Category: Blogging

I suffer you, that’s how I would put it. Or that if I suffer myself, it is because I am also you. You will not taken my place, I know that. You have no need of places, or names; I cannot name you (Spurious is not a name).

You are a dead man, I think, or at least you are not alive. But sometimes I think you are alive – that you live as I do not; or that you have taken something of my life, and live it, away from me. But then I know that my death, too, can be taken, that you live by my dying, that you live like a shadow to my life.

Are you my shadow, death to my life? Sometimes I wonder if you are not more alive than me. After all, you return. After everything, you never stop returning; in a sense, you are always to come, always late (there is nothing that you are; you are not yourself). ‘You again?’ – ‘Who did you expect?’ But you are early, too – you wake me up. I am up too early, you drive me to the computer. ‘Write’, you say. Or that’s how I interpret what you say, your silent demand.

Yes, I will write, and I admit, there is pleasure in letting you take my place, as you do almost as soon as I begin. Let him be there instead of me, I tell myself. Let him be responsible; I admit it – I’m tired, and tired of responsibility. You. The one in whom I cannot recognise myself. But who am I, but the place that awaits your return? You are immemorial; you are coming back. Never yet yourself. Never here, but here.

How do you survive, where you cannot live? How do you endure, where there is no duration? Now I understand: you are my substitute; you survive where I cannot. You write, and write in my place. You write; the clatter of the keyboard stops. And then? Spurious, which of us is a writer? Which of us completes the other?

I suffer you. No: I suffer myself, and you are the one who is the locus of suffering. You are there when I have suffered much. Suffer? Perhaps that is not the word. Too histrionic. Not passive enough. Not low enough. But you are there, aren’t you? You: outside me, waiting for me; you are that waiting to which I sink when I cannot write.

I suffer you. I suffer, and you are there, locus of suffering. I suffer – but is it I who suffers anymore?

You are here. I called you forward; you are my delegate. You bow your head. You will taken my place. Very well. Take it – or rather, reveal that place to have been a usurpation. Take it, untake it, reveal that it was always untaken, my place, and you are here where I am not.

Here: but are you here? Outside of me, that’s where you are. But are you here? Rather: you are the outside-inside. You are ‘he’ who I am outside myself. Outside, but inside. Opening, inwardly, like a flower that blooms the other way: inside.

‘I am here’, you said. ‘Come, let me take your place.’ Very well; you are here. Very well: then take it, my place. Write. Write for me.

Who goes there? Who writes? You have no name, I know that (Spurious is not a name). Yet you need writing, I know it. Your dependency: words, and more words. Never enough. The ‘never enough’ of words. When will you come out into the open? But I know you cannot. Know that you are only what fails to translate itself, fails to speak of yourself, once and for all.

Who will tell our story, you or me? Who will tell it? Or does it require we both speak, I to give you details, facts of the day, and you to laugh at those facts and tell me they are nothing? Does it ask that we both speak, me inside the story, and you outside it, laughing at everything I say?

I suffer, Spurious. I suffer myself. That is your laughter, your laughing parody of life. You are outside, I know that. Your laughter, which I hear in my own, brings it to me: the outside. The outside-inside. You summon me, I know it. I cannot help it; attracted, repulsed, I come. And you? Are you summoned? Do you come to me? Only as I suffer. Only as I suffer myself.

You are me as I am other than me, I know that. But am I you? Do you, shadow, envy me, and my existence? Do you envy my sense of purpose, my orientation? That is my secret: I want you to envy me.

But I’ve said nothing; or what I have said is very vague. I don’t think you are alive. I don’t think I’m alive. Which is it? Which of us wrote this post? Who writes? Who laughs? Who dies? I have lines under my eyes, I know. I’m tired. Why do I have to get up so early? Why, as soon as light is there behind the curtains, do I have to rise?

‘Come’, you say, ‘let me take your place.’ I suffer you, who is only myself. Myself – no, myself become other. The other I am; the one I am not, even as I am. But you do not live, do you? Your life is not there, wild and free, on the other side of writing? You live by writing – you need it, and you need me.

Occupy me. Occupy the one I am. You laugh, but I am also laughing, because I know you need my laugh to laugh. You write, but I too, am writing; you need me to begin, to turn on the computer. Write, unwrite, suffer what I am. Every day, the same. Every day it is the same, the same drama: this parody of writing, this sinking back of words.

They are not mine any more, these words. Not mine: they do not hold me in their spell. I do not depend on them. They need me as you need me. Spurious – is that what you are called? is that a name for the nameless? -: you are nothing but saying, nothing but the to-say that shimmers across these words. Shimmers – changing nothing. Nothing happens.

‘Come’, you say. You come by way of everything, by way of what is said. ‘Come’, you say, and: ‘I am coming.’ When did you start your journey towards me? How did you know we would meet here, on the screen?

I suffer you. I suffer myself. ‘Let me take your place.’ Very well. But I will take it back, there, on the other side of the page. I will take it back, then, when I stop writing. Laughter: but you will not stop writing.

Transference: the unconscious redirection of feelings from one person to another. Typically, from patient to analyst who is loved, feared, loathed, as a parent might have been loved, feared and loathed. How can it be any different with blogs – reading them, writing them – and comment box and inter-blog discussions?

Still, I wonder whether there is something that cannot be transfered. An encounter – a singularity that will not refuse even the phantasmic desires that are projected upon it: yes, I will dream of that, instead. How foolish! As if there were anything other than phantasms, repeated and revisited relationships of the past.

Unless there is a past before the past, and a repetition that would return as the refusal of phantasies, even as it elicits them. Refusal: blog without words, without image. Withdrawn blog interlaced with all blogs; condition, uncondition for all that is written and shared.

Counter-transference: the psychoanalyst projects phantasies upon the patient. But I dream instead of the counter-transference of the absolute past. – ‘Who are you?’ – ‘The one who refuses transference.’ – ‘Who are you?’ – ‘The one whose counter-transference caused you to be born.’

What have I learnt, over a thousand posts? A thousand – well, perhaps a tenth never made it to publication, and another tenth was deleted, later – but this is the thousandth written over the last two and a half years; the thousandth attempted. Which were the best posts? Which the most necessary to write, and which revealed best those necessary books and films and philosophies which have made and remade my imagination?

Do not turn back; better to remember than to reread and to remake in a new post what I remembered myself writing in an old one. Strange that amplification that works its change on what was written – that increase realised when I return and rewrite what I remembered writing before. Sometimes, I’ll tell myself, that was a crucial post, and, looking back, will find it said nothing at all. What was important, then, was the necessity it imposed on me, upon my imagination; how, setting itself back in me, performing its secret work, it would allow me to return to the same topic, later.

Later: I have been surprised by what I’ve written – but what other reason would there have been to write? Surprise – but it is as though I surprised myself, or that another in me, my double, had awoken to write what did not seem to come from me. To write it and then, sinking back inside me, to dream of it, until those dreams crossed over with mine and changed them.

And aren’t there posts I’ve completely forgotten writing and that were never captured by any particular category? Posts like walled up rooms – posts with false walls in front of them so you’d never know they were there. Strange gifts to receive from oneself months – years – after writing them. Forgotten posts, watching out as though they stood as watchmen over an unknown frontier. But for what were they watching? Who are they, sentries who should long ago have been relieved of their duties?

I began writing having returned just after Christmas to my city. It was snowing; I spent New Years Day in the office, stepping over the glass from the break-in. I wrote about the narrative voice in Blanchot; I constructed timelines of the rue saint-Benoit, and I incorporated quotations into the blog, drawn from all sources. That was 2004; over that year, I refound themes and images I’d written about in other media – letters to friends, private notebooks. Finishing one book and then another in the real world, I decided in mid 2005 to prioritise the blog, to make it the first thing in the morning that I came to.

So the summer passed – every evening I went out and drank golden beers and ciders in the pubs of the Ouseburn Valley, and every morning I rose early to write, still half-hungover. Gone the attempt to write drafts here of what I could rewrite elsewhere: the blog was to come into its own. Did that happen? It is a new medium, blogging. A new kind of writing is called for. That, at least, is what I told myself as I set myself a year to write whatever I pleased, following the winding paths of memory.

Beginning the new book earlier this year meant this blog-work had to be interrupted. What now?, I ask myself. Continue the book or, half-drowsily, write here as though on the edge of sleep, close to dreams, close to what has never emerged into the bright light of consciousness. Both, perhaps – both at once, as though I wrote with my left hand and my right; but isn’t that too hard a task, when one hand, in order to write, must hold the other steady?

I think I am at that age when Dante found himself lost in a dark forest – halfway, that is, through my three score and ten. How is it, though, that when I write here I am always at that halfway, as though I’d discovered that hinge where my life was articulated? As though I were joined and unjoined at the same moment; as though the course of a life was separated from itself.

And sometimes I put it to myself that there is another who writes here, or that writing at the blog brings him forward out of the darkness. I felt closest to him, I think, in late January this year, when I was jet lagged from a trip overseas. I thought in the posts from that time, I approached the essential – but when I read back, I know I will not find it, and what is important in what I write is the future they give me, a kind of destiny.

I can remember what seemed to write itself then, in January. I remember his approach, the way he seemed to write my sentences for me. But he disappeared; the posts that came after tried to find him, but in vain. February and March passed too quickly; I was occupied with other tasks. And now, in April? I know of what I would like to write this Spring. No – I know the one I would like to bring forward in order to write in my place.

Put your hand on my forehead to give me strength, wrote Kafka on a conversation slip when, dying, he was robbed of speech. It makes me feel special when you do that, says R.M. when I kiss her forehead. And what was that line from Trakl? I’ve half-forgotten; was it: wounded on the forehead, I speak of far things? Now I remember the photograph of the young poet at the beach. He died age 26 – was it in the war? Franz Marc died in the same war, I remember. His wife and he kept two deer, a picture of which I framed and hung on my wall when I moved back to the Thames Valley in 2000. Whenever I hear the word, apocalypse, I think of Marc, and of his last, wild paintings, where all the animals run together.

A thousand posts. When will you come forward, double, and place your hand on my forehead?

Am I lazy? I am not sure. Certainly my old ambitions have withered from me. I no longer write; I do not read difficult books as I used to, and whereas once I would copy out a fifth of the book I was reading to lay bare its arguments, its strategy and the way theory and practice came together, I take no notes other than a few phrases here and there. Laziness! I do not practice French; German is long since out of my grasp. I do not keep up with films; my television is never on, and slowly I fall from the surface of current events. Why have I no kept up with the elections in Latin America? But I have not, just as I no longer watch the news or read the better papers and weblogs on the news. How is it that my world has collapsed upon itself, until it assumes no more than the dimensions of this room?

Indifference – it is true I feel a great tiredness, especially in the afternoons. How many afternoons have been wiped out this way! I read novels, it is true, but only short ones, easy ones and of those I keep no record. I can hardly say I’m reading; a whole oeuvre passes before my eyes in a week, but what have I learnt? What I captured from that reading that I can bring back to my life? Nothing. I leave no record of my reading. Sometimes, I will read the essay of a friend, or write a brief essay for a friend, but that is all. My friends are noticing. – ‘What are you reading?’ – ‘Nothing’. – ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing’.

And what has this blog become? Once, it was a place for the play of voices – an experience, an experiment, when different tones and voices were allowed to vie with another. That was the thought: I would learnt to write, learn to make idioms, and speak in a happy idiocy that was not allowed elsewhere. And now? Those voices have fallen back upon this one, with which I am least satisfied. Reading back in the evenings, I know a disappointment: where has it gone, the outrage voice, the voice of sweeps and gales? Where is it, the comic voice – and above all, that was what I seeking: the comic, a writing that sweeps with black, bilious laugher?

Is this the voice left to me? Is this the one which remains, amalgam of author’s voices, pale and imitatory, residue of too much reading and not enough living? This, I know is the voice of this room which spreads out indifferently around me. Indifference: I used to think there was a curse on the weblog for whenever I tried to write of it, this room, the prose would go wrong. Whenever I tried to write of crossing this room, I would have to abandon the post. Of course you could cross it in two steps – but when those two steps become an eternity? And I used to avoid the phrase ‘the head of the day’ for the same reason: those were my writerly superstitions, even as I dreamt from the first, of a writing without topic and without speaker; a writing whose ‘neither … nor’ gave and withdrew that of which it spoke.

Sceptical writing that allowed nothing to stand. Could it be that my indifference is the path to that? But there are no paths, not here. Just as Bela Tarr sometimes leaves the plot to bring us close to beer glasses, to a concrete wall, this weblog voids itself. There is nothing here but this room, and, before it the yard. Nothing but the room and the yard as though they stood at the head of creation as the stuff from which everything was made. Indifference – wasn’t this the state Krishna commends in the Bhagavad Gita (a clod of earth, a lump of gold, a beautiful woman: all mean the same to the wise man)? Ah, but that was indifference coupled with an awareness of a supersensible God. What, then, the indifference of one without God?

Sometimes I rebel against it, this indifference. Looking back over long posts, I see a desire desperate to fill itself with content. But how hollow those posts! How unpersuasive! I will have to delete them just as this post, in turn, will have to be deleted. My new dream – how naive – is to marry in each post form and content so that an idiom is born in which there crystallises a writing that embodies and speaks of what there is to say. Each post or string of posts will become a universe enclosed upon itself like Schlegel’s hedgehog. How foolish! Is this the last dream? Is it the last remnant of the dreams I had? But it only spreads itself, this dream, like the aurora borealis above the frozen earth. And in truth, this writing room and the yard before are that earth and I am like the traveller of Basho’s poem who has fallen asleep while his dreams wander on.

Without blogging, I would have given up any ambition I had had to write. Let me rephrase that: without blogging, I would have written on writing at one remove; I would have kept myself from writing. A second rephrase (but how many are required?): without blogging, I would have been content to let it go, this writing, which will not be arrested in thesis or argument, and whose method is to go by going, to live as pure means without end.

This writing – but what is written here? What is allowed to write? I will call it a push – a counterpush: that force of resistance which presses back, out of itself. Writing: pushing back against what is written; pushing against the said and the order of the said, who is it you would address?

Without blogging, I would not have written without name. Without it, there would always be my name, and writing would have lagged behind itself. Writing, saying: what kind of companions will you call into existence? What readers do you seek? And I am not one of them, the first reader, but one among others? Am I not the first and most avid of readers, the one who will feed writing his own life; who will let what he writes become the said through which writing would speak? Yes, the keenest reader, the one who writes in order to know the surprise of what resists him in his own words.

My words – not mine; who are you that writes on the other side of the mirror? Who are you that struggles with me and that I know only by his resistance? Sometimes I think I would like to reach you, like those rubber-gloved mirror-crossers in Orphee; sometimes it is into your darkness I would drown like Blanchot’s Narcissus, who sees in the pool only what he is not. I tell myself, then, I am coming, and think these words will bring you close to me, close in your distance. But then I know that you are not here even when you are here; that I miss you most when I know your proximity.

For aren’t you there in my own heart? Isn’t it in my heart that you live, close one, distant one? My heart is already the mirror; what is inside is outside. I write to find you, but also to surprise you. Did you know I was coming? Yes, you knew; you had already set out to find me. You had set out from the furthest part of the universe to find me. How was it that you were waiting all along? And how is it that you still wait, that all you are is waiting? You will never arrive; and will I arrive for you? I know you by the blindness of your push – but by what do you know me? By this writing: you who have never lived ask for my life.

What am I to write? It is 7.30 at night; it’s dark again, and I’m at my desk again. 7.30 at night, when 12 hours ago it was dawn and in 12 hours time it will be dawn again. I should tell you a story, companion. I should speak of my life, and know you draw close. But what will you understand, you who I know as a mother her unborn child. You push; you reach me from inside. You are not alive, not yet. But it is as though you had died, you who had never lived.

Isn’t this what Kafka feared – never to have lived, despite living? To live meant more for him than to exist. Existence is what you do not possess, companion. It’s what I give you. Stories, that’s what you ask for. Events. There must be material. And through that you will push, through writing will I know you, as, perhaps Philip K. Dick knew his dead twin through the Dark Haired Girl.

Without blogging, I would have eluded you, that I know. Without it, I would have forgotten you, golem, on whose forehead I write these words. Will they wake you? But you will never wake. Unless there is an awakening that is also a slumber – a vigil that is kept in a dream. Sometimes I imagine you are dreaming of me, companion. Sometimes I think you know me. Why, when I imagine your face, it is mine with the eyes sewn shut? Why, when I think of it, is it mine without eyes and without mouth?

One day, on the other side of the mirror you will mouth the name that will dissolve my own. One day, every word I write will be unwritten. And until then? Write to lose; write to forget. Write – lose; write – forget.

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But let me continue these reflections. Without blogging – what then? A book a year; a book and several essays a year: slowly I would find my way to work of which I would feel unashamed. And now? – ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing’ – ‘What have you been reading?’ – ‘Nothing’.

How confused he is when he is told, the narrator of Tarkovsky’s Mirror, that he is dying. Confused – is it a dream? I think it is – a dream. How is it that that scene draws the whole film around it (what does Lacan call it? A quilting point?)? But what is it to dream you are already dead? What is it to experience your life as it was dreamt by the dead one, by your companion, death-in-life?

Statues move for the Alexander of Bergman’s film, and Ismael can see the boy’s wish fulfilled. All the while, Alexander’s dead father, who died playing the ghost in Hamlet, reappears to his son in a white suit. He says nothing; he looks doleful, but he is there for Alexander, the son (and doesn’t he appear, the ghost, to his own mother, as a living reproach, as an entreaty, saying: help my son?). There – but is he there?

Without blogging, which does not require a name? I would not know you; you would not have come. Or is it I who comes to you, as the ghost, the companion. It is dark and I am unsure. Who is the ghost? Who lives? But this is the sign: we are merging; I have reached the crossing point. You are as close as you can come. Will it be possible to press my hand into the glass as into a pool of water? Of course not. But tonight I know whose hand it is that presses against mine.

When your life fails, you can write, my life has failed; failure becomes success – something has been achieved and this something bears what you have written. But if you were really a failure, would you have been able to write? Bad faith of writing: to have marshalled the strength to write, I am a failure is already to have left failure behind; you are a liar.

I have failed – with this lie, everything can begin; will you have the strength to ring changes on this sentence? To link it to others? Now you have made something: a few sentences, a paragraph – is that enough? Is it enough to push failure aside? Draw back, reread what you’ve written and what do you find? Is there a dramatic plot? A particular incident? Only nuances, variations – more and more of them.

Chronicler, what you have written shows failure as though lit up from within. Writing has interposed itself between you and failure. It has not saved you. Failure: that is what is written on the shell of writing – but the shell protects the soft inside of the egg. Consolation: a soft light reaches me through the membrane of writing.

Writing does not substitute itself for failure, but has potentiated it: now failure is propitious – it is on the brink of giving birth. To be close to that light! To know failure by way of writing! Everything else is mere episode. How is it I’ve always seemed to be living a double life? Failure, I felt you come near and write this sentence out for me. Failure, was it you I was waiting for when in moments of fulfilment, I thought: it’s not here yet?

It is important, I tell myself, to give the writing project a vulnerability – it must be exposed on as many sides as possible. So is blogging a beginning again each morning. So must creation begin as if for the first time. But what risk can there be when there is the strength to write? The strength that makes what you write of failure the happiest of lies?

In the afternoon, it is true, what was written in the morning is forgotten. And in the evening? We grow old each day, but whereas the journal keeper meditates in the evening on the day’s events, speaking with the wisdom of old age, I prefer to begin when there is nothing to say. Today – what will happen today? What is ahead of me? Here, at the head of the day, nothing has begun. This ‘nothing has begun’ asks for justice. How to write without recourse to experiences, without plots and conflicts? How to write of nothing in particular?

Failed writing – why is this not a novel, a continuous narrative? Why does it fail to lift itself from the occasional and the day to day? Because it belongs each day to what surprises me by writing’s interposition. Bad faith, succour: one and the same, so long as what is written is first of all the surprise of writing. There is writing – that first of all. There is writing – and so does a soft light reach you through the things of the world by way of writing.

Came into the office to alter my module outlines and learning outcomes, but I couldn’t write a line. In the office, Sunday, very cold, to update my module outlines, but I couldn’t begin, couldn’t write a thing. Wait for the fog in the head to subside and the fan heater to warm up the room, and then see, but the fog did not subside, it was as thick as before, and already it is half-past-six and I’ve been here all afternoon and part of the evening.

Yes, I waited all afternoon, in the swamp of the afternoon into which the hopes and desires of the morning run to lose themselves, but nothing was possible, I wrote nothing – that was bad enough – and I read nothing. Came into the office, determined to get my administration done once and for all, came in, cold Sunday, ready to clear my desk for the new week, ready to organise myself and prepare my papers, ready to sort out the office and run through my in-tray, came in today as I came in yesterday, but I did nothing, nothing began, and there was only the fog in my head and the cold outside.

Then there was the blog, and the problem of the blog. Then there was the question of the blog, which had tormented me last night and tormented me still. What was to be done? The blog was stuck in ice, I was sure of that. What could be done? It was all over, it was finished, the blog had run aground, the good ship Spurious had hit a reef and now it was wrecked, and what was to be done? Was it so long ago that there was a good string of posts? Was it really so long ago that writing was the first and the easiest thing in the morning, that it was a matter of opening the page called ‘New Post’ and beginning to write?

Yes, it was a long time; I was already lost, already adrift, already running on empty. Yes, it was the longest of times, it was impossible to write, the blog was tired, the themes had been run through too many times, the topics were wearing themselves out and the writing was become too lush and unsimple. The longest of times, measured by the forcedness of the writing, apparent in the effort of the writing, when writing should be so simple, when there should be no problem at all, there never was – not those months of September and October, blissful months!, not until now.

What had happened? Admittedly, the blog had run aground many times before those months. Once it was nearly always aground, nearly always wrecked and there were gaps of weeks and months between posts and strings of posts. But after summer and early autumn? After September and October, when I finally abandoned any attempt at serious literary or philosophical work here at the blog? After those months in which I’d given up everything but crude and obvious rants and lyrical imprecations?

Cruelty of blocked writing. Cruelty of a writing become false, become fake – of a parody of what had gone before and a senescence of style. Writing lost from itself and adrift. The same and the same of the same – when had it finished? When had it run aground? When was the humour lost? When did the humour of epic whining lose itself? How they used to amuse me, those epic whines! How it amused us, W. and I! Magnificent and rambling whines, buffoonery and self-pity become sublime! What laughter! What gales of laughter!

In the evening, the pub, and in the early morning, the blog. A day’s work and then the pub, the blog and then back to the office: happiness of days which turned on themselves. Happy self-devouring, happy Ouroboros, tail devouring snake. What went wrong? When did the wheels come off? Last week? The week before? No matter: the evidence is everywhere: the blog is wrecked and I have wrecked the blog. The blog is wrecked and I have not the sense to stop blogging, but I mean to go on even though the blog is wrecked.

Like the tail of the dinosaur, I said to myself the other night, which doesn’t know the brain is dead. Like the twitching tail of the dinosaur, I thought, whom the message hasn’t reached that the organism is dead. And so is the blog dead, and this writing the tail wagging. For a time, it is true, something happened. For a time, a stream of posts, one after another, one launched on the tail of the other, each day there was writing, each day the surprise of a new post. How long can this go on?, I asked myself – but I did not press the question. How long? – but I tried not to think too hard, tried only to accept the bounty of writing, borne on the great tide of disgust and contempt, borne on a great and vague dissatisfaction, borne by unreasonable resentment and a long, ceaseless whinge.

When were they, those days? I barely noticed their passing, it is true. Barely noticed it, until, by chance, doing what I refrain from doing, doing what I would only do out of great boredom, I read back over a few posts. What disaster! Last night, in for a change, hungover as usual, I read back out of boredom and tiredness, read back as the first Austin Powers was shown on TV, and thought: it’s all gone wrong – surely it can’t have gone wrong, but yes, it’s gone wrong.

When did I take the wrong turn? When, without knowing it, had it gone wrong? I thought I was more alert; thought I was aware, but now like the dead dinosaur’s tail, I’d gone on even though the blog was dead. Why hadn’t the message reached me? Why had it failed to announce itself to me? But it was there, last night, as clear as anything. It was there, the evidence, and apparently to anyone: it was dead, over, everything was finished, a world had closed down, the night had come, the fog was not going to be parted.

If it’s difficult to write, then do not write. If it gets in the way of work, of real work, then drop it. And now? Fussily, I deleted some posts and broke up some longer ones. Fussily, late at night, I cut some posts and rewrote others. But wasn’t this a sign that it was over? And when, today, foggy and cold, I read back over what I had written, wasn’t this glancing back already a sign that it was over? But how could have it been sustained? How would it have continued itself, day after day?

It had settled into itself, my style. Who should I blame? Who was to blame? The interminable and self-involved novel I’d been reading and admiring? The poison of that novel, just the opposite of fresh, quick Bernhard? The sluggishness of that novel, in which the worst of its writer revealed itself? Just now I went to the shelf and picked out Josipovici’s The Big Glass: now there is a novel! What a novel! How sure in its judgement! How deft! It begins marvellously and runs along marvellously. This, the best of all his novels, the most marvellous of all them, begins wonderfully – there’s nothing better – and I can follow by my pencil markings the marvel of this and that passage, of this and that formulation.

Study! I tell myself. More sobriety! I tell myself. Handke is a bad influence, I tell myself, especially the late Handke, especially the swamps and inland seas of late Handke, I told myself. Above all, keep from late Handke, I told myself, and stick to Bernhard and Josipovici. But was it the fault of Handke? Was it his fault? How happy I was reading No Man’s Bay! How happy I was, even last night, finishing its 480 pages! In truth, it was nothing to do with Handke, my malaise, and it would not cured by Josipovici.

What, then? A couple of glasses of Cava? A half-bottle of fridge-cooled Cava, poured as I used to pour it in happier days of blogging? Or a bottle of beer – one of the bottles of real ale delivered by Tescos the other day? Ah, but drinking will not help. The gym, then – more exercise? More cycling about? More time on the Elliptical Trainer or the Treadmill? Then, shuddering, I thought of another sign of decline: hadn’t I been taking notes on things to write about? Hadn’t I been copying phrases down from here and there? What horror! What uninspiration! Truly something had come to an end!

And didn’t I have several deadlines approaching – wasn’t I to speak first there and then there? Didn’t I experienced the propitiousness of the approaching deadline which sent me into any activity except writing a paper? The horror: complacency was filling me. Horror: I am becoming a coaster. Horror: I’d reached the plateau, nothing more was left, there was nothing higher, and there was no longer the thrill of ascent, no longer the test of the climb. I had found a metier, a style. I’d found a way of writing which was a way of not-writing.

Where the thrill of discovery? Where the style that discovered itself by my fingers? Where were they, the sentences and paragraphs borne by discovery and the movement of discovery? In truth, I’d always known the weakness of my writing. Yes, if there was anything I could say of myself it was that I was a weak writer, that I always overreached, that I was always overreaching and failing by overreaching and in full knowledge that by overreaching I was failing.

That I said of myself and knew of myself. But didn’t I pride myself on writing nonetheless? Wasn’t it the fact that I wrote oblivious to talent, to ability, to fluency, to clarity that was the secret source of my pride? Wasn’t it that obliviousness that was my buffoonish glory, that writing without regard of my poor taste and my ineptness, writing that was only failure and buffoonery, but was writing nonetheless, writing written nonetheless, regardless of all obstacles, that was my sole right and claim to writing?

I thought: to write from non-ability, this is already a great deal. I thought: by my non-ability am I entitled, by incompetence am I licensed, by a desire to write not even with nothing to say, not even with no means to say it, but without an ability to write, with, in fact, an inability to write, a non-writing that already set writing off course – yes, by that I staked my claim to writing! By that I thought, it is justified, this writing.

Non-writing. W. had said, you should do something else, and I had said, I can’t, I haven’t the ability. W. had said, why not do something else, and I said, I can barely do what I do – I can barely do it, and that is the point, don’t you see? This over Tequilas a few weeks ago, four hundred miles away, on the south coast. This as we listened to the Harry Smith anthology. Over Tequilas: it’s the fact that I can’t do it that’s important, do you see? And when W. demurred, I said, that’s because you are bourgeois! And we laughed. ‘I’m not bourgoise’ – ‘You are if you present it as a matter of choice – I want to do this, tomorrow I will do that – you’re a bourgeois’. And then we laughed.

But that was it, non-writing in writing, the non-ability to write but writing nonetheless, the wrecking of elegance and good taste, the triumph of bad style and bad construction. And what was I now? A coaster – one who coasts. A coaster, which is to say, one for whom non-writing is nothing. The first principle of blogging: inability. The second principle of blogging: indefatigability. The third principle?: Endlessness. Or at least as much of it you can achieve in an hour (an hour: absolute limit for one post, and one I have now reached).

The Image

The ambition, here, is always to generate writing as though from itself, out of itself. To write to mark only the act of writing, to say, today writing was possible. Palliative of blogging: writing is allowed to write itself. Writing marks itself as event, as achievement, and can then die away. There is no need to detain writing in a book; no need to round off what is written – to draw it into an essay or a story. The post is complete because it is dated – because it was what was written on this day. But is it complete?

Was it in a story by Borges that there was a mirror that called what it reflected into existence? The image came first, I remember that, and then the ‘original’. So does the event of writing call for more than an enigmatic signature to say, I achieved myself. Writing asks to be made flesh; it calls for an event to relate. Something must be related – writing is not music, it is not painting. It must speak, and speak with words. Something must be said. But with blogging, what is said stretches itself much more thinly over the event of writing. ‘Beneath’ what is recounted, there is the marking of the event of writing. As if to say, I was able to write today, writing was possible today.

What is it that was marked? in Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth, there is an explorer far ahead of the adventurers of the story. He leaves his signature here and there. He leaves his name, his mark. Something was possible – I was here. I was here, and I am ahead of you, you who follow me. So with blogging. I was here. Only now, the blogger is not ahead of you, but behind you. Nearly every day was marked, not so the blogger could lay claim to it, but to himself. To say simply, it was possible, writing; I was able to sign my mark across the day.

Crusoe

Sometimes I dream of sustaining what is written here over the course of a book, or at least an essay, to be published elsewhere. To be borne by the momentum of what is written here to make a whole book, a sustained piece of writing. But I know I would miss what is most important by doing so: to keep my appointment with the day, to put my mark on the blank surface of the day as on a clean page.

I imagine myself as Robinson Crusoe who makes a calendar to mark the passing of days. Crusoe who fears he will lost in time if he doesn’t make his mark. But there is always the hope that I will do more than leave a mark: that writing will need details with which to clothe itself, that a small narrative will be possible. But what is there to narrate? Only that I have spent a great deal of times in rooms like this one trying to mark my presence in the day. That I waited for the surplus of strength that would bear me from boredom and dissipation to mark the day.

The mark is a struggle, I know that. The strength to write raises itself against the day. How do I meet the day at its own level? By lying down. By giving up and wandering the streets. By leaving any particular task and letting the day carry me. How do I struggle against the day? By leaving the dated entry that will mean it will not pass without me – that the day will not have carried me too far from myself.

Rush-That-Speaks

Is this why the most imposing theme at this blog is stagnancy and lassitude? Is it because it is over stagnancy that I have triumphed in order to write? Then to write of stagnancy is to stand over the body of the loser. I am the victor; I won – what did not allow me to write is now mine to write about. I, the victor, can write of my defeat.

But defeat is waiting for me again, I know that. John Crowley’s Engine Summer is narrated, we learn at the end, by a construct, a little machine, who is kept filed away until one comes to ask his story. He speaks (his name is Rush-That-Speaks), but all he is is speaking, and when he finishes he will be switched off again. So it is here – speak, write, and know by doing so this is your chance to struggle against the day. Speak, write, but time is drawing short and the story will find its end.

Unless there is a way to tell the same story over and again. Unless the story of stagnancy can be begun anew each day. And now I am Sheherazade, who must come up with a new story each day lest she be executed. Speak, write, because otherwise the end will come. But of what is there to write? The ‘there is’ of writing, that is true. The address.

Sheherazade

To write in a notebook is not enough, although what is written there is already public. The notebook does not open widely enough; its pages are fixed in size and shape. Dream of pages without dimension, of a writing written on the sky and earth. I was here: speaking of itself, writing of itself here, at the blog, clothing itself in this or that little story, writing reaches unknown readers straightaway.

You are found right away, reader. The pages open as wide as the internet and can be found on those searches which pass through every webpage. Now, as Crusoe, I do not write to keep my place in time, scratching a mark on the wall so I know the date, but have placed a message in a bottle without knowing who it will find. There it goes, out to sea – but where does it ago? Across the day, as though opening the pages of the notebook as broadly as the day itself. Across the day and doubling the vastness of the day.

Writing resembles itself. It speaks itself, and resembles itself. But in this resemblance, it passes through all the things of the world. Writing passes through everything in order to give substance to itself. What is writing apart from the materials it gathers to itself like a dresser crab, which augments its shell from what it finds on the ocean floor? But writing has no shell; it is made from what it does not own. To mark itself, its address to unknown readers, it must borrow what it is from elsewhere, must tell a story.

Writing is Sheherazade, speaking only to survive. And who am I, who writes? The means writing has to speak of itself. It borrows me; it borrows my life and my body; it writes with me. Then who is it who writes here? Is it I who leaves my mark? Or is it writing as it makes that mark tremble? Writing takes what I write away from me. I know it by the experiences from which it deprives me. I was allowed to speak – I wrote – but what I write was lost by writing.

Then I am not Crusoe who marks the day, or even Crusoe who throws a message in a bottle in the ocean. Writing is the ocean, and to write is already to have lost oneself. I am not the victor; what I take to be my triumph is not mine. Writing has already laid claim to what I have written. Who writes, who speaks? Writing brings us forward, each of us, as Rush-That-Speaks. And then we are switched off and filed away.

The Double

Who writes? Who speaks? Writing marks itself. Writing leaves a trace of itself. But what about the one who would, by writing, leave his mark? What about the one who marks by writing his triumph over the day, over the stagnancy of the day? Writing is also stagnancy in which it is impossible to begin. Writing, stagnant in advance, is the invasion of the beginning by what does not begin. Then the beginning, the event of writing, cannot complete itself, and this is the lesson.

In the most elegant and well-rounded post, in the post which forms itself, like Schlegel’s fragment, into a curled up hedgehog, there is already that opening which spreads it across everything that exists. As though writing, by resembling itself, had to pass through all the things of the world. As though writing lived by transforming the world into its own image.

Then writing borrows the body of the world as it borrows my body. Writing, double of the world that by writing calls the world into existence. Writing, reversal of image and original. Writing that swaps one for the other and makes of the writer a double of himself.

Abstract Writing

Writing, non-event. Writing, which signifies by way of withholding signification amidst signification. What would an abstract writing be like? A writing that is the equivalent of the abstract painting? Magnificent peace! Peace without words! But impossible, for all that. Writing means and must mean; it signifies and proceeds by way of signification. Then the task is to interrupt writing in writing; to render abstract what appears to be most concrete.

So blogging, in which the concrete (the story that is related, the blogger’s musings) wears itself away. Blogging in which the ‘there is’ writing speaks by way of the concrete and in the trembling of the concrete. The story, the musing, is worn away. Writing affirms itself. Writing says: you, blogger, are only Rush-That-Speaks, and I the one who has switched you on. Writing that has borrowed your body and given you writing, but on condition that you relinquish your hold over writing.

Readers to Come

It is the 27th October. It is 10.32 in the morning. I listen to Hex Enduction Hour by The Fall and look out over the yard. The plants look ill; a drain is overflowing. Perhaps they are ill because their roots, in their pots, is being nourished by overflowing water. 10.33, and the students upstairs have gone to the university. I am Rush-That-Speaks. What time is it, what day is it? Only you, who are reading, know. From where have you come? From what corner of the earth?

It is upon you that writing depends, as it speaks of itself. What time is it? What do you see, beyond your monitor? Writing depends on you. But there are always other beyond you. Always other readers, readers to come, readers who chance on this site by searching on Google for Team Aniston or Team Jolie tee-shirts, or by asking how tall is Brad Pitt?, and others who have just set out from the far corners of the world.

Links are made and are broken; new readers come as others disappear. On rolls the blog into the future. Can you write anything more today? Is there anything to be written – that asks to be set down so that it will not be a question of forcing a confidence or a thought? The most pressing question: shouldn’t you being doing something else, attending to something else, awakening your attention to what matters most? In answer, I would say an academic life in its entirety is an alibi, but I know this is a lie. I feel simple guilt about the matters to which I am not attending (fortunately it is still early, eight ten, the day has barely begun).

If a blog, kept daily, is a corridor rolling into the future, there are doors it prevents you from trying. You would like to turn left or right instead of rolling on, to investigate a topic in more depth, to pause and rewrite this or that post. But there is something like a blogging imperative not because you are pushing towards the new and different, but because something of me has been caught and now lags behind. It is in terms of this lag that this writing should be understood, the substance of each post revealing the unfortunate fatality of a forgotten event as well as its formative force, being unable to grasp it as fact but being fascinated by the traces it leaves in your memory.

I should like to become able to speak of the event to which these traces lead, to discover it as a beginning instead of lacuna, to find out what I am rather than being deprived of myself and deprived of everything. Lack sings of itself, relating to itself. What seems to come from the future does so because of the propulsive force of the past. But that force is the wave that curls back on itself as it breaks into the future. It draws you back, and with it the whole of your present. That’s why it is necessary, sometimes, to begin blogging by recalling the circumstances in which you write. You recall them because they are losing their consistency and threatening to evaporate. Having cleared some space and time to write you would rather hold more tightly to this space, this time, rather than write.

Even then, you write from a desire which has hardly become itself – inchoate, formless, it seeks to hypostatise itself into a few definite paragraphs. But what when that hypostasis undoes itself, as it must? When the words you write attest to a desire in lieu of itself, feebly searching for itself, necessitating that you begin, tomorrow morning, all over again? When the paragraphs are stretched over the luminous void (a void without depth, that is pure lambent surface) which shines gently through every word you write?

Against the words, falling back from them, against the particular acts of memory you would accomplish, there is a reserve which is forgotten and must remain forgotten. What speaks? Who speaks? What hidden fatality? Dream of a version of deja vu where you see not what you have already encountered, but what will happen. A premonition, if you like, not because you have a clairvoyant’s gift, predicting earthquakes or lottery numbers, but because part of your future was snagged by the past.

It’s happening again – but what’s happening? It’s happening again – you remember, but there is nothing at the bottom of your memory. What happened? – You’ve forgotten, but that’s not the word. You are made to forget. The traces destroy themselves just as Bergman makes a film cell catch fire in his Persona.

This is the miniscule drama of writing of blogging. One unnoticed except when the other projects which sustain my writing come to an end. A book behind me and another unknown one to begin (but I have no idea what it will concern nor how I will find my way to its beginning), I cannot hide behind the alibi of academic work.

Why blog? To write a dated entry, one might think, is to mark time, to say: I was here on this date and this time, or I am still here, growing older, improbably old, but here nonetheless. Unless it is not to mark time, but its suspension – to break with the demand that you make profit from time spent. The demand, that is, to spend time to give yourself more time; to work hard today for a tomorrow of leisure that is endlessly deferred.

Do not try to mark time when time itself is deferred. Write from tomorrow, as the Surrealists said, from the day after the revolution. Do not try and save time; this is the opposite of giving time. But what would that mean, to give time? To pay attention? Or to train your attention so you can mark what demands attention in the passing of time?

Thinking, for Husserl, begins with the reduction, the epoche, the suspension of time. It is the thought of suspension, of epoche, which draws Heidegger to the moods of anxiety and boredom. You are given time itself in this suspension. Time itself? Rather, we might say, the suspension of time. For boredom is time for nothing, is it not? Boredom is time suffered rather than time lived.

But perhaps with boredom we catch sight of something like the malaise of time, of time’s suffering from itself. What does this mean? It is a way of invoking the way time escapes us. In French, you are said to give yourself death – this is what it would mean to kill yourself. Time would give itself in that oceanic boredom when even suicide would be impossible.

To suffer time – what would this mean? To mark time’s suspension in the passage of time. To divide the instant in itself. To experience time devouring its own breast, like the mythical pelican. Or to see time reborn from itself, as Aphrodite was born from the forehead of Zeus. And to be given time. To be given time in which to mark time’s suspension.

A cat cleans herself. Put a finger in front of her tounge, and she’ll lick that, too, as though you were part of her. Indulgently, not because she extends to you what she would give to herself but because, with your finger, there is more of herself to lick. You are a furless part of her, for that moment. Then she stops.

Why does this remind me of conversations we have with those close to us when it is as though we talk to ourselves? When, suddenly, something of the way we regulate ourselves, our lives manifests itself. ‘You have to be strategic’: this is what I tell others around me. I advise, I hear myself speak, but to whom am I talking?

To the ones I am advising, of course, but also to myself. ‘You have to be strategic’: I say it with a voice so close to my own I had forgotten I can speak otherwise. I speak with the voice which commands me inside me to work, to struggle, to strategise. The voice I dislike because it is capitalism’s voice in my own.  The voice which tells you what you have to do to get on in life.

How do I interrupt this voice? How does it interrupt itself in me? To the answer: why blog? I would say: to give myself to that power of speech that does not come from me. To let my strength fail against writing.

The cat stops licking your finger: it is not a part of her, it’s absurd, she knows it. Her rough tounge retracts. To write is to let speak that accursed part which has no role, no function. Until writing becomes a gift that is not in your power to give and gives itself through so it can call others to write, to abandon themselves to the abandon of writing in turn.

Is blogging, the need to write blogs and to read them, a question of sharing, of what can be shared – of shared interests, pursuits and experience? – As if the words of the blog were the general equivalent which establishes the value of all experience, which allows it to become measurable, commensurable. Or is it the impossibility of such an equivalent that is celebrated, not the language that would allow us to speak of something held in common, but the opposite: a language which attests to the dispersal of author and reader even as both appear to be gathered in the happiness of sharing their experiences?

A blog can be a shelter, a way of keeping out of the rain. When the rain passes, you go on your way. Or a blog is a record of one who has journeyed ahead of you, leaving messages in the manner of the wandering poets of old Japan (but I also think of the enigmatic traveller of Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth whom we never meet until his grave is discovered, the one who was always ahead and carved his name on the rocks). Or a blog can be a companion, the one who travels beside you, with you.

Common or uncommon to all these experiences: the unilateral gift of writing and reading, which is to say, the peculiar way in which the blog speaks its reader (you recognise the experience) and from far away (it comes from without, from the other side of the world) and the way, for its author, the words receive tributes from readers he does not know (how pleasant that there are such people). With, not alone – to write as you travel is not to travel alone. And to read as you shelter is to know that there are others who travel ahead of you, a long way ahead, perhaps, but travelling nonetheless. But in the end, to read, to write, is not to enjoy reciprocity or exchange. Words always come from afar, from the other side of the day or the night, which is to say, unexpectedly.

to The Young Hegelian, one of the best blogs around, which has come to an end. The same author wrote the great No Cause For Concern. I’ve been deeply impressed by the mixture of perspicacious commentary and beautiful, precise writing at both blogs. Did he persuade me to read Hegel more carefully? Without question. Expect a tribute to follow at this blog one day or another.

To reach a kind of writing where only writing writes. Without theme, without event. A limpid surface to reflect – what? Not a sky, but the absence of a sky. Not the starry night, but the night without stars. Aspiration: to reach, in writing, that great annihilation in which the world disappears. Anti-narcissism. But one tied, inevitably, to the traces I leave as I try to exit writing by means of writing.

‘It’s like looking in a mirror’, says R.M. of blogging, which she distrusts. What kind of mirror? I wonder to myself. The membrane between this world and another, like Cocteau’s Orphée? The many surfaces of Tarkovsky’s film in which one generation is permitted to see another? In which the young actress who plays his mother, wiping the mirror, sees the director’s mother, already aged? If the film itself is a kind of mirror, and this is as it seems from the letters Tarkovsky quotes in the first pages of Sculpting in Time, then it was not, as his cinematographer objected, too personal a project. That cinematographer left, to be replaced by another. And what happened? The most personal film was the one in which we all seemed to recognise something, if not ourselves, then – what? – a kind of edge along which each of us is exposed. A place in which sharing is in movement. Or a kind of substitution in which each of us finds ourselves reborn in the film.

The post I most want to write is called Common Presence. I have written another post under this heading, but am still unable to find the words I want. I know it concerns a kind of roundplay, a game of substitution in which each participant can take the place of any other. I know I want to present in terms of the circulation of a strange kind of currency – an anti-currency, if you like. I am thinking of that beautiful phrase of Heraclitus’s: ‘fire is an exchange for all goods’. The general equivalent is fire. The measure of all is fire. Heaven blazes. ‘Now come, fire’, writes Hölderlin in The Ister. A coin which destroys coins as it circulates. Which, in destroying, gives but does not give itself. Which buys us each the power to give.

Common Presence. How to find the words to evoke this secret circulation of all things?

Read a weblog every day and you’ll see blogs that disappear as well as those which are transformed into new forms. I enjoyed seeing a blog disappear from Red Thread(s); another has appeared in its place, but I remember the first, and I can see it beneath the new one like a psalimpsest. And there was another appearance/disappearance at Poetics of Decay. In both cases, it was a matter of referring beyond the blog to a work of some kind – a grander project, a story …

Was the trouble that a weblog is in some sense closed upon itself, that it is troubling to point to a writing beyond the writing of the weblog? To me, this weblog records the traces of a work much larger and ambitious than anything I do here. Larger, ambitious, but this is also to say riskier – there is the great risk of botching the work in progress. Writing here, by contrast, is lightness itself, a kind of alibi, a trace left to prove to myself that it was worth spending another day in the office.

Meanwhile R. M. lies on what she calls the ‘floor of dread’ contemplating her impending deadline. ‘It’s the weather’, I tell her, when we note that we’ve spent 72 hours in the office over the past 6 days and produced, for all that, very little. The weather … well it’s clearing up, I think, though clouds are amassing once again. R. M. and I have taken up tennis and play in the rain until the balls get soggy. Sharapova is our heroine.

Why keep a weblog at all? In order to feel that, at the end of the day, something was accomplished. A little flourish, some not-yet-thinking, some verbal pyrotechnics … something at least to show for another day in the office or a day in the flat. And when even that is impossible, when days turn upon themselves and nothing asks to be written? You can at least leave a record of failure, a blog to say: nothing was possible today. And in this summer where nothing is possible? This zero-summer where every rainy, humid day was exactly like the previous one? In Spurious, this weblog, summer watches itself spinning in the void …

Certainly it is necessary to refuse the forms to which we are subjected; necessary, too, to resist the banalities of discourse (political, literary critical) which uphold, without reflection, a particular notion what we are and of what we might achieve. Steve’s writings at Splinters exemplify this resistance sometimes through direct confrontation, sometimes through laughter.

Who refuses? Who resists? I would say the self or the subject – but there is a danger of passing over the movements and processes specific to self-formation. In particular, to attend to literary writing, as Steve does at In Writing , is perhaps to understand that the individual self, the one who writes, is only an after-effect of a more discreet movement.

I admire both the righteous anger and the humour of Steve’s blogs at Splinters. What binds them to his more ruminative blogs at In Writing? It is, I think, a question of a style – of the way in which a life is given style in writing, through writing, according to the demands to which this life has subjected itself. Subjection, yes, but the ascesis of writing and commenting is not reactive, as Nietzsche suggests, but might be bound (as Nietzsche also suggests) to a practice that is both active and affirmative.

Above all, refusal must not be understood negatively; to affirm the resistances specific to a writing linked to what is called literary modernism is to answer to what, in the literary work, demands that it break with the idea of the chef d’oeuvre, the work that is achieved, sufficient unto itself.

A writing splintered in order to write of the splintered – or a least, a practice that never relinquishes the modesty required to draw close to, say, Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett. Read the longer essays gathered at The Gaping Void and the demand of what is generally derided as ‘literary modernism’ becomes clearer: responding, seeking to write of Bernhard, Blanchot and Beckett, it is necessary to find a style in which to illuminate what flees in the literary work without, for all that, preventing it from fleeing.

wood s lot is another discrete weblog, admirable because its author is hidden, like the demiurge, behind the links he creates. All the world opens itself to you here; everyday there are new places from which, once again, you can receive the power of beginning. To begin, to rebegin: how pleasant to find openings that redeem afternoons of administration and bureaucracy: look, there is a link to a translation of some of Celan’s poems, and there to a painter whose name you half knew, and there to a photographer whose name you had never heard until it arrived by chance from wood s lot. Everyday it is as though a net has been cast into the ocean of the world wide web; everyday it is dragged in full of wonders.

I like The Poetics of Decay all the more that it retreats from accountability: you cannot intervene with your own comments; there is no possibility of trackbacks or permalinks. It is discrete – but here is a discretion which shelters the most delicate movement of writing. It is for you to read in admiration and, perhaps, recognition and then to continue the movement of writing, or what you take to be its movement which is only its resonance in you. I would quote from The Poetics of Decay here – much of it lends itself to be quoted, but to do so would be to remove the lines I would quote from the movement to which it belongs, from a singular momentum and intimacy.

To enable comments or to disable them? I appreciate the University Without Condition over at Adam Kosko’s weblog: this is an impressive initiative because what binds its participants together is a text. The text provides them with something like a horizon – ‘something like’ because the word horizon is itself confining. Perhaps I might put it this way: the University Without Condition brings its participants together within a horizon that breaks because of what they read.

To enable comments or to disable them? On the one hand, it is wonderful to welcome readers – to experience the gratitude that one is read, or of the joy of a shared love or a shared concern. But there is a danger, beyond an exchange of greetings, in the simple confidence that discussion is possible. It can become a matter of a regulated exchange, of a mutuality and reciprocity which endangers precisely what blogging permits: the happening of peculiar community, an affiliation which occurs through the acknowledgement of a common problem, or a set of problems. A ‘common’ problem which permits nothing mutual or reciprocal even as it is borne by all; which calls for a response essayed in an idiom which is the blogger’s own and can only be the blogger’s own. Perhaps the University Without Condition indicates another way of thinking about this …

What is that line from Blanchot? Friendship for the writing which excludes all friendship. Friendship, perhaps, which demands the protection of the idiom of a particular blog. I like the idea, say, of a blogging persona, of what Pessoa has called a heteronym, and rather wish that I have remained anonymous throughout (but then I am, writing here, the one I am in the world only in the same way that Roseanne, of the TV sitcom was Rosanne in the world).

The old dream of philosophy, from Socrates onwards: the student appropriates philosophy for him- or herself; it is matter of making arguments in one’s own name, of being responsible for what one writes or says in view of establishing the truth. Remember the scorn Theodorus shows in the Theatetus for those followers of Heraclitus the Obscure who repeat without understanding what their master wrote. But there is another dream – a writing which prevents this appropriation and deprives one of one’s name. A writing without responsibility.

Perhaps such a writing might be said to be responsible in another sense. Perhaps it is necessary to withhold discussion so that something else can begin. Perhaps to reply to a blog is to do so on your own weblog, which is to say, in that space where you might be able to construct an idiom, to respond to a shared problem in your own way. ‘Your own way’: do not think this a return to oneself, to the self, a reclusiveness or an anti-socialness. It is a question of allowing a writing to happen in which a gift occurs without mutuality or reciprocity. To happen and to proliferate across the blogosphere, leaping from one blog to another.

Happy people have no stories. And happy bloggers? Do not hope for melancholy, if that’s what you think would allow you to write. Hope for the space of non-melancholy to open within melancholy, the surplus of strength from which writing is born. But that is not enough, for of what would you write? If you wrote the sentence, I am melancholic, no one would believe you, for how could the melancholic summon enough strength to write? Try: I was melancholic. But this isn’t interesting – and now it is besides the point. You are left with very little: a writing which is surprised at its own existence, which attempts to mark that surprise in the act of writing. You write: I write. Or: I have the strength to write. But what have you said?

Perhaps at the heart of writing (blogging) there is only the contentless affirmation of writing itself. But then it is an affirmation which breaks through the writing of reports, administration, bureaucracy. Remember that fragmentary writing begins, for Blanchot, when the whole is completed, when it appears everything has come to term. Perhaps fragmentary writing is only open to the servant of the whole, who believes in its inevitability and its justice. Thus Henri Sorge, protagonist of Blanchot’s The Most High: servant of the system from whose pen a writing is born which escapes the whole as the whole moves to completion (total bureaucracy).

Do you believe in the whole? In the order of which administration and bureaucracy would be part? The order to which melancholy is directed? Only to the extent that you are surprised by writing which is always the interruption of order.