There are those whose presence changes the space around them, whose presence is a kind of command, or that it bears of itself a kind of commandment: to think. And this by way of their gestures, the tone of their voice or the length of their silences, the way they look or do not look at you. By way of them – not as though they were not important, but that they are as traces, as signs of an experience that is at one with thought.
Blanchot remembers Bataille’s long silences when he spoke in public. Long, intense silences. And there was the seriousness of his tone, which others recalled. But he was not solemn – or rather, it was thought that was solemn – it was thinking that commanded of him a kind of solemnity. Bataille was a thinker; he thought, he struggled with thought. No, better: thought struggled with him, thought kept him; this was his seriousness – but a kind of lightness, too, for doesn’t Blanchot remember what he calls the play of thought that was at stake between them?
The play of thought: this does not make thought trivial. It lightens them, the heaviest thoughts, by letting them be spoken and shared. Spoken – or written. Didn’t Blanchot write of Bataille’s friendship for thought? A friendship which, moreover, meant Bataille had to do without friends? Bataille, in the years of Inner Experience and the other books of The Atheological Summa was indeed insolated; he felt abandoned by allies who once joined him in his communal experiments. They turned from him, he felt, even as he began to write a section of Guilty entitled Friendship.
Friendship – could this be the name of a relation to thought, to thinking? The name of a relation – and one, now, that lays claim, in some, to the whole of a life: to the same gestures, voice tones and silences, to a way of taking up space or not taking it up. This laying claim would be the presence of thought in the thinker: the way thought keeps a life, even as the thinker supposes that it is thought that must be kept safe.
Thinking of them again – not as friends, but as those who are friends of thought – what communicates itself to me is not the content of a thought – not this, or that idea, but the ‘that there is’ of thinking, and in another such as him, another such as her. Thought: in person. But there only as a multiplicity of gestures, of tones and silences, as a way of moving or keeping still.
Thought, then as choreography; thinking as what demands all of life – and more than the life of any individual. For isn’t it that ‘more’ that reveals itself in multiplicity? Isn’t it that the thinker lives more than the life of an individual – or rather, such individuality is only a way thought has of folding itself up? The thinker lives a life – any life in particular. The thinker’s life is any life, and all life – or it is the ‘more’ of that ‘all’, and thought is what gives itself differently, each time.
Think. No: be thought, be the keeper of thought. Let thought claim you, and down to the most intimate details of your life. The thinker never stops thinking. The body thinks – the whole body in its movements and its stillnesses. Thought is there – in person. Thought relates itself to itself by passing through the body of the thinker.
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