The Rift

From what do you write? From where? What calls for writing? A kind of excess, perhaps – but this is vague. A kind of gift, a giving – but this, still, is vague, and still too passive. A rending, then – a kind of fissure or tear.

Heidegger called it a rift, that division in the work of art – that struggle between what discloses itself as a world and what withdraws from that disclosure, presenting itself even as it withdraws as what he called earth. Earth: the materiality of things, the hither side of a world which disappears too quickly into use and familiarity. The rift opens because that disappearance is too quick – because the heaviness of things still comes forward in their brightness or their clamour, because there is a weight in their very texture or because their scent is surprising. There is a struggle at the heart of things, and why not at our hearts, too? Isn’t it there, in the heart, that a writing asks itself to be written which would allow language to resound with the same earth Heidegger evokes?

But it is not a matter, as for Heidegger, of coming-to-dwell, of opening a time-space in which a folk would find itself at home. Nothing is inaugurated in the struggle in the heart. It is, rather, a turning from the dwelling place, an exile analogous, perhaps, to the one which took Abraham to Mount Moriah. But there is nothing to sacrifice – no Isaac in whom Abraham was given the future of the chosen people. Nothing begins; it is a sterile time, what happens is only a repetition, the same, the same which makes you despair of writing anything which would differ from itself.

Yet it is not a trap and it does not defeat you. Is it because this repetition is analogous to that response to the Other which Levinas calls saying? Is it because all writing can do is repeat the empty fact that it is and nothing more? Is it that writing is nothing more than earth as it struggles with world and does not cease struggling?

Writing: contentless affirmation. Writing: repetition of nothing, the return of nothing.