Conversation with W., who’s read the preface to my book. ‘You make too many references to yourself.’ – ‘Where?’ – ‘In the preface.’ – ‘Oh you mean the articulation of my thesis.’ – ‘It’s unnecessary. Let someone else do it for you. Levinas didn’t write one for Totality and Infinity.’ I protest: ‘But I spoke to X. and he said: “where is your thesis?”’ – ‘You shouldn’t listen to X. No one should write prefaces for their books. Are you depressed now?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘Good. Well I’ll ring you tomorrow and depress you about the first chapter.’
Then to write a preface is to try and supplant the place of the reader, of the act of reading which would decide what it was that had been argued. To write a preface would be ungenerous: it attempts to stand against the proliferation of readings of the book, to safeguard the univocity of a message when that message is more equivocal and more complex than might appear. It is as though the book itself had something like an unconscious – not the unconscious of its author who wrote the book, but a darkness or a reserve in the book itself. As though the book were alive and dreamed and the reading, my encounter with the work, were only the unfolding of a dream latent in the book. Of what does a book dream? Of itself, which is not to say of its pages, of its white pages and black ink, but of that source from which it never ceases to well each time it is encountered by a reader.
Perhaps W. is right about prefaces, though I still remember what X. said, and recall my impatience when I read theoretical books whose argument is too elusive to grasp. ‘How much time do you think I have?’, I find myself asking these books. But this is also an attempt to avoid the act of reading. An act? No, something like a passion. A passion linked to a kind of passivity and a kind of patience which I always fail.
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