Not-yet-thinking: a thought not formed, a thinking which is not determining or identifying. It is not the ‘thing itself’ long sought by philosophy unless this designates what ‘in’ the thing which does not let be claimed or identified as the thing. It is a claim, an appropriation which cannot be appropriated in turn – cannot be grasped, that is, by a determinative thinking. Not-yet-thinking: a thinking which has yet to find its term, yet to allow itself to be enfolded by the concept. But what is it which allows this unfolding to unfold? What enfolds such a thinking so that it unfolds itself and the claim of the concept?
Not-yet-thinking attends to the coming-into-presence of the thing. But it is also that which sets itself back before what can be identified in the thing: it is a kind of residue, a stubbornness which belongs to the singularity of the thing, its unique occurrence. If it is not, here, a question of mediation, it is not one of immediacy either. The suspension of mediation, its incompletion. Think of it in terms of the coming-into-presence of things before they are identified or grasped as things. Of the way what gives gives itself and lays claim to experience.
Not-yet-thinking is non-wilful; it is a thinking that is implicated, unfolded by what there is to think. Unfolded, magnetised, drawn out of the power which is proper to it. Called out of itself, displaced with respect to itself and hence deferred with respect to its goal. Not an abdication of thought, giving up before the unthinkable and standing guard over the ineffable, but thought’s suspension – a detour of a thinking-on-the-way-itself – a non-developed thought or thought as interruption which is taken in by what, in things, turns away from their identification, their determination.
Not-yet-thinking is a name for life lived, for that opening to the world in which everything touches me before I assemble them into identities. Everything: it is a matter of the world, of that contexture of things and persons, of everything that is woven by me into a contexture. Is it this to which the opening passages of Woolf’s The Waves attends? When the child-narrators have not gathered what they experience into a world? When it is only this patch of blazing colour, this tremulous sound, this atom of sensation which awakens them?
"Birds are singing up and down and in and out of all around us," said Susan.
True, Woolf’s infants speak what they cannot speak – they indicate with words what words cannot find. But as they speak they also give voice to a speech which resounds in the pages of that literary writing which is claimed by a reserve that is not yet thought and not yet woven. They speak what literature speaks as it unweaves our world – as it tends towards that living fire which reaches us only in our most distant youth. Only children read, only children write.
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