‘Pull out another chair’, I say to W., ‘not for Elijah, but for idiocy’. But idiocy does not come to sit down; he’s already here. Between us. Idiocy is between us.
Plymouth Gin is the path; it opens the way. Plymouth Gin, the table, W.’s front room: now it opens: the route to idiocy. Now will we run up against what everyone is capable but us. Claustrophobia of idiocy, the sense of being pressed up against it. There is no escape. We are idiots, we are becoming idiots.
Plymouth Gin opens the way. Gin over ice, no tonic, no mixer. Gin: absolute alcohol. Alcohol that has burned everything away but itself. What burns? Alcohol burns; it has become a star. Alcohol, igniting itself, is sheer ardency. Drink, and speak of what you have not done. Speak of your failure; share it. Share your failure, and your sense of being outside. You are both apes, imitators. You are idiots, and your idiocy is growing pure, as pure as alcohol.
Burnt engine oil: that’s what opened the way to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But now it is Plymouth Gin, and it opens nothing but our own idiocy. Let it complete itself, that idiocy. Let us experience its completeness, its fatality. From the first, our idiocy. From the beginning, and before the beginning.
How could it be otherwise? Idiocy set itself back in us. It was our fate, our fatedness. It set itself back, it fell into our past, and into the past before the past: the a priori. Idiocy was our a priori, our condition, our uncondition. It is what sets us apart, and apart from ourselves.
How could it be otherwise? But it was also our gift. A gift from idiocy to itself, and by way of our idiocy. Two idiots, drinking. Two idiots, invited by idiocy to drink in a room with red walls, a table between us, and ice, and two glasses, and a bottle of gin, of Plymouth Gin.
Blanchot recalls that passage in Bataille where he speaks of reading and drinking with X. We know who is, says Blanchot, but that does not matter: X. stands for friendship as much as the friend. And to drink with X.? To read? A kind of community happens, says Blanchot. Drinking, reading, are its condition.
Plymouth Gin opens the way. Drunkenness is the path, and this is what distinguishes us from Socrates, who knew he knew nothing. For we do not even know that (and isn’t it the same for Bataille’s’ Socratic College’?). We speak of our failure. ‘When did you know that you’d failed?’
We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y.? and Z.? Ah, that conversation I had with Z.! And with Y., that summer’s day? And X., when we had him to ourselves for a whole evening? And more distantly, we speak of the thinkers we read. ‘How is it possible for a human being to write like that …’
Later, we will go up to W.’s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. ‘How is it possible …?’ Above all, it’s not possible for us; that first of all.
It is enough that Rosenzweig and Spinoza existed. Enough that they were alive once and wrote these books. The books are like facts, great looming facts, like mountains, like the flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it is for us, and especially for us. And the curse of that impossibility, its very impossibility.
So does idiocy presses us up against itself. Idiocy calls, and by way of the Plymouth Gin, the red walls of W’s room, and the open copies of Rosenzweig and Spinoza. We are idiots. Do we know we are idiots? Not even that. We are not even Socrates, who knows he knows nothing. It takes gin to get us to that point – gin, and the open books in W.’s study. And by that time it’s already too late. Know? What do either of us know?
Between us: what does it mean to share idiocy, to wander out in the mountains and the flashing stars, where books loom and thinkers are gods? To share it: now I wonder whether it can only be shared. For who can attain idiocy, pure idiocy on their own?
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