Hubris

You are prolific, you write too much; you squander your time and your resources; you are educated, but you do nothing with your education. What is more grotesque than writing about writing, about your own inadequacies with respect to writing at the time of the new atrocity at Fallujah, the theocratic madness in the States?

You’ve turned writing into a petty narcissism. It’s worse than that, for narcissism would presume a self that could be reflected in the mirror of his prose. But there’s no one here. No one who has not turned himself inside out. Who knows he is no more than what is written, impersonal language which streams above the place where he should be. As though Narcissus saw not his reflection but a kind of black hole and tumbled into it.

It is irresponsible. Nothing is being said; no work is being done. This is indulgence, a waste of time, a waste of effort. What does this kind of writing add to the world? What does it make? What does it permit? Worst of all: you have abrogated all responsibility because you will not articulate a position. You write of the Outside, of impersonal affects, of a swarm of forces which escape what is called the Self, but this is a way of avoiding the responsibility of philosophy. You refuse to argue, to present arguments. To use your time in order to focus upon what matters most.

You’ll tell me you never asked for a place at the philosopher’s table, but this is the pathos of pretending to be outside philosophy, one of those rebel thinkers. But you are exactly what Sartre said of Bataille: “an incendiary in carpet slippers.” I know what you’ll say: I cannot find the words, I haven’t the strength to express an opinion, to hypothesise. I’m too weak to to lift myself to the place where a philosophical argument would be possible. But this is a pose; behind your relentless productivity, and your mock-disgust at the same productivity, your great whine about not being educated enough, about lacking taste and culture, I see hubris and retreat.

Everything here is an alibi. You write without responsibility. And I know what you’re going to say. In his letter to Kojève, you”ll tell me, Bataille conceded that everything was finished, history was over, except for the wrap up. One does not have to agree with this to experience what he called unemployed negativity: that residue of restless inaction, of a feverish desire to do something which mocks everything that can be made or achieved. Most often, says Bataille, unemployed negativity becomes art. You’ll remind me that this is an alibi, another lie. And you’ll claim the same could be said of philosophy. But do you think philosophy, with all its riches, its great dignity, its devotion to what matters most would have anything to do with what you call writing?

I can hear you laughing. You laugh and I despise your infinite capacity for evasion, your writerly irresponsibility.  But I will have revenge. You fall towards the Outside, you laugh but it is no one’s laughter. One day it will swallow you up and you’ll struggle to write a few lucid lines.  But you’d like that, wouldn’t you?