Errancy

I dislike, in conversation, that demand to have an opinion, to express doubts, reservations, to assess, to weigh up: this invents the vile judge, measure of everything, the bore who finds the world wanting.

Deleuze was right: there is too much communication, too much opinion-making. My favourite thing about this country: polite talk, discussion of the weather, pleasantries: nor conventional formulae, but a lightness in which language is seized by an impersonal movement. No one appropriates it; there are no ‘order words’. No ‘ontological tumescence’ to use Levinas’s expression. I like to agree with others. I like living in a city where you often hear the sentence ‘I am a socialist’. I am a socialist: pleasant phrase, said with simplicity, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Unsurprising to find, when I go out for walks with a group, everyone avoids the one who pronounces on everything – true, I objected when he said ‘all these blacks, taking our jobs …’: what tedium. More than that, though, it was the desire to spread his opinions that bored us all. Someone said: don’t walk with him. So I drop back, walk with other people. Once again a conversation, joyous interchange, give and take of language where nothing is said – there is no specific content – but difference is affirmed by the very fact that each of us talks without taking a position.

Errant conversation, moving nowhere in particular – there are conventional formulae, yes, apparent blandishments – there is repetition but what is repeated is the difference that marks itself by the fact that what is said is said by another. You speak and then I speak. I speak then it’s your turn. But there is a sense of another speaking, that through both of us there is a great impersonal streaming of language. A happiness comparable to a certain writing. What do you discover? Joy of a speech which drifts without responsibility …

Bliss: no longer to make a case, to defend an argument or to contest one, but to allow there to open, like the psychoanalysist’s drifting attention, a movement of language and gesture in which the ‘I’ is no longer the castle which would have to defend itself. A dispersed movement, nomadic, across the plane without cities.