Typepad is down, so what will you do? You can’t transfer writing into the ‘post introduction’ from anywhere else, bceause the format goes wrong, and words as simple as ‘everyday’ are scrambled. Don’t write, then. But how to find yourself back to the writing compared to which everything else is a mere episode? Is it that I lead a double life everywhere else but here? Or is to write to separate life from itself in another sense? In the world, distance and I are no longer one. But here, where to relate to life is to double life by writing?
Last night, not writing, I rediscovered my flat, tidying and reorganising, finding again the framed paintings I had long since taken down from the wall. I cleaned the kitchen floor, and broke up old furniture to make way for the chest of drawers and wardrobe that are to arrive this morning. I found a flat within my flat, or it became, in these silent days after the departure of the students upstairs, a home. But what about writing?
Husserl calls an epoche that suspension of the world through which the phenomenologist must proceed in order to attend to the things themselves. But what if those things can only be written about, not seen with the theoretical eye of the investigator? I think the world doubled itself when the first human being stepped into it. Being was unjoined from beings; the creation was inverted or parodied as things appeared in place of themselves.
To speak of the world, to write, is to double the world. The capacity to speak already entails that doubling. And the speaker, the writer, is also doubled; we lead double lives. All at once, this is forgotten. Who can bear the shimmering where the world is unjoined from itself? Language, which was once allowed to be sacred, falls into the mundane. Literature is confused with the representation of the world as it is, rather that the undoing of the world, and the holding of the determinate into the indeterminable.
What is theory blogging, when theory still retains the etymological reference to sight, to that measuring of the world which abstracts from the world? Can theory be brought to know its own operation, the blindspot of sight? Blind theory, wandering like Oedipus who was led by his daughter to find a place to die, it is only now you experience the doubling of the world. Only now do you come up against the limits of knowledge, you who embody the new claims of knowledge itself against the ancient wisdom of the gods (Goux).
To write is not to see. Or, there is a writing that is not a seeing. Who are you double, coming close to write out this sentence for me? Who are you, distant one? Who are you, distance of the world, its doubling?
Lars Iyer's Blog 