(I have often wondered what I have tried to name with the phrase ‘lightened speech’. Strange path of research that lets a phenomenon crystallise around such a name, without knowing yet its significance or what it means, but only that it works as an attractor, that it seems to push itself forward as something that will one day have to be thought as such: doesn’t it work according to the logic of the future anterior as Sinthome discusses it? – ‘It’s clear only now what I meant all along.’ – ‘Is it clear?’)
Lightened speech: ‘but we never said anything’, that’s what you said later. Yes: nothing was said, or rather, nothing was decided. A feature, perhaps, of adolescent romance, which does not yet know in what direction it reaches, or even that it reaches at all. Looking back, I can say: ‘I know what was happening.’ Or: ‘if only we’d spoken of what we felt!’ But a retrospective glance can unify what happened on the basis of what had not yet happened; what did not happen accompanied its happening, and by way of speech.
And that was the point: like Bergson’s sugar melting in the water, its duration was given in its unfolding, or rather, its unfolding could not be detached from it; to know what has happened today is to know nothing; the experience was made of our unknowing, that’s how it was lived and that was its delight. But I suppose there’s always a moment like this before any romantic relationship begins: to not-know, to speak without knowing what is said.
‘It was then I realised …’; ‘suddenly it came to me …’; not love at first sight, then, but love as it gathers itself from disparate, inchoate beginnings. That comes to harden itself into a decision, and then to that kind of contract that is made in a relationship. That remains, yet, part of indeterminate speech. (I always think of Donnie Darko: Donnie walking up the road with the new girl in school …)
There are relationships that never begin, or that teeter on the edge of the beginning, still drawing with them what does not begin, like that drowsiness that can seem to draw waking back into sleep. I’m half-asleep – nothing has quite begun, or the non-beginning is still returning in what seems to begin. This is what is lost once they have made a pact that allows each to rest in the awareness of the other’s regard.
Nothing is certain, even now, but there is at least a beginning place; a relationship has formed. And before the beginning? The relationship is not yet itself, or it is not sure of its terms. The other has not been engaged, not fully – or rather, that engagement has not been redoubled in the commitment that is the beginning of a relationship.
The suspense of not-quite-loving before it is commitment. The engagement, the call, that is only half-avowed. What, then, of a relationship that remains in suspense, or that retains, in its happening, what did not happen and could not happen? I think at once of Duras’s The Malady of Death: is it the male character’s homosexuality that keeps the lovers apart? Is it his masculinity (read Duras on men in Practicalities …)? And then I ask, not really sure what I’m asking, what would fidelity to the non-event might mean? Or a fidelity to what did not reveal itself according to the logic of the future anterior?
‘It did not happen.’ – ‘It keeps not happening.’ Non-happening happens, opening out the instant to what does not pass in time. Bergson’s sugar never melts – or is it that melting never melts, never completes itself?
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