Rereading my last post, I wonder why I am content to write so vaguely and impressionistically about music? In my defence, I might say I don’t have the time – I am too busy to make space enough to listen to the albums of which I write. Too busy – which is to say, I don’t have the leisure: I can’t let myself be drawn into the space they open. But then, writing that, I wonder whether I would ever ‘have time’: isn’t the idea of busyness the attempt to avoid the encounter with the work? Then I know I am deluding myself: to write, here, is to sketch an experience I am frightened to have. Empty time, open time: I don’t want to be drawn into a space that resembles the space of unemployment.
Why write about it, then? Why write? I think of that child of whom Freud writes who, in the wake of his mother’s death, plays the game by which he expels something and then draws it back to himself, thereby controlling the experience of loss, of losing. The ‘busyness’ of Spurious: I write about dispersal, but nothing, here, is dispersed. Blogs are not fragments, if fragmentation would safeguard a ‘minor’ speech – a way of writing that resists the grand synthesising gesture. But how, then, to write in a way that would risk risk, answering to the risk in the work of which I would write?
Rather than answer that question – which cannot, perhaps, be answered (it is a matter of allowing the question to resound, to give it issue rather than answering it once and for all), I would prefer to wonder why commentary would be necessary for the critic. Remembering Freud’s story again, one might think it goes back to a trauma of some kind – a death, a bereavement. But who died?
Remember the story of the child who witnesses a night behind the day in Blanchot’s The Writing of the Disaster. Do not think that it is a ‘confession’ of some sort, as if this would give one insight into the origin of Blanchot’s strange vocation. It is not a question of an original trauma that is then repeated, but rather of a trauma that occurs as repetition – the fact that there was no origin, and there is only the return of an experience without meaning and without determination.
Busyness – the busyness of the employed, of the critic, of the philosopher: is it possible it is a defence against the recurrence of a kind of nothingness, of an experience which cannot be situated with respect to the present moment? In which the past and the future evacuate themselves of any specific content? A defence, yes, but one which manifests itself in the attempt to control the experience in question – to subordinate it to the general busyness of the day, throwing it out and drawing it back in like Freud’s child.
The critic survives where the artist does not. The artist who disappears into madness was unable to return. And the critic, who writes on Nietzsche, on Holderlin, on Nerval? Somewhere, far away, these writers laugh from out of the night into which the critic is too frightened to enter.
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