Covac

I have only read the script of Bergman’s The Touch but it has remained with me for many years. David Covac has to smash everything up; he shatters the happiness of a married couple; the wife leaves her loving but stodgy husband, but then Covac destroys that relationship too. Why? It is as though Covac were a moving storm; what makes him exciting makes him dangerous. If he destroys everything it is not because he wants to, but because the storm wants to destroy everything he wants.

Why am I reminded, thinking of this, of Bataille’s remarks on philosophy – it is too boring, he writes; nothing is at stake for the philosopher, above all, there is never the laughter in which the thinker grasps that he or she is a buffoon with respect to what he or she is trying to think. The Hatred of Poetry – this is the name of the first edition of a book that was later republished as The Impossible. Is it possible to write of a hatred of philosophy? And then to envisage a storm that would carry philosophy away because it would show that this destruction is what, all along, the philosopher sought?