A relationship ends, and what interwove your lives no longer interweaves them; what was held together is held apart, and this is the discipline: to keep the decision enforced, to let the past be the past and to put it behind you. I suppose the degree of upset depends upon who instigated the breakup; that is obvious enough – for one, perhaps, there was closure, whereas for the other, an irruption from nowhere.
Sovereign is the one who can decide the state of exception; sovereign, too, is the one who breaks up with the other – who is outside the law of the relationship. (But there are other possible perturbations of sovereignty here: how would you read from this perspective, the relationship of Cordelia and Johannes in Either/Or?)
Best of all, of course, is a mutual breakup: closure for both, and you both knew it was coming. The End, then. Let the past fall away – you are both sovereign, and the state of exception is that open space which precedes the beginning of new relationships.
And now that past is separated from the forward-streaming of your life like an ox-bow lake from a river’s meander. The water does not move, and slowly it will silt up, and more slowly still, will close up, and close up the scar that evidenced its presence. A closed-up past like a closed-up house: who lived there? who shared jokes, and friends, and ways of speaking? Closed up – and from you who lived there, for you cannot discover alone the life that made sense only as it was shared.
Now, for you, a different life, and the chance of a different set of singularities that will be caught in the memory of a relationship. But now wonder about a relationship that never began such that it could end, that teetered on the edge of a beginning into which it never fell, mourning in advance what it never was. No End – because there was no beginning.
How to date the beginning of a relationship? Perhaps only the future anterior that allows what happened to make sense only retrospectively; before then, there was only a kind of speech before speech.
And for you who have only what failed to complete itself? You are not the lovers who rejoice in the fact of their love, and can recount its story: ‘that was when we met’; ‘that was when I caught your eye.’ What, then do you have? Perhaps the dream that one day you can speak of it together, and what did not happen can be called to account. ‘Why didn’t we speak about it before?’: now ‘it’ has a consistency, a substance: it has come together like love’s future anterior. The non-event is at last born as an event.
It happened – not then, but now, and can be called a failure by the measure of loving. ‘It couldn’t have worked out for us’; ‘it could never have begun, not then’. Imagined scene: the two of your talking, at last, about what did not happen. Together, at last, and talking about it, and happy in their speech.
To thicken the past into an event: isn’t this to exert a retrospective control of an event that would have otherwise fallen into obscurity. Time is ours, the past ours, and now we will affirm it so that it may truly pass. Now it can pass, as all time passes, and it will fade away like an ox-bow lake fades into nothing.
But imagine this, instead (the novels of Sarraute): the non-event that remains non-event, that refuses the measure of love, and what is called a relationship. Now it is a relationship without relationship, one whose terms are not symmetrical, and in which neither will ever have been a lover.
Who am I, then? – and who are you? Who were we, then – and who now? I imagine a succession of ‘whos’ sounding out without answer. The ‘who’ that returns as your heart, that speaks there. How to be loyal to what you are quite sure might have happened? For what kind of fidelity does it call, the non-event?
Non-sovereign is the one who cannot decide. Non-sovereign is the anteriority that is never joined to the future.
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