‘Oh, first I’m going to attend to myself!’ says Foucault to his interviewers, when they ask him about his future projects. Of course, at this point, there’s not much of a future left to him. Perhaps he means to cultivate an ethic of self-cultivation, breaking from a morality that is always tied to civic institutions. Or more simply: to strike out on his own in some bold new way. To go by going, as the blind woman in Lispector’s story says.
What might it mean to give up and walk away from writing having made a whole oevure with stops and starts and swerves and dead ends? To walk away as if writing were at last to leap from the page into life? As if it were possible to live at last what was written, when it would be necessary no more to write, only to live. But then to write is also to know that there is no end to writing. Silence needs words to form around, like moss around cool stones. And white space is a sea of milk that needs the black letters it seems to set afloat.
‘I can’t speak to others, but I very genuinely experience a lack of purposiveness in both my professional life and my intellectual life.’ ‘My theoretical identity is perpetually fluid and without fixed coordinates.’ Banal point, and probably only my fantasy: doesn’t what Sinthome has written (or perhaps I should address him directly: what you have written) at the blog already exhibit a kind of purposiveness, and even a kind of identity (a trajectory: better word)? My fantasy (used in the most ordinary sense of the word): that you will write of the relationship between pre-personal syntheses and what happens when the self comes into language (that is, of Deleuze and Lacan, Simondon and Hegel).
Lars Iyer's Blog 