What actually happened to the quotation marks? Gone are the days when middle and index fingers curled at shoulder height around words like “truth” or “fact” were part of the idiom of humanities seminars. Gone are the days when Joey caused a big laugh on the TV series “Friends” because he didn’t understand the meaning of the gesture. As one of the last to tweet erratic quotation marks, Donald Trump made a name for himself. Their expressive use today has an almost frivolous aftertaste. Nothing demonstrates their loss of meaning more clearly than the fact that their use no longer seems to make a difference in the case of such aggressive signifiers as the N-word.
One need not go as far as Peter Sloterdijk, who recently lamented the “abolition of the quotation marks”, but their boom seems irrevocably over. A good moment to look back on her eventful career and to ask what her rise and fall reveal about the zeitgeist.
The Cerisy-la-Salle Conference
A key scene in the history of the quotation marks is the great Nietzsche conference that took place in the summer of 1972 at Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy. At that time, the cream of young French philosophers from Gilles Deleuze to Jean-François Lyotard gathered to discuss Nietzsche’s new topicality. It is amazing how many buzzwords of poststructuralism – “nomad thinking”, “absolute decoding”, “intensity” – go back to the conference. While Nietzsche was still considered a pioneer of fascism in Germany, in France he was discovered as the cue for a new philosophy of difference. Particular attention was paid to his quotation marks during this shift.
The philosopher Eric Blondel spoke about Nietzsche’s habit of using idiosyncratic quotation marks to distance himself from the terms of the philosophical tradition. Jacques Derrida’s lecture “Sporen” will be remembered, with which he must have challenged his listeners enormously: a meandering commentary consisting of sheer digressions on a single Nietzsche sentence casually scribbled in a notebook: “I forgot my umbrella”. Derrida’s reading consists, among other things, of an attempt to surpass Martin Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche with Heidegger; from the assertion that in the texts of the notorious misogynist Nietzsche, Western “phallogocentrism” – ideas such as truth, essence, identity – are undermined; and last but not least from a resounding slap in the face for the two Italian Nietzsche editors Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, from whose new edition published by Gallimard the sentence with the forgotten umbrella was taken.
With their edition, Colli and Montinari aimed to reconstruct the “real” Nietzsche. In order to correct the omissions and falsifications of the older editions, they had re-deciphered his entire estate, including the sentence about the forgotten umbrella, which Montinari had transcribed and adopted as he had found it in Nietzsche – namely in quotation marks .