Saying Everything

Liberty: saying everything. This is what Sade would have enjoyed. Joy of being able to say anything at all. Writing opened before him. The chance to write whatever he wanted, however obscene. He took this chance; he wrote and wrote voluminously. But why the desire to fill book after book? Why not rest, stop? Because the movement of writing is infinite. Because the desire to say everything will carry you to the point where you know you haven’t begun, and that every beginning was an imposture, an usurpation with respect to the writing of a writing which withdrew itself in advance. Did Sade know of this frustration? Or did he bury this knowledge in a sheer movement of writing – in the desire to write everything to avoid the terrible awareness that to write is to write nothing?

‘Begin.’ – ‘But I cannot begin.’ – ‘Begin and accomplish a real act in the world.’ – ‘But the beginning eludes me. I begin and the beginning slips away. I write and writing escapes me. Empty eloquence. Empty prolixity.’ – ‘Then give up writing. Turn away.’ – ‘But it is as if, in turning away, it is only then that writing turns and turns towards me. As if, at the point where everything is lost, everything is gained.’ – ‘But what is gained? You have produced nothing. You waste time.’

Job received everything anew after the ordeal. He kept faith – and thus if he had 7,000 sheep before his trial, he had 14,000 after; if he had 500 yoke of oxen beforehand he had 1000 after. Abraham received Isaac anew after he raised the knife to sacrifice him. Think of Kafka: what does he regain when he breaks his engagement, estranging himself from other around him? And Kierkegaard, whom Kafka admired? And Sade? Empty consolation: consolation without consolation: the restlessness of a movement in which nothing is regained and nothing is your reward. Is this the content of one who knows nothing will come to anything, that all is vanity and nothing is new under the sun? The pleasure of one who knows he or she has gone beyond every human work and laughs at them all. I am not sure. Or at least, I am not sure that the one who takes pleasure is the same as the writer who writes. Then there is one inside the writer who laughs at writing. Who is laughter laughing at the imposture of writing and the usurpation that authorship is.

‘Who laughs? Who laughs within these sentences? Whose laughter tears these sentences apart?’- ‘The one you become when you measure writing against other acts in the world. The one who knows it is all for nothing.’ – ‘”For nothing”: but I have written a book.’ – ‘You have written only what permits you the illusion of having done with writing.’ –