Thinking

There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.

Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?

The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.

Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.

Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a mutliplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.

Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.

Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.

The impersonality of the thinker. The thinker as no one. Thought has claimed her. Thought keeps him; he lives within the secret. She thinks with every part of her life. And thought reaches us, too, by way of her life, his life. Thought thinks – and not only by of the external ‘show’ of a life.

Every detail; each movement: thought thinks. Thought laughs and thought loves. Thinking is absolutely of the body, it is nothing but the body – but that of no one in particular. And so does the body of no one touch my body. So am I touched – called. So am I enfolded.

But it is only that thought has leapt across to me. Only that thought, like the fire that leaps from tree to tree in a forest fire, has reached me. My life is not consumed, but it burns. It is not burnt up, but burns, every part of it by the same thinking.

Yes, there is thinking – the same thinking, but it differs because it thinks with a different body – mine. Who am I, thinking? No one at all; no one in particular. Or rather, my body is joined to that no one and what I say, what I write is joined to another speech and another writing.

What joy! But then, disappointment, as I cannot give content to what I have thought. I have only been dazed. I was only dazzled. There was thinking; thinking passed across to me, and I, too am on fire. But thought has not resolved itself into determinacy. It blazes, but without determinacy.

Everything is thought – the whole, hen panta. That thought is my blazing, it is my friendship with thought, which reaches me singularly. Friendship – which turns me, for a moment, from my friends. I am alone – but am I alone? There is thought; there is thinking. I am kept; the secret maintains itself. Nothing can be communicated.

But then, by my gestures, by the tone of my voice and my silences, thinking is there, in person. Thinking relates itself to itself, by way of me. Its price: I have become no one. My body, my life has be joined to no one. I am pure figure. Thinking gives itself to itself – but what is left of me, who is sacrificed in this giving?

Thinking communicates. But what does it say? Only itself. Only the saying of itself, the ‘that there is’ of thinking. Only the surprise that thinking has incarnated itself, that it has found a body. This communication is the sign, the trace. But a sign of itself, without signification. A kind of doubling – a division between my body and a body, between my life and a life.

Thought burns; my whole life is burning, but nothing is consumed. Nothing is changed. Friendship, which demands solitude, changes nothing. The world will be restored to you; everything will come back; it is the same world, there is no other. And yet it has changed – yet the same is also what divides itself and does not cease to divide itself between individual lives and a life.

This is thought’s adventure; it is the adventure thought gives itself. But there is no one to give; nothing stands behind thought. It is only that thinking is adventure, and infinite movement. It is only that thinking is the stirring of the infinite in the finite, the fold which can only refold and unfold.

Let it come, then. But it needs assistance. It needs a body, a thinker, one whom it can keep. Hence those thinkers whose memory is precious to me, those who, for a time – a sunny afternoon, a room full of conference attendees, a brief conversation outside, as others smoke – incarnate thought, give to it their life, the whole of their lives.