What does the Other want of me? It is in these terms, Sinthome explains, that we might understand the notion of fantasy. What matters is not what I want, but what I think the Other wants of me: my sense of what I am is given by this kind of projective transference.
But of course the Other, too, does not know what she wants – she, too, is without answer. The prospect of discovering her as such is terrifying, since it threatens to overturn the fullness and completeness I seek in her. I am steered close to ‘subjective destitution’ by confronting the fact that, in Lacan’s aphorism, ‘the Other does not exist’. Rather, she does not exist as I understood her to be: a discovery that also holds the prospect of overcoming the fear and anxiety that arose from my projection.
With respect to writing (still following Sinthome’s account), I project that Other wants me to write in a particular way – even as I unconsciously seek to write otherwise. A transgression that depends upon my projection of the desire of the Other. Then the fear and anxiety I feel when I write (if I understand this correctly) is a symptom of a fantastical structure for which I am responsible, albeit unconsciously. The overcoming of transferential projection, then, opens the chance of discovery a pleasure in writing as it accords with my desire – of writing as pleasure, as jouissance.
As pleasure, as jouissance? Or does another kind of projection announce itself in the relation to writing? A projection, now, that reverses its polarity, as though it were writing that desired me – as though, by some strange counter-transference, it fantasised me into existence, I who am now only the eidolon of writing?
A desire on the part of writing, that does not belong to me: how difficult it is to formulate the strangeness of a demand that reaches me as though from a place higher or lower than where I am! Am I only inventing another kind of Other – a God, a father to whom writing would be a sacrificial tribute? Is it not for the Other that I would burn, sacrificing my life by appeasing a higher power?
But then writing is not a term of a relation – it cannot be arrested in a particular figure. The Other does not exist – and nor does writing exist, if it supposed to name that upon which my desires can be projected. What, then, of the counter-transference of writing, of writing’s resistance to the measure of jouissance and the measure of fantasy?
I suppose I am referring to what happens only when writing approaches the condition of writing, when, perhaps after a long time, it courses towards the question of its own possibility and turns there. Isn’t that a question that blogging can reach, but only as it suspends the ‘why?’ and suspends the order of reason?
Not ‘why write?’, then – nor ‘why blog?’, but the fact that there is writing, there is blogging. A fact that is not a question, but the erosion of questioning. And that is not even a fact, a ‘that there is’, but the non-place where writing disappears; the remove of writing as it is given in writing. As it speaks of the experience to which it must return.
Strange formulations. But how to speak of the ever-strange performance of language, in which language is brought to its limits and it is those limits that speak? Not language as tool, as medium, but as language, there where it reaches what it can say only as it withdraws itself from reference. As it speaks – itself, but a self, now, that is in lieu of itself.
Writing does not exist. Writing desires. It suffers – but only as I, the writer, give myself to suffering. Only as I am given, after a long time, after writing a great deal, as kind of relay in writing’s perpetual tautology, its return to itself.
What does it mean to theorise blogging – to think the activity that blogging is? Nothing so long as what is theorised is not also performed – as it is drawn to the limits of language, to what can be said, not in order to gasp of the ineffable, but to fold language back upon itself, to allow it to come forward in its thickness, in a kind of materiality that withholds itself from reference even as it seems to refer.
For Sinthome, Joseph K. is engaged by the fantasy that he will one day discover who accused him, and of what crime. A fantasy he escapes only when he is murdered ‘like a dog’, says The Trial. But I also think of The Castle, in which, perhaps because it is never brought to an ending, or perhaps because of its length, and the incessance of its paragraphs, seems to approach the condition of writing as I have tried to invoke it.
The fantasy of writing. The desire of writing: but now read each genitive both ways. Fantasy of writing, writing of fantasy: at what point does writing give itself to that incessance in which it seems to speak only of itself, of what does not refer? Desire of writing, writing of desire: when it is that the writer is engaged such that his desire is turned inside out like a glove?
There is a kind of writer who can endure subjective destitution. Sinthome writes of his fascination with those who show him no respect – or enacting that fantasy by seeking out conflict. As though (and this is my fantasy) conflict might catch him out, just as it has done, he says, on his blog and in the discussions into which he has entered at the blogs of others.
I’ve often wondered whether this is one path to subjective destitution – to exacerbate conflict, to let yourself be punished. Everything depends upon the experience of failure – of failure’s near completion (Blanchot: ‘an almost infinite nihilism’). You have achieved nothing, you’ve written nothing of worth: endure the limit of your strength as it undoes itself and becomes limitless.
Is this why, reading blogs, I feel closest to those who I fantasise are close to despair? Close, very close – but, nevertheless, Kafka’s ‘merciful surplus’ that lets a writing be born that attunes itself to inachievement. That folds the limitless into the limit. That performs it.
I think to myself that a great space should be cleared so that desolation is allowed its voice, and that the one who speaks becomes sacred in their lament. Subjective destitution is necessary; it is the test of writing, the test of blogging, and reveals its condition.
How to tear your face from itself? I tell myself that it is writing that reaches you, and now as it sacrifices its own term. Just as you, too, will be sacrificed.
Sacred writing. Writing that separates itself and its writer. Solitude before the day begins, when you are not alone with yourself, but with writing. What sun is rising through me? What destitution?
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