produced eight different versions (cf. Knowlson 412-14, 442).

5 The "sack" can represent the placenta, the testis, or simply the self: "billions of us crawling and shitting in their shit hugging like a treasure in their arms the wherewithal to crawl and shit" and "he can't repel me it's like my sack when I had it still this providential flesh I'll never let it go" (58, 61). In other words, what sustains the narrator is also the narrator, who draws on his own memories, mourns the loss of himself, attacks himself, and eats himself.




3) Adorno's final criterion - that "the unwitting artwork is permeated by its other, its own essence, the movement toward objectivation" - is again manifested literally in Beckett's text. In part two, the reader learns that the narrator is also called Pirn (74, 66). He tries to rename Pirn "Bom," only to find that he (the narrator) has become Bom as well. And although it is quite clear that there are two figures hugging and beating each other in the mud, the narrator eventually refers to them as "glued" (132), and they part company by becoming the same person: TA VIE LA-HAUT plus besoin de lumière deux lignes seulement à Pim la parole il tourne la tête larmes aux yeux les miens les miennes (93) YOUR LIFE ABOVE no more need of light two lines only and Pim to speak he turns his head tears in the eyes my tears my eyes (83) and Pim Pim vite après Pim avant qu'il s'efface s été que moi moi jamaicomment c'était avant moi avec moi après moi comment c'est vite (127) Pim quick after Pim before he vanishes never was only me me Pim how it was before me with me after me how it is quick (113) Pirn's tears are the narrator's tears; as Pim turns his head the narrator sees himself. Later, Pim "vanishes" when the narrator identifies that Pim is the same person as himself. The first line of Comment c'est - "how it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is" - is amended to "how it was before me with me after me how it is." The text has become permeated, as Adorno would say, by "its own essence" (ihr Eigenes) .

As Hullot-Kentor suggests, then, within Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Beckett's Com- ment c'est functions not as an artwork but as the slippage of the concept Sosein. Comment c'est remains a "Comment c'est" for Adorno - not just an exemplum, or a reference, but something between a concept-name and an actual artwork: a "title" that reveals not only its own essence but also the essence of modern art. Sosein "becomes" "Comment c'est," with page 223 of the English translation providing the last reference to this concept. Moreover, because Adorno's intention is not to talk about art but with it and through it, it is especially apt that the concept-name for art's fundamental expression has this quality. As he puts it in "Negative Dia- lects and the Possibility of Philosophy," "The goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept, their absorption in the concept; yet it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds" (64). Aesthetics "must strive, byway of the concept, to transcend the concept" (65). In Aesthetic Theory, the concept Sosein has become the artwork Comment c'est, though still as the concept "Comment c'est."

In what follows, my analysis moves between Comment c'est as a literalization of Adorno's ideas in Aesthetic Theory (in other words, as a kind of meta-text) and Com- ment c'est as an exemplum of his views on the new, unity and meaning, and mimesis and expression.

The New: Sosein

For Adorno, the autonomous artwork is unlike the commodified world from which it came. By presenting itself as valueless within that world, it achieves a "secular" transcendence:




Ist alle Kunst Säkularisierung von Transzendenz, so hat eine jegliche Teil an der Dialektik der Aufklärung. Kunst hat dieser Dialektick mit der ästhetischen Konzeption von Antikunst sich ges- tellt; keine wohl ist mehr denkbar ohne dies Moment. Das sagt aber nicht weniger, als dass Kunst über ihren eigenen Begriff hinausgehen muss, um ihm die Treue zu halten. Der Gedanke an ihre Abschaf- fung tut ihr Ehre an, indem er ihren Wahrheitsanspruch honoriert. (50) If all art is the secularization of transcendence, it participates in the dialectic of enlightenment. Art has confronted this dialectic with the aesthetic conception of antiart; indeed, without this element art is no longer thinkable. This implies nothing less than that art must go beyond its own concept in order to remain faithful to that concept. The idea of its abolition does it homage by honoring its claim to truth. (29)

Art embraces its own abolition because it must always be new. Because the truth of the new is "the truth of what is not already used up" (26), and because what has already been used up constitutes the concept "art" at any period of time, art must attempt to transcend itself by embracing its own abolition. This transcendence is art's newness: newness necessarily tied to the secular, the old, what has come before: "Das Neue ist die Sehnsucht nach dem Neuen, kaum es selbst, daran krankt alles Neue. Was als Utopie sich fühlt, bleibt ein Negatives gegen das Bestehende, und diesem hörig" (55; "The new is the longing for the new, not the new itself: That is what everything new suffers from. What takes itself to be utopia remains the negation of what exists and is obedient to it," 32). Art is its own longing to be art, just as the new is a longing for the new. In this longing art reflects the problems of its age. Modern art revolts against the art of the past: that which has been made comprehensible or placed under the law of a concept by an exchange society. By playing out its own abolition, art attempts to restore its dignity as non-conceptual, foreign, and incomprehensible. Modern art is Utopian precisely because it is color- less, fragmentary, and asymmetrical. And yet, the artwork remains sadly obedient to the old world: black is the absence of color, the fragmentary is that which is not whole, the asymmetrical is that which is not symmetrical.

The setting of Comment c'est moves between what could be called the utopia and the dystopia of mud. The mud at first seems to represent the "womb" of the mother/ earth, rich in nutrients: "the tongue comes out lolls in the mud that lasts a good moment they are good moments perhaps the best difficult to choose the face in the mud the mouth open the mud in the mouth thirst abating humanity regained" (30); "I live the air sustains me the mud I live on" (19). It is also a kind of blanket, the "warmth of primeval mud" (12). But the narrator quickly finds himself haunted by grim memory, the "rags of life in the light," the despair of having lived (23). The primeval mud becomes muck - "billions of us crawling and shitting in their shit hugging like a treasure in their arms the wherewithal to crawl and shit" (52) - and the narrator is no longer the child in the womb absorbing the earth but an old man being absorbed by the earth and clutching his "sack" (58). Similarly, the tins suggest both self-sustenance as well as the remains of a commodified world. The can- opener (that which turns a commodity into nutrients) often loses its functional role and is used for self-punishment and what seems to be a form of masturbation. As are all utopias, Comment c'est is a utopia of the new built from the old, filled with "the gaps the holes" of despair (93). Its utopia is also the failure of utopia; its pri- mordial mud is also shit. And yet, failure always points again to success - the longing for the new is the new, and muck is never that far from mud (or mulch) : on parle maintenant d'une procession se faisant par bonds ou saccades à la manière de la merde à se demander les jours de grand gaîté si nous ne finirons pas l'un après l'autre ou deux par deux par être chiés à l'air libre à lumière du jour au régime de la grâce (150-51)




we are talking of a procession advancing in jerks or spasms like shit in the guts till one wonders days of great gaiety if we shall not end one after another or two by two by being shat into the open air the light of day the regimen of grace (135)

As Adorno would put it, the new is both melancholy - it is only the longing for the new - and hopeful - that very longing is the (only possible) new. The womb of mother earth becomes the intestinal tract, and the hope dawns of being shit "into the open air the light of day the regimen of grace" again. Beckett's vision of utopia thus embraces Adorno's paradoxical formulation of the new: the narrator is at once in shit (as well as being shit himself) and in the open air, no longer trapped in an enclosed (intestinal) shit-world. Utopia and dystopia are inextricably interwoven.

The fundamental contradiction of art is that its newness is merely the longing for the new: "Während sie der Gesellschaft opponiert, vermag sie doch keinen ihr jenseitigen Standpunkt zu beziehen; Opposition gelingt ihr einzig durch Identi- fikation mit dem, wogegen sie aufbegehrt" (201; "Whereas art opposes society, it is nevertheless unable to take up a position beyond it; it achieves opposition only through the identification with that against which it remonstrates," 133). Art opposes society without providing an alternative. Hence its opposition is also a partial agreement in that it employs the very "arguments" that it resists. This means that art opposes for the sake of opposing, for the sake of itself, for the sake of the "quickly exhausted gesture" of its Sosein (126). "Art is the ever broken promise of happiness," as Adorno puts it (136). It does not point the way to enlightenment; rather, it displays the filth of the world as filth. Its clarity is the promise of a knowledge-beyond, but it goes no further. This is what Adorno calls "absorbing the enemy" of fungibility: "Noch seinen tödlichsten Feind, Vertauschbarkeit, muss das Kunstwerk absorbieren; anstatt in Konkretion auszuweichen, durch die eigene Konkretion den totalen Abstraktionszusammenhang darstellen und dadurch ihm widerstehen" (203; "But the artwork must absorb even its most fatal enemy - fungibility; rather than fleeing into concretion, the artwork must present through its own concretion the total nexus of abstraction and thereby resist it," 135). The non-concrete is visible only in the arrangement of its concrete and fungible parts {vertauschbar: literally, mixed up, switched, transposed, but also exchangeable, like a commodity) . "The nonexisting in artworks is a constellation of the existing" (135), which makes up the "Comment c'est": "Die Kunstwerke sagen, was mehr ist als das Seiende, einzig; indem sie sur Konstellation bringen, wie es ist, "Comment c'est" (200-01; "Artworks say what is more than the existing, and they do this exclusively by making a constellation of how it is, 'Comment c'est,'" 133).

For Beckett the constellation of how it is is the "fragilité de l'euphorie" (47; "fra- gility of euphoria," 42). Comment c'est is made up entirely of the fragmentary and the fungible; it is an "orgie de faux être" (85; "an orgy of false being," 76) replete with random acts of violence, bursts of despair, self-pity, an obsession with power and punishment, and a fixation on the anus both as sex orifice completely devoid of sensuality (94, 104; 85, 94) and as mouth (eating/shitting and speech/gas: the flatus is "a fart fraught with meaning," 29). Comment c'est is an arrangement of dis- jecta membra or a sculpture made from trash, the comment c'était being the utter fungibility of the text and the comment c'est the overarching form: that which makes the past present and the artwork into one unified pregnant moment in which the "nonexisting" can be heard. In this moment of presence the artwork revolts against the filth of its parts.

A preliminary idea of the autonomy of the artwork should be clear at this point:




Nicht more scientifico ist von Notwendigkeit in der Kunst zu reden, sondern einzig soweit, wie ein Werk durch die Macht seiner Geschlossenheit, die Evidenz seines So-und-nicht-anders-Seins wirkt, als ob es schlechterdings da sein musste, man es nicht wegdenken könnte. Das Ansichsein, dem die Kunstwerke nachhängen, ist nicht Imitation eines Wirklichen sondern Vorwegnahme eines Ansich- seins, das noch gar nicht ist. (120-21) The necessity of art cannot be propounded more scientifico but rather only insofar as a work, by the power of its internal unity, gives evidence of being thus-and-only-thus, as if it absolutely must exist and cannot possibly be thought away. The being-in-itself to which artworks are devoted is not the imitation of something real but rather the anticipation of a being-in-itself that does not yet exist, of an unknown that - by way of the subject - is self-determining. Artworks say that something exists in itself, without predicating anything about it. (77)

The Sosein is the unforgettable essence of the work of art, the expression that shines out through all its fungible parts. The fungible therefore becomes for-the-whole, has a significance with respect to its arrangement, and points to a present: de ce vieux conte quaqua de toutes parts puis en moi des bribes tâcher d'entendre quelques bribes deux trois chaque fois par jour et nuit les ajouter les unes aux autres faire des phrases d'autres phrases les dernières comment c'était après Pim comment c'est (130) of this old tale quaqua on all sides then in me bits and scraps try and hear a few scraps two or three each time per day and night string them together make phrases more phrases the last how it was after Pim how it is (115)

Sosein is the expression of being whole, being autonomous: somehow in the string- ing together of bits and scraps of how it was, a picture of how it is arises that is irreducible to those parts. And just as the new is the longing to be new, this expression of autonomy is the very devotion to autonomy; it asserts that a being-in-itself must exist, even though the artwork cannot show this explicitly, because it is only a collection of the past. The fundamental ontology of the artwork is therefore not the being-in-itself that the artwork suggests, but rather that expression of a being- in-itself made through the artwork 's constellation.

Meaning and Unity The meaning (Sinn) of the artwork is therefore its unity: its existence as a thing

that resists a definite or conceptual meaning. Adorno describes Beckett's work as putting "meaning on trial" (153). Although each part may have once had meaning in its original context, and although its medium (language) is considered to be a means-to-meaning, the constellation of the artwork resists comprehensibility: essence (as Sosein) overpowers meaning. The modern artwork therefore has only "aesthetic" or "artistic" meaning, as opposed to what Adorno calls "theological" meaning. (The "role" of God in Beckett, for example, is its very meaninglessness.)6 Aesthetic meaning is the meaning of unity, the revolt from theological meaning, or the meaningful revolt from meaning:

6 Adorno moves back and forth between "aesthetic" (äesthetische) and "artistic" {künstliche) meaning throughout Aesthetic Theory. He contrasts this with "theological meaning" (153), or just "meaning" as it is ordinarily conceived. "Theological meaning" is the traditional conception of meaning, the very meaning whose absence is the criteria for aesthetic/artistic meaning: "the emancipation of artworks from their meaning becomes aesthetically meaningful once this emancipation is realized in the aesthetic material precisely because the aesthetic meaning is not immediately one with theological meaning" (153). By "putting meaning on trial," for example, Beckett's work refuses to admit an interpretation of Waiting for Godot as an allegory of mankind waiting for a God who will never come. Theological meaning, of course, does not just imply religious readings. Even to claim that Beckett's play is "about" the absurdity of human existence would be to impose a theological meaning.




Die neue Kunst, mit ihrer Anfälligkeit, ihren Flecken, ihrer Fehlbarkeit ist die Kritik der in vielem stärkeren, gelungeneren der Tradition: Kritik am Gelingen. Sie hat ihre Basis in der Unzulänglich- keit dessen, was zulänglich erscheint. (240) Modern art, with its vulnerability, blemishes, and fallibility, is the critique of traditional works, which in so many ways are stronger and more successful: It is the critique of success. It is predicated on the recognition of the inadequacy of what appears to be adequate. (160) What was once successful as art - the current model of "success" - can no longer be acceptable, since art is always something new. The new cannot have a (theological) meaning because meaning is something "discovered" from past artworks. For Adorno, the only meaning left to (modern) art is the meaning that art has always had - aesthetic meaning - the revolt from meaning. To understand this is to "comprehend incomprehensibility," as Adorno puts it: "Kunstwerke sind nicht von der Ästhetik als hermeneutische Objekte zu begreifen; zu begreifen wäre, auf dem gegenwärtigen Stand, ihre Unbegreiflichkeit" (118; "The task of aesthetics is not to comprehend artworks as hermeneutical objects; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended," 179).

However, the unity of the artwork, or its aesthetic meaning, is necessarily a melancholy one, a "gesture of letting oneself fall." This is because the artwork 's being-in-itself is not locatable in the world, meaning that the assertion of Sosein carries with it the idea that Sosein is not: "Aus den Kunstwerken wortlos leuchtet heraus, dass es sei, vor der Folie, dass es, uneinlösbares grammatisches Subjekt, nicht ist; auf nichts in der Welt Vorhandenes lässt es demonstrativ sich beziehen" (161; "What radiates wordlessly from artworks is that it is, thrown into relief by it - the unlocatable grammatical subject - is not; it cannot be referred demon- stratively to anything in the world that previously exists," 105). Because the unity or being-in-itself of the artwork is the mere assertion of a being-in-itself, it is also a sadness, a stillness, a longing. There is no hope of "proof," and hence this assertion is at the same time a lament, "if only it were true."7 The artwork therefore negates its being-in-itself along with asserting it: It is thus has aesthetic meaning because "it" is unlocatable, "it" is also not.

Adorno wrestles with this paradox through paradoxical formulations: "Sinn- zusammenhang, Einheit wird von den Kunstwerken veranstaltet, weil sie nicht ist, und als veranstaltete das Ansichsein negiert, um dessentwillen die Veranstaltung unternommen wird - am Ende die Kunst selbst. Jegliches Artefakt arbeitet sich entgegen" (162; "A coherence of meaning - unity - is contrived by art because it does not exist and because as artificial meaning it negates the being-in-itself for the sake of which the organization of meaning was undertaken, ultimately negat- ing art itself. Every artifact works against itself," 106). The coordinating conjunc- tion "and" in this sentence does not make sense if the sentence is read as a subject- object relation, or the relation between an artist and her artwork, which Adorno suggests with the verbs "is contrived" (wird . . . veranstaltet) and "was undertaken" (unternommen wird) . An artist either contrives a unity because she desires it and it

7 "Even while art indicts the concealed essence, which it summons into appearance, as monstrous, this negation at the same time posits as its own measure an essence that is not present, that of possibility; meaning inheres even in the disavowal of meaning. Because meaning, whenever it is manifest in an artwork, remains bound up with semblance, all art is endowed with sadness; art grieves all the more, the more completely its successful unification suggests meaning, and the sadness is height- ened by the feeling of 'Oh, were it only so.' Melancholy is the shadow of what in all form is heteroge- neous, which form strives to banish: mere existence" (105-06).




does not exist, or contrives a unity to undermine her search for a real unity - but not both at once. Adorno is trying to describe the artwork 's contradictory relation to itself by contradicting himself. This is negative dialectics at work: an attempt to surpass the concept (the subject/object distinction) through the use of its concepts (meaning, unity, creation, creator) in order to open a pre-conceptual space where "art speaks," where a work of art can become a concept-word, and vice versa. The play of concepts such as meaning vs. non-meaning, for example, becomes so complex in Aesthetic Theory - and this even after the distinction between aesthetic meaning and theological meaning - because these terms get in the way of themselves. Art is a constellation of anti-meaning, but the "point" of an artwork is not this constellation. It is not l'art pour l'art.8

The constellation of anti-meaning expresses an aesthetic meaning - that the world is thus. Comment c'est is full of paradoxes and contradictions; apparently meaningful connections or binaries appear (such as the mouth/anus or narrator/ Pirn conflations) that in the end provide little, if any, additional significance to the work "as a whole." Such instances make up the "God on God desperation utter confusion" (81) of the muck-world, where going to the end of the world seems indistinguishable from going around it: "au bout du monde j'irais ainsi au bout du monde à genoux j'en ferais le tour à genoux" (109; "I would go to the world's end on my knees to the world's end right round it on my knees," 98). Descriptions contradict other descriptions; sentences contradict themselves.

Aesthetic meaning is therefore coherence, constellation, "concretion," "the total nexus of abstraction," and unity. And yet these concepts do not describe the artwork but what the artwork says. The artwork cannot be thought away, and yet it cannot be thought through. The "Comment c'est" is mysterious: it demands interpretation and yet cannot be interpreted definitively. This is the central paradox of Aesthetic Theory, which Adorno tries to acknowledge through parataxis and contradiction (see Nicholsen, "Toward a More Adequate Reception" and Exact Imagina- tion, Late Work). Likewise, Comment c'est introduces a series of concepts and oppo- sitions only to later confuse them. Although it is possible to distinguish the role of opposites, such as the blue- vs. the mud-world, the self vs. the non-self, virility vs. sterility, childhood vs. senility, God vs. Godlessness, and even narrative moments involving sense vs. non-sense, information vs. performance, some passages seem to mock the endeavor to create coherence by being so suggestive and self-conscious that everything collapses and flows downriver with the text itself: "rêve viens d'un ciel d'une terre d'un sous-sol oùje sois inconcevable aïe aucun son dans le cul un pal ardent ce jour-là nous ne priâmes pas plus avant" (45 ; "dream come of a sky an earth an under-earth where I am inconceivable aah no sound in the rectum a redhot spike that day we prayed no further," 40). In this case, the narrator's longing to be selfless becomes a longing to be "inconceivable," which he then seems to perform through this utterance. The contrast between the muck-world vs. "the

8 In a similar way, I have already shown that art is always anti-art for Adorno, both because its newness is different from any conception of art that has come before it and because art is always a longing to be itself. This argument also appears contradictory to the extent that the first definition seems to assert that an artwork succeeds in being aconceptual, whereas the second definition seems to assert that art "knows" it can never escape its being conceptual. Yet this condition is precisely Adorno's point: it is the "knowledge" of art, expressed in the gesture of renunciation, that is the success of art.




light of day, the regimen of grace" is dropped for the dream of a new, silent world with "a sky an earth an underearth." This turns into a sudden recollection of either being tortured with a "redhot spike" or being sodomized. The line "that day we prayed no further" alludes to Francesca's final line to Dante, "that day we read no further," her description of the moment when she and Paolo gave way to their lust (Inferno V 138). This is in turn a perversion of Augustine's description of his con- version reading St. Paul: "No further would I read, nor did I need to read further, for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away" (Confessions 8.12.29). Beckett perverts Dante's perversion of Augustine, turning the lustful encounter into a kind of phony traumatic experience, written apparently for shock value. (The narrator never mentions this "trauma" again.) Francesca replaces divine love with corpo- real love; Beckett replaces a meaningful allusion with a nonsensical one. Comment c'est incites associative meanings and yet mocks those associations, as though to say that no greater understanding will be found through them than by taking the text literally or counting the number of times a certain word appears on a page.9 Comment c'est is

toujours des aspects toujours changeants selon les besoins mais les besoins les besoins ce n'est donc pas ici toujours les mêmes besoins d'âge en âge les mêmes soifs la voix l'a dit (90) ever changing aspects of the never changing life according to the needs but the needs the needs surely for ever here the same needs from age to age the same thirsts the voice says so (81) What never changes is its ever-changingness, ever-fungibility: the awful "same" invades the narrative, creating repetition, variation, and finally contradiction. Despair increases. The narrator does and says the same things over and over. He is plagued by the same unspecific thoughts of the general in general. The voice speaks in fits and starts through a kind of endless intestine; or, as I suggested earlier, the voice traverses as gas out of the intestines into the air. If the latter, then to speak is to be birthed into a "regimen of grace." But then I have lost my point. And which is correct? All of them, which is to say none at all: to reject meaning by embracing it in toto.

Mimesis and Expression: So ist es

The needs and the thirsts of the artwork are made "for ever here the same," as Beckett would say, by the voice that utters them into the present: It is thus. The "it" is not the "I" or self-hood of an artwork, for the expression invokes a being- in-itself that the artwork is not. And yet the "it" cannot be located; it does not speak of anything outside of the artwork. Adorno uses the phrase "mimetic consummation" to explain this: Nachahmung ist Kunst einzig als die eines objektiven, aller Psychologie entrücken Ausdrucks, dessen vielleicht einmal das Sensorium an der Welt inneward und der nirgendwo anders überdauert als in Gebilden. Durch den Ausdruck sperrt sich Kunst dem Füranderessein, das ihn so begierig verschlingt, und spricht an sich: das ist ihr mimetischer Vollzug. Ihr Ausdruck ist der Widerpart des etwas Ausdrückens. (171)

9 Ruby Cohn argues that Beckett's favorite word for the "cryptic present" is "quaqua" ("whereso- ever" in Latin) . Presence is integral to Beckett, and yet the concept-word almost mocks that invested importance. See "Comment C'est, de quoi rire."




Art is imitation exclusively as the imitation of an objective expression, remote from psychology, of which the sensorium was perhaps once conscious in the world and which now subsists only in artworks. Through expression art closes itself off to being-for-another, which always threatens to

engulf it, and becomes eloquent in itself: This is art's mimetic consummation. Its expression is the antithesis of expressing something. (112)

The sensorium that was perhaps once conscious is the pre-conceptual, the idea of a "time" before the psychology of subject/object, creator/creation. Because art is an expression and "expression is a priori imitation," art is the mimesis of expression (117).10 The "it" is neither the subjectivity of the artwork nor anything outside of the artwork. It cannot enter into a direct relation with another (an observer) who wants to engulf it - that is, understand it, destroy it, or eat it. It cannot be for the other. The "resignation" of Schubert, for example, "hat ihren Ort nicht in der vorgeblichen Stimmung seiner Musik, nicht in dem, wie ihm, als ob das Werk etwas darüber verriete, zumute war, sondern in dem So ist es, das sie mit dem Ges- tus des sich fallen Lassens bekundet: er ist ihr Ausdruck" (171; "has its locus not in the purported mood of his music, nor in how he was feeling - as if the music could give a clue to this - but in the It is thus that it announces with the gesture of letting oneself fall: This is its expression," 112). The So ist es is a gesture of letting- fall because the artwork is impotent: it speaks and yet no "it" can speak, and it speaks of an "it" that (it) is not. "It" asserts "it" where neither "it" is locatable. And yet this impotence constitutes the artwork 's autonomy: it cannot be for the other any more than it can be for itself. "Art is redemptive in the act by which the spirit in it throws itself away" (118).

The So ist es is a gesture, or an expression, like the Etruscan vase, "that most resembles speech," denoting einer Selbstheit, die nicht erst durchs identifizierende Denken aus der Interdependenz des Seienden

herausgeschnitten ward. So scheint ein Nashorn, das stumme Tier, zu sagen: ich bin ein Nashorn. Die Rilkesche Ziele "denn da ist keine Stelle, / die dich nicht sieht", von der Benjamin gross dachte, hat

jene nicht signifikative Sprache der Kunstwere in kaum übertroffener Weise kodifiziert: Ausdruck ist der Blick der Kunstwerke. (171-72) a selfhood not first excised by identificatory thought from the interdependence of entities. Thus the rhinoceros, that mute animal, seems to say: "I am a rhinoceros." Rilke 's line "for there is no place / without eyes to see you [for here (there) is no place / that does not see you] , which Benjamin held in

high esteem, codified the nonsignificative language of artworks in an incomparable fashion: Expres- sion is the gaze of artworks. (112)

Art's expression is of an in-itself before heterogeneity, the self-hood of the self that cannot possibly know it is a self. It expresses in a pre-conceptual state before the opposition of an "out there" and "in here." The Ich of Ich bin ein Nashorn, the Ich of the Etruscan vase, Rilke's da before the "Archaic Torso of Apollo" is the same as the es of So ist es. Put in the language of negative dialectics, the expression of the artwork is the "nonsubjective in the subject" (113). Certainly, it is only to the

10 It should be noted that this is a rather idiosyncratic definition of mimesis. As Adorno defines it, "The mimesis of artworks is their resemblance to themselves" (104). Mimesis, in turn, is part of a dialectic that involves construction, which, according to Adorno, "is the form of works that is no longer imposed on them ready-made yet does not arise directly out of them either, but rather originates in its reflection through subjective reason" (222). The artwork, for that reason, is never purely mimetic; it only has the illusion of being so. When "thinking and art both become dynamic, the constructed work stands still" and seems to mirror itself (222). See the first chapter of Nicholsen's Exact Imagination, Late Work.




other (the beholder) that the rhinoceros or the artwork speaks, for if a lion could talk, as Wittgenstein says, and Adorno seems to be echoing him here, we could not hear him. And that is as much to say that we use identificatory (conceptual) thought in order to regard the nonsubjective in the subject (the preconceptual gaze) . One could say that we project the idea onto the rhinoceros that it knows it is a rhinoceros even when we are not around.11 This is why the animal's eyes are sad: as Adorno says, thinking of Kafka, the ape seems to mourn that it is not human. An absurd idea, but still (somehow) real: the ape, falling under the concept "non-human," mourns that fact. To use the first person: though I know that I must have imposed that sadness onto the ape, this does not change what I see. Likewise, the artwork is autonomous, entirely other than me, and yet it seems to contain a part of me in it: the sadness of its gestus. Or, from the opposite perspec- tive: I know it is for me, that it exists to be seen, demands interpretation, and yet I cannot interpret it. It seems indifferent to me. It speaks of something else, an it that I cannot grasp, that is beyond itself. The artwork is a confrontation with a gaze that is for-me and yet not looking in my direction. It is the gaze, as Hullot- Kentnor translates Rilke, somehow without eyes and yet seeing me everywhere.

Comment c'est

Does this relate to Comment c'est? Indeed: the conflation of the narrator with Pirn, his renaming Pirn as "Bern" and then "Bom," and so on; the theme of victim and tormentor, which at times involves an endless chain of millions and at other times only two people "glued" together; the idea that the c'était of "one the journey two the couple three the abandon" (126) is ultimately the constellation of c'est - are all different ways that Beckett calls into question the easy polarization of the "I" as speaking voice and the "it" of the world the voice speaks. Indeed, the narrator's earlier suggestion that he is doing what he is speaking, or that he hears himself speaking what he is doing, no longer makes sense by part three, where the narrative voice moves back and forth from "I speak" to "it speaks": ou elle disait en réalité tantôt Bem tantôt Bom par distraction ou inadvertance en croyant ne pas varier je la personnifie elle se personnifie . . . n'ayant pas compris que Bem et Bom ne pouvaient faire qu'un (138) or it said in reality now Bem now Bom through carelessness or inadvertence not realizing that it varied I personify it it personifies itself . . . not realizing that Bern and Bom could only be one and the same (122) There is no way to name this something that speaks, or the something about which it speaks: pas moi Bom toi Bom nous Bom mais moi Bom toi Pim moi à l'abandonné pas moi Pim toi Pim nous Pim mais moi Bom toi Pim quelque chose là qui ne va pas du tout (139) not me Bom you Bom we Bom but me Bom you Pim I to the abandoned not me Pim you Pim we Pim but me Bom you Pim something very wrong there (124)

11 Adorno's reading of Wittgenstein's cryptic maxim would be that the only way a lion speaks is through non-speaking (its gaze). If a lion could actually speak, that is, utter a language, that language would be incomprehensible to us, hence not a language at all, for it would fall outside the concept of language.




Naming is what is wrong, because naming assumes that distinctions can be made, and "ici personne ne se connaît c'est l'endroit sans connaissance" (149; "no one here knows himself it's the place without knowledge" (134), as the narrator puts it. "Knowledge" is the conceptual, delineated world in the light: là-haut dans la lumière où l'espace leur est compté ici la ligne droite la ligne droite vers l'est que nous soyons quatre ou un million la ligne droite vers l'est c'est curieux alors qu'à l'ouest la mort en général (149)12 above in the light where their space is measured here the straight line the straight line eastward strange and death in the west as a rule (134)

Certainly, the struggle of Beckett's artwork, and the reason it often dramatizes itself in terms of these names, results from the fact that it is made up of them - names, objects, personifications, metaphors, allusions, words. But the "sole end" of the wretched existence (Dasein) is to express its essence (Sosein), the "Comment c'est," which involves leaving all names and words behind: tant d'autres mal dites mal entendues mal retenues à seule fin que soit possible blanc sur blanc trace de tant et tant de mots mal donnés mal reçus mal retrouvés mal rendus (163) so many others ill-spoken ill-heard ill-remembered to the sole end that there may be white on white trace of so many and so many words ill-given ill-received ill-rendered to the mud (147)13

The trace is the fundamental expression that lingers in all of the ill-spoken murmurs of this old world, and, as the narrative voice becomes more erratic and charged in the final pages of Comment c'est, the narrator admits that there was/is no procession of millions glued together, there was/is no journey and no Pirn or Bom, in fact not even a sack that might be linked to the womb (origin), the testis (reproduction), and - finally - to the self as the one who speaks: que moi en tout cas oui seul oui dans la boue oui le noir oui ça tient oui la boue et le noir tiennent oui là rien à regretter non avec mon sac non plaît-il non pas de sac non plus non même pas un sac avec moi non (176)

only me in any case yes alone yes in the mud yes the dark yes that holds yes the mud and the dark hold yes nothing to regret there no with my sack no I beg your pardon no no sack either no not even a sack with me no (159)

The text gradually effaces objectivity and movement until it finds itself trapped in the last stirring of the mouth. The last cry that comes from this almost-pre- subjective I, the "Comment c'est" itself, is the cry of death.14 And death, of course, is good, for the after-Pirn (beyond conceptuality - here, the closure of the text, the blank page of "white on white") marks the pre-subjective present voice of the whole:

12 Note that Beckett omits "que nous soyons quatre ou un million vers l'est" from the English text. 13 Beckett adds "to the mud" to the English text. 14 The cries (the capitalized text in Comment c'est) are the only formal break to the flow of mur-

muring other than gaps. They represent a different kind of expression, an expression that attempts to transcend the was of the flow of the text - the attempt of the So ist es to manifest itself literally in the fragmentary text. After all, the cry breaks the narration (of the "past") to betray an immediate emotion: it attempts to move from comment c'était to comment c'est. All of the cries, moreover, call attention to a crisis of representation or distinction: YOU PIM (78), YOUR LIFE ABOVE IN THE LIGHT (79), YOUR LIFE HERE BEFORE ME (81), YOUR LIFE ABOVE, DO YOU LOVE ME, YOU BOM, ME BOM (83), YES OR NO (87), DO YOU LOVE ME CUNT (99), HERE HERE (105), SAME SON (106), WHAT'S MY NAME, LIKE A CROSS, YES OR NO (161), NEVER SUFFERED, THAT'S MY LIFE HERE, LESS AND LESS, DIE, I MAY DIE, I SHALL DIE (160).



ADORNO'S COMMENT C'EST/ 429

alors ça peut changer pas de réponse finir pas de réponse je pourrais suffoquer pas de réponse m'engloutir pas de réponse plus souiller la boue pas de réponse le noir pas de réponse plus troubler le silence pas de réponse crever pas de réponse CREVER hurlements JE POURRAIS CREVER hurlements JE VAIS CREVER hurlements

bon bon bon fin de la troisième partie et dernière voilà comment c'était fin de la citation après Pim comment c'est (177) so things may change no answer end no answer I may choke no answer sink no answer sully the mud no more no answer the dark no answer trouble the peace no more no answer the silence no answer die no answer DIE screams I MAY DIE screams I SHALL DIE screams good

good good end at last of part three and last that's how it was end of quotation after Pim how it is (160) 15

The text echoes itself, as though it knows what it is about to become: its completion. And yet the knowledge of this completion, its self-entitlement as a Com- ment c'est, is echoed through the text - here in the familiar formula "after Pim how it is" - always anticipating the present but unable to speak of {only declare) this present, a frustrated desire that betrays itself in a voice punctuated by screams, its own inability to answer itself, anticipating the burst (crever) of pure expression but unable to be it in any given moment.

Adorno reads Beckett's Comment c'est as an embodiment of the pure expression of art not only as an artwork, but also self-consciously in its text. It is therefore no surprise that Adorno uses the title of Beckett's work as a concept-name. But isn't self-consciousness the case with all modern art? The Etruscan vase and the rhinoceros, after all, both seem to know what they are, and their expression is this expression. Comment c'est, however, possesses a very particular self-consciousness in that its very identity is also a tortured struggle to be itself. The ape mourns its ape-hood through its sad eyes, but Beckett's narrator is beyond mere sadness: he is also trying to become that sadness, the exhausted "Here I am" that is the work of sadness. The narrator is trapped in Comment c'est - trapped as the old and the was - and so he is never able to know himself, to begin, in a voice of sheer "presence." (One might note in this regard that "Comment c'est" is a homonym of "commencer," to begin.) In that way he is similar to the author in the process of writing his work. Beckett loves to dramatize art-as-torture, characters in urns with impossible dialogue, writers or "thinkers" forced to speak their own nonsense on stage - nonsense made even more nonsensical by the fact that they are forced to say it aloud. Beckett dramatizes making art in his art - more specifically, he dramatizes making his own art in his art. The change of name from Pim to Bom is "scored by finger-nail" on the flesh of the other; it can only occur through writing (67). The senseless numbers that proliferate in part three are deliberately written as numbers, again alluding to the written text rather than the narrated text. Pas- sages such as "similarly number 814326 may know by repute number 814345 number 814344 having spoken of him to number 814343 and this last to number 814342 and this last to number 814341 and so back to number 814326 who in this way may know number 814345 by repute" (130) are surely meant to be seen and not spoken. No reader is expected to stop and think the numbers out loud so as

15 Beckett had originally planned to call his work Pim, hence "after Pim how it is" could have been read "after Pim how it is."




to get a better idea of what these "murmurs in the mud" sound like (30). Similarly, images such as "the gaps the holes" or "the white on white" don't invoke what a man would see face down in the mud, but rather the gap-filled text of Comment c'est, one of its striking visual qualities. The play between narrator and author is alluded to in the idea "I say it as I hear it." One can hear both the self-conscious voice of a frustrated author trying to complete his three-part plan and his frustrated protagonist/actor who is once again stuck in some awful position to speak the writer's words. Comment c'est dramatizes its very struggle to be Comment c'est, and hence the actual utterances of "comment c'est" in the text are the reminders - the "concept" or schema - of what it must achieve: of its own expression or title. "After Pirn how it is" means that once part three has been written the work is fin- ished. Comment c'est says itself in the hopes of being itself, says that it must be itself, since that is precisely what it cannot do in the saying.

Adorno and Beckett are therefore in a unique relationship over the "Comment c'est'/ "comment c'est," given that Beckett also uses it as a concept in his work. But (and perhaps this is unfair) given the fact that Comment c'est not only embodies the "Comment c'est" of Adorno but also plays out the struggle to become it, it points beyond Adorno's idea that the "Comment c'est" is the fundamental expression of the work of art. In other words, Comment c'est surpasses Adorno's "Comment c'est" in that it shows itself through Adorno to be a struggle to be his "Comment c'est" and not just a simple "Comment c'est" like the Etruscan vase. If Adorno's aesthetics bows before anything, it is the experience of the artwork. And so perhaps Adorno's "Comment c'est" demands that the fundamental expression of the artwork be re-thought in the light of the artwork to which the concept refers, just as that concept demanded that the reader re-think Comment c'est through Aesthetic Theory.

Certainly, if Adorno's thought is to be re-thought through Beckett, then a possible objection is that I have destroyed my grounds for the entire endeavor, and that I must conclude a) that Comment c'est has nothing to do with the simple expression of the artwork as its ontology, that Beckett's "comment c'est" is something entirely different; or b) that Comment c'est is a meta-text and hence also can't be used to explain Adorno's concept-word "Comment c'est" at all; or c) that the very struggle in Comment c'est to be a "Comment c'est" is still somehow part of the "Comment c'est." But this objection surely arises from over-conceptualization.

University of Chicago

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

. Ästhetische Theorie. Frankfurt am Maini Suhrkamp, 1970. . "Negative Dialectics and the Possibility of Philosophy," "Trying to Understand Endgame."

Adorno Reader. Ed. Brian O'Connor. Maiden: Blackwell, 2000. 54-78. . "Titles." Notes to Literature. Vol. 2. Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. New York: Columbia UP,

1992. 3-12.




Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Edward Pusey. New York: Modern Library, 1949. Beckett, Samuel. Comment c'est. Paris: Minuit, 1961. . How It Is. London: John Calder, 1996. Chritchley, Simon. Very Little . . . Almost Nothing. New York: Routledge, 2004. Dante. Inferno. Trans. Robert Hollander and Jean Hollander. New York: Anchor, 2002. Knowlson, James. Damned to Fame. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Nicholson, Shierry Weber. Exact Imagination, Late Work: On Adorno's Aesthetics. Cambridge: MIT

Press, 1997. Nicholson, Shierry Weber. "Toward a More Adequate Reception of Adorno's Aesthetic Theory': Con-

figurational Form in Adorno's Aesthetic Writings." Cultural Critique 18 (Spring, 1991): 33-64.

Ruby, Cohn. "Comment C'est, de quoi rire." The French Review 35.6 (1962):. 563-69. Shapiro, Henry. "Review." The Philosophical Review 95.2 (1986): 288-89.



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Adorno's "Comment C'est"

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