Anonymous Speech

Aimless curiosity, passing the word along: there is a speech that seems to lift itself from the world, that speaks of nothing in particular, or of everything. Rumour, gossip without foundation barely refers to the world, barely reaches it. What does it matter what is said or who is saying it? Infinite loquacity, the desire to help speech along without detaining it in your own name, to lighten speech by allowing it to say nothing.

Thus the conversationalists of Duras’ The Vice-Consul, or India Song. Who speaks? We are not told. Anyone is speaking, everyone is speaking – anonymous speech, anonymising speech in what is spoken is only the turning of rumour, drifting first this way and then another. In truth each speaker is only the relay of speech, saying everything by saying nothing.

Indifference: voices that rise and fall saying nothing. The decay of speech, but also its rebirth – what is said when nothing in particular is said. To pass the word along; to give rumour the life of speech – entropy, negentropy: how is it that speech lives by dying, that its life is indistinguishable from its death?

Deathless, lifeless, what does it mean to remove the attribution of speech to speakers as Duras does? It is to indicate the indifference of speech, its withdrawal into itself. Itself – but what, then, is speech, when it seems to break itself insouciantly from the world to which it used to refer? Speech lost in its own alleyways. Speech wandering in its own labyrinth.

There is no one here to hear you. But there is no one to speak. No one, anyone – at what point to these words become exchangable? When did they lose their general equivalent? This is what Mallarme fears: crude speech will overcome essential speech, the poetic word will be lost. And it is what worries Heidegger, too: fallen speech, inauthentic speech denies the fact of our mortality that we all share insofar as it would direct each of us to take account of his own singularity, her absolute difference.

But death is already speaking. Death is the forgetting speech bears. Forgetting itself, forgetting everything, it knows itself only in the most unsubstantiated rumours, in the gossip that, in the absence of its object wears away the capacity to refer, until speech lifts itself from the world and streams, glistening in the sun.

Kafka’s Josephine gives voice to anonymity, sings it. But doesn’t she become too greedy for acclaim? Doesn’t she want her voice, whose power is that it is the same as anyone’s to be marked in its difference? Perhaps there is an experience in which our voices are the same. Neutralised – neutered, until they reverberate on the same plain, until all they speak is the wearing away of speech. Who speaks? Anyone, no one. Anyone at all, no one in particular. And who listens?