Weariness

R.M. and I worked alongside one another all summer; she is spending a week tying her life up elsewhere (finishing her Ph.D.) and will be back soon (but then she will go again, and for much longer this time). Meanwhile, I am alone in the office as it comes to the end of the long summer teaching break. And alone, no longer bringing us splendid lunches to eat, no longer playing tennis after work and arriving back at the flat late (too late, it always seemed to me), my time is unstructured, I lose all grip on my projects, I’m overwhelmed by work …

Why am I entrusted with so much bureaucracy? It is unreal to me, or I am too unreal for bureaucracy…. But there’s task after task, all leading up to the quality audit. I’m hopelessly behind, as always. And there’s the project of the new book and a paper which has to be done by October 1st, and then a review article … everything written up to the wire, always half-realised, semi-botched, full of typos and poor grammar.

And the flat? Bare-walled, awaiting lining paper and wallpaper. Slugs die on the repellent at the back door … the shower needs an element and there are holes where the skirting board should be. Damp rises up from the darkness under the house. Ants find their way across the floors.

I read Bataille in the gym – what a contradiction! and feel, as usual, a nostalgia for a life I’ve never led. Bataille sleeps on Balthus’s floor during the war … Bataille reads aloud from Inner Experience in his lover’s flat. Bataille cycles in the fields during wartime. I attempted a kind of chronology of Bataille’s war five hundred posts ago.

How poor this writing compared to Guilty or On Nietzsche! I am one of those weak vessels who is smashed by the work of a great writer. I am so surprised such work exists I cannot muster my critical faculties. It all seems incredible to me that people still write in our world and regard it as important. I read an interview with Samuel Weber in which he speaks of French philosophers who will not let a day go past without going into the study. I still live from that great period when the translations of Bataille and Blanchot began to appear – Inner Experience, The Space of Literature …

Sometimes what I read and what I write seems to stream very far above me. As though what I read and wrote bore no relationship to my life as it is lived. At those times – and tonight is one of those times – a great power of unbelief seizes me. I reread my own book – painful experience! – I turn idly the pages of Bataille. It is always of Bataille that I think since he is the one who protests he is too weary for philosophy, or that philosophy makes him weary. He hasn’t the strength to develop a system of thought. He plunges, and he plunges as he writes, he plunges in a writing which falls away from him. And when you are only capable, like tonight, of writing of what you cannot write, of failing to let writing fall away, of clinging to writing, writing ‘I’, ‘I’, ‘I’ …

New neighbours: lads, more lads, loud music, a roaring car. Gone the quiet old lady. I’ll have to sleep in the lounge for the noise, with earplugs handy (I went and bought a fresh set today). Weariness of a weariness which will not let relinquish myself and plunge into reading and writing …