The oldest topic on this blog, which is also what makes writing here possible, even as it seems also to deny that possibility, excluding it from any kind of project, and making it only the repetition of its exposure to the impossibility of beginning: how to mark that writing born from the exhaustion of strength, the ‘merciful surplus’, as Kafka called it? How to mark that turn in exhaustion, where suddenly – and by what miracle? – it becomes propitious, allowing there to begin what seemed to have no chance of beginning.
Exhaustion: the limits of strength. A limitless limit, because exhaustion seems without end, and that is its trial: who are you that cannot collect himself into a task? Who has fallen from anything but a waiting for waiting, that has forgotten the realm where a task might be completed and waiting takes an object? A forgetting of forgetting, too – for you must have exhausted all kinds of nostalgia for action, all memories of power, so that something might begin.
These strange formulations are necessary if the time (the non-time) of exhaustion is to be remembered. The word waiting, like the word forgetting, is suspended between transitivity and intransitivity, each falling back into what deprives them of object. So they can be put into play such that they echo exhaustion and let it speak in the way it, too, seems to strip possibility of itself and then, sometimes, bestow it again, the chance of action.
Then exhaustion is part of the rhythm of the withering and regaining of strength, of the ability to be able. A mysterious rhythm that allows, in with the withering of your powers, power to be regained, and not by an initiative that belongs to you. This is what Kafka calls the ‘merciful surplus’: the capacity of writing to come to itself, and for you to write of the exhaustion that kept you from writing.
But how to remember the time before writing seemed to wrench itself from itself, to give birth to itself and come to itself, all at once? How to mark what could not begin in the writing that begins of itself and seems to carry itself away, having never arrived at what it was? Writing wrenches itself from what cannot begin; it comes to itself – but only as it can now write of anything, just as you might speak of anything, in the lightness of speech.
What an extraordinary capacity! Extraordinary lightness, when the world opens to you as it gives itself to the power of writing, of speech. Of what can I not write? What can I not offer for writing to thicken itself? Writing becomes happy loquacity, the empty chatter despised by the philosopher, just as speech can speak of nothing in particular in rumour and gossip.
Who speaks? But there is only the lightness of a writing that wanders everywhere and illuminates itself according to what it speaks. This can be the happiness of blogging – an errant writing, a writing that circumvents the channels of publication. Or that publishes itself without shame, without embarrassment, writing easily of anything at all. But what, then, of a writing that remembers the violence of its own beginning, that draws with it the time before writing gave itself to the measure of possibility.
What of that time before time, which should not, perhaps, be thought in terms of rhythm, which lets it be joined too quickly to that same measure? What relates writing and the impossibility of writing? It comes down to this, to the question of relation – and to that attempt, in writing, to speak of a relation that seems perpetually in suspense, that withdraws itself insofar as it does not take, as its term, the human being who has the ability to begin.
Without initiative, then. Without possibility. And then as though the measure of possibility was granted at the same stroke as something else withdrew – the strange modality (but is that the word?) of the impossible.
A modality, now, that is without you, the writer, the reader, that wanders in itself and dreams of itself. But isn’t this wandering in advance, this strange avant-garde that has already cast you from yourself, that from which possibility comes, and the chance of beginning? Isn’t it out of the impossible that the measure of possibility is made, folding itself into the linearity of time, into life lived in the first person?
But impersonal life is also streaming, and the river into which you cannot step even once has already altered time in time. Isn’t this what redoubles itself in that writing that would remember the violence of its beginning as it set itself back from the impossibility of such? Isn’t this what remembers itself – obscure memory – as the event tore itself from the primordial non-event?
Strange cosmogony, in which what does not begin encrusts the beginning, in which the power to create is a mutation of non-power. Redoubled, marked: writing remembers the ‘other’ modality, and not simply the death of the writer that preceded writing, as though the non-beginning occurred once and for all. For the non-event, impossibility, doubles and ghosts the event, it writes with your writing, and you, writer, have an obscure double.
Who writes? He and you, together. The one and the other, joined by a relation that suspends itself as it joins (without joining) the possible with the impossible. Without joining – then your double is forever separate from you. Obscure companion on the other side of the mirror. Isn’t he the one Kafka wanted to become, as he dreamt of writing in a night within the night?
Only Blanchot, I think, has sought to confront this companion of writing, and bring him forward. Uncannily, in The One Who Standing Apart From Me, he is made to speak in our language, as though he were more than a simple refusal to speech, the withdrawal of its measure. He speaks, but only, it is true, as he resists the one who interrogates him, the writer whom he accompanies. And his speaking is such that it allows Blanchot’s tale to mark the possibility of writing his tale as it sets itself back into what makes it, at the same time, impossible to tell.
Possible and impossible, where the conjunction must be thought as that suspending relation that joins time with the ‘other’ time, Chronos with Aion. His récits hover in that peculiar juncture, where what is joined also unjoins – where the present is doubled with the ghost of the present, and the future gives itself also as the return of what never began.
Peculiar formulations – pretentious, perhaps, and certainly lacking all elegance, all good sense – but they have to be risked. Risked, though in a language that is also brought to suspension – that redoubles the performance of the récit, and sets it in motion again. Blanchot comments of Paulhan, that everything he wrote was a récit. Certainly one could write the same of Blanchot.
But putting his work aside, even though everything I write is drawn towards it, what does this mean for a practice of writing, blogging, in which everything can be published and everything said (and by anyone, as the author of In The Hall of Mirrors reflects), everything – and also, for that reason – nothing of what marks that irruption that lets writing begins as soon as a post is opened. I suppose others might find it easier to write – or that that ease does not recall the difficulty of writing that must, from the first, for me, be overcome.
A difficulty – an impossibility – that seems to fascinate what I write with the chance of its not happening, and draws me to that mirror in which I see the other who writes with me. Then nothing is advanced here, nothing goes forward. An idiom falls into itself, it thickens, it forms a clot in the veins of sense; it does not flow. No fluency here, if that it means that things might be said – said, and left to stand for themselves.
Nothing stands here. Nothing rises above its own ruin. No accomplishment, nothing is said, nothing began. Only the fall of the beginning into the non-beginning, of telling into its impossibility, as though all I could narrate is that of which I am not capable, and first of all of narrating. Why write? But there is no ‘why’ that does not fall back with this falling. Why tell? But no telling that does not expire within its own impossibility. And why are you telling me this?
Who tells, and to whom? Is there a way in which companion might call out to companion, that what might be shared and by way of writing – of the performance of writing – is the ‘other’ time as it calls forward our doubles? Shared – but only as it turns us from ourselves, as the first person gives way to the third, and, in each, it is a kind of refusal that is made to write and to read, to speak and to listen.
And in this way, too, I wonder whether there might be a kind of affinity, a friendship, that passes by what is common to each of us – common, according to that relation which suspends relationality. A friendship of incapacity, of what opens us in vulnerability, in a responsiveness that is also exposure, the risk of reading, writing, of speaking and listening that we might share.
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