And the day when you’ve had enough, when you done enough reading, enough writing? When the day comes and you’ve had enough, when reading is impossible – the words mean nothing – and writing is impossible – the words mean nothing -? It’s over – but what does this mean? It’s all over – what does this mean?
How did it seize me these past twenty years? Why did I spend twenty years in one room or another? And what would it mean to say, it’s over? To read from the book of nature? To disappear into manual work? To emigrate to a new country and a new life? There is nothing on the other side of reading, of writing. Unless this ‘nothing’ could be thought as a push or pressure within reading, within writing. As if it is experienced as a disjunction, as absent meaning, as the withdrawal of the measure of sense.
It’s all over. But wasn’t it over from the first? Wasn’t this ‘it’s all over’ what pressed against you in what you read? Pointlessness of reading, reading’s disinterestedness – was it at that point, exhaustion, that another kind of reading became possible? An exhaustion wherein it was still possible to read, but where what was read emerged as against the background of non-meaning and disjunction.
I’ve read everything, you could have said to yourself. I’ve read it all, and I’ve worn reading out, you might have said. I’ve followed reading everywhere, from book to book, and it’s led nowhere, I am where I began. I’ve followed it, reading, I’ve followed book to book, but what is it I read? It comes from the same and it speaks the same – not what is signified, but what withholds itself from signification.
It is the same with writing. What is writing except what is held against non-meaning? What comes forward as the written except that braced against the absence of sense? Completion: it was over from the first. There was nothing to say, but everything to unsay. Nothing to say, but this ‘nothing’ was not the ineffable.
Bear it in speech, that infinite murmuring. Bear it, that humming along the edge of non-sense. As though it were the trace of the first explosion. As though, like the cosmic radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang, it was the remnant of the origin all around us. What is that reading, that writing that is able to bear absent meaning?
It belongs to the origin, not to the first appearance of signs, but to the appearance of the one to whom signs could mean nothing. Isn’t it by the withdrawal of meaning, the withdrawal of sense that we should know the human being? There they were, the first ones, who knew the pressure of non-sense beyond sense and whose sentience was hollowed our by nothingness?
Non-sense: meaningless suffering, meaningless events: crucible from which everything was born. But first of all non-sense, as though the Big Bang that distributed the marvellous galaxies and star-systems was also the nothingness which burned at the heart of galaxies and stars. The galaxy turns around the black hole; the star collapses into the black hole; all around us, in every direction, and as far as our instruments can chart, there is the first radiation, the darkness without significance and against which significance emerges.
So too the nonsense in our language systems and sign systems; so the breakdown of sense, that cancer that has devoured sense from the start. What’s it all for? What is spoken by language, what signified? Everything, but also the nothing of nonsense. Everything – but then, too, the ‘there is’ which speaks the undoing of everything. The cell does not obey; the signal does not reach it: cancer is the evacuation of the sign, spreading everywhere. It speaks; it undoes speech. It signifies, but as the withdrawal of sense.
What trace does it leave, by reading, by writing? By what does it mark itself and its withdrawal? Evacuated speech, speech of no one: wasn’t this the old claim for music, and for a musicality of language? Rhyme, onomatopoeia: signs of Benjamin’s pure language. Signs of the first language, that was spoken by Adam, humming and singing along with the humming and singing of Eden.
But what music can hold itself out into nonsense? What music can let speak the backdrop of nonsense, the cancer which devours splendorous sound? I think of the contorted music of Shostakovich, of an ‘irony’ that turns on itself and devours itself. What hatred there is in his music! A hatred turned on itself and devouring itself. A cancerous hatred that maintains itself by destroying every classically musical gesture. The motif from Rossini stretched across the 15th Symphony and worn away. And in the 15th String Quartet? And in Smog’s The Doctor Came at Dawn?
Suspended sense – sense held into its suspension: is that what repeats itself as written irony? The irony of reading, the irony of writing – so is the great work of the book suspended, and the culture of the book. Irony: of what does it speak, writing, reading? What does it mean to read when as though at the end, after everything has been said? Exhausted cosmos. Entropy. Cancer that has devoured the stars. What is there to read now? What is there to write?
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