Play Acting?

‘You’re a dominant personality’, said R.M. after looking at some old photographs of me as a child. She’s suspicious. I tell her of those high court judges who, tired of their roles, pay prostitutes to allow them to play the role of the insulted and the injured. I think to myself of myself: ‘and of course, for those same judges, it is a game, they’re paying, after all’. And then: ‘perhaps the appeal of disappearing and dispersal is also, for you, a game and what you dislike is only the extent of your presence, your heaviness for others as you have some say over their fates. What you dislike is that place you occupy and even as you write of a liberating weariness, of that falling where you tumble beneath your own work and the possibility of working, is still play, still play-acting. Only one in possession of himself would write thus. It is a kind of reversal of those literary toreadors, of Hemingway with his bullfighting or Mailer and his pugilism.’

Still, I wonder. Because what I also experience is a failure to talk, to write as someone in command of a subject-matter, as an expert. Tired, the other night, I read an old commentary by Wellek on Croce and others and thought to myself: Wellek is in command of his materials, Wellek writes, there is no doubt in his voice, Wellek does not fall from himself. And then: I prefer Bataille’s Inner Experience; I prefer Guilty – I trust a broken book whose author breaks himself and his authority. And then: but what if this, too, is enabled precisely by his strength? What if it is his strength which allows him to write of his weakness.

Weakness: a few days without work, lost from work. It is pleasant; I visit friends; I catch up with my administration. But I am slightly hysterical. Just now a conversation with W. ‘You wanted to escape this time last year as well’, W. observes. ‘But it’s crazy …’ – ‘So what are you planning this time?’ – ‘I don’t know’. – ‘Are you hysterical again?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘How does it manifest itself?’ – ‘A complete inability to believe in anything I do.’ I think to myself: it is usually enough to speak, to discourse on this or that thinker, on this or that topic, for the magic to work: to speak on authoritative thinkers is to seize for oneself some of this same authority. As though the activity of speaking believed in my place, and the voice with which I speak – a lecturer’s voice – believed for me.

Once I drew a moustache on a photograph of famous thinker X. (you supply the name). Tired of X.’s ability to talk, to talk on this and then that subject without doubt, without failure, without weariness marking itself in X.’s voice. Zizek and others write magnificently on the need for the strength of belief, for that magnificent sacrifice, that great repetition, the re-taking through which a future, a political future might become possible again. A revolutionary asceticism.

My favourite revolutionary? Yukio Mishima because he will allow doubt to infest his written voice in his novels and essays. As though he shattered his own resolve into characters who spoke each against the other, who prevented the possibility of action. And yet, in Mishima’s text, a great admiration for the one who acts. I will never forget the blow of reading the opening sentence of the second volume of The Sea of Fertility: ‘Honda was forty years old …’ In the first volume, he was twenty, but now – forty! What horror! Honda encounters, in that novel, the young revolutionary who will take his life in ritual seppuku after murdering an old industrialist. It is marvellously dramatised, this moment, in Schrader’s film Mishima.

Mishima admired Bataille. This, too, intrigues me. For all that the drama surrounding Mishima’s own act of seppuku, there is something admirable in his resolve for all that it is carried out in the midst of his own doubts, his own weariness. Of course, Mishima formed a private army with whom he went on training missions. It was madness, it’s laughable, a project of the extreme right. But he overcame his own lassitude, he hardened his body …

The dream of such action only comes to someone infested with weariness. As if, with a last strength, with the merciful surplus of such strength, it were possible to disappear into action. To become a living sun. This is madness, Mishima’s delirium of the extreme right. What interest me, however, is the way that weariness, that fall from work, from the possibility of working, itself becomes a source of hope, of freedom (I am thinking, with the these last two words, of I Cite‘s generous response). As though were we called to fight for a revolution, whatever that means, it would be with the peculiar weapons with which lassitude arms us.