Lars Iyer's Blog

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?

… the problem is with my thinking, my writing, my ‘work’.

‘What are you working on?’, asks one artist of another, or one writer, or one academic. My fantasy of blogging: that the answer comes, to that question: ‘nothing, nothing at all.’ Comes from that writing that wears the life of a writer away, speaking for her in her absence, and in the echo-chamber of its lack.

"My thinking, my writing, my ‘work’ …": citation that lets each word speak as though unsure of its own meaning. ‘My thinking, my writing …’: the interval between words stretched to the infinite. And a stretching that pulls those words apart, that lets them speak without reference and without the chance of truth.

Inadequate words, wings that beat in the throat, the steady panic of a speech that is lost in itself. ‘My "work"’: quotation marks around the word work, and around every word.

Who speaks? What writes in your place? Second fantasy: it is in this falling back from achievement and the measure of achievement that your singularity is marked. Who are you? A way in which failure thickens and lives itself.

Ah, it was only then that I met you – only then that I read you. Friend, we share that of which we are each incapable.

Sinthome writes:

Transferentially, what is suggested in suspecting that one’s writing always harbours the seeds of disaster and one’s own destruction? What is the unconscious desire or intention behind such paranoid posts?

A familiar experience: your writing is seized by the current of writing; a frail vessel sets itself out into a broader channel; you write with an enhanced fluency, with the breath of inspiration in your sails. Now writing seems to live by itself: what wonders you discover as you let the movement of writing lay claim to you. Happiness of being able to speak of this, of that; your life is given to you again – a life to be written, yes this is the glorious mirage that burns on the horizon as the river opens itself to the sea.

But what gives itself also withdraws; the measure of inspiration falls back into itself, and who are you, writer in lieu of the fluency of writing? A reader of your own words, and a disappointed one. Wretched disappointment in a writing that seemed to carry itself so urgently: how could what you were gifted to write let itself flow into this salt marsh?

Choked writing, writing that does not move. No dream, now, of the book into which writing might lift itself. What is there left to you but to wait for writing to come again, if only to push your post further down the page. Curse of writing, that seems to give birth to itself through its own inadequacy.

Writing lacks itself – or that that ‘itself’ is already lack and truthlessness. Never will writing break from itself and refer. Never will reach the other shore, granting that adequation from which truth, the redeemer, might shine. Errancy, then; a daily failure. Isn’t this your own disaster, your destruction? The sea drowned in salt?

Unless the dead sea floods back into the veins of your writing. The sea that is a desert. To write of the failure of writing – to catch it out, the ‘itself’ into which writing seems to withdraw. But it is you who are caught thus, who desired to entrap what was lying in wait before you ever began to write. ‘Who desired’ – for desire belongs to that relation to the present that has lost itself in you. Unless, now, there is another desire, that does not catch yours and sweep it along like a current, but shows the vessel of your writing was always broken apart.

Is it a novel you wanted to write? Or, at least, a narrative? Is that what continually fails to let itself begin here, at the blog? Abraham asked to murder Isaac, God’s future on earth, was allowed to sacrifice a ram in his place. Thereafter, says the narrator of Blanchot’s When the Time Comes, Abraham saw Isaac shimmer with the image of that ram, which had been substituted for him.

And isn’t it in that way that, asked to sacrifice what is written here for a greater work, a finished work, I find in that work, which I cannot begin, the vain sacrifice that is each of these posts? No finished work, no completion: only posts that mark the return of what does not begin and cannot conclude.

Then narrate the impossibility of narration – write of what you cannot do. But, that is nothing I can bring about. It is only by chance – and one that might have eluded me – that narrative can mark its own impossibility, bear it, and let it speak. Chance: this, then, is the faith of the blog: let what cannot begin pass this way. Let it prevent itself from finishing, that passage that can never gather itself into an ending.

Would you like to work what is written here into publishable form? To join post to post as fragment to fragment to make a larger whole? Perhaps there is another experience of the fragment that forbids this whole – a desire that asks for a kind of forgetting that would interpose itself between post and post. A margin – white space, and not simply that which would divide blocks of prose on the page.

A margin in time, as though between each post, each entry, there was an interval so vast that everything was lost therein. An interval, a desert greater than the Biblical one, that takes not forty days to cross, nor forty years, but more than the whole of time. Time loses itself there – or is it space? The becoming eternal of space, the becoming infinite of time: eternity, infinity, interposes itself before and after the post.

But doesn’t it, too, pass through the posts themselves? Doesn’t it allow itself to mark itself there, to set beginning adrift into the non-beginning, and the future into what will not come about. It will not end, that which did not begin: desire to write, and to sacrifice the desire to finish anything, or to work what is written here into a finished whole.

The inexhaustible: write from that weariness for which the end is impossible. Bear in it the post that turns aside the post. The date at its bottom is not the date. Or it is what lets it ring out, lost, in eternity.

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.

1. Why am I telling you anything at all? Why?: but what kind of question is this?

Ask it, with Steve, of a novelist.

At the beginning of every novel written in the third person, the question I always ask is : why am I being told this? As soon as the narrator begins to speak, I ask, why are you telling me this? If the questions remains unaddressed, much as I might enjoy the novel – and I enjoy them as much as anyone – ultimately it seems to fail as a novel.

And ask it, with Jodi, of the blogger:

A fundamental problem accompanies reading blogs: we ask, but cannot answer, ‘why are you telling me this?’ As readers, we ask it of the blogger. In so doing, we assume me, viewing the ourselves as the one being told – why are you telling me this? – as if the text or performance were for us, specifically or more generally. We forget that the writing has nothing to do with us.

2. Gratuitousness of writing. No one asked for it. Then why presume to write? Somewhere, Derrida speaks of the presumptuousness of speaking without invitation. And says, he writes when he is asked to publish – or to commemorate an occasion when he is asked to speak. Is this why he allows the markers of such spoken occasions to appear in his texts? Is this why he risks all his writing appearing merely occasional? Then his discretion is impressive. True, he came to publish a great deal, but, he suggests, he did so only when asked.

Secondly, Derrida insists that he alters his idiom according to the topic on which he his writing. The topos his writing, too, inhabits. How to do this without a mechanical repetition? How, without parody, to perform a writing in response. Of course it is this performativity that infuriates many of his readers. Those longwinded introductions – when will he ever begin? Pure self-indulgence, I’ve had enough, he was burnt out years ago.

Late on, Derrida will claim only Lacan tooks performative risks as he did. Not Deleuze and Guattari, then – not Lyotard. Lacan. But remember it is Deleuze, he claims, of his contemporaries, who is closest to him – Deleuze never attacked me, I think he said, Derrida who was so sensitive to being attacked (but this is part of his charm: his vulnerability. He’s human just like us.) But what about Deleuze and Guattari, what about the ever-underestimated Lyotard?

3. Questions that don’t matter to me, not really. Why am I drawn to the previous generation – to Bataille, to Blanchot, to Levinas, to Klossowski? Why do I feel, foolishly enough, that for them – for the first two in particular – writing was more urgent, that it bore more risks? A simple anti-academicism?

Writing, for them, I tell myself, could not have been considered presumptuous. It was a necessity. No questions – no idiomatic risks. First of all writing, and as with the great moderns. Mandelstam and Kafka, Tsvetayeva and Rilke, Pessoa and Joyce: there must be writing, and that first of all. This is my fantasy. Those are the writers who wrote in order to mark the fact that there is writing.

‘Are you really suggesting this is entirely lacking in the coming generations? Do you really think it’s absent in Foucault or Bourdieu, in Nancy or Lacoue-Labarthe, in Cixous or Irigaray?’ – ‘This is my fantasy, I told you. There are some authors for whom writing is necessity. Writing – not communicating by way of writing, but writing.

Then ‘why’ of their text sets itself back into the surprise that there is writing. I remember Angelus Silesius: ‘a rose is without why. It flowers because it flowers.’ Writing writes because it does. And now Heidegger, from the Principle of Reason, part 5 (via Lichtung):

cognition is on the lookout for reasons to render. This happens insofar as cognition asks: why does the cognised exist, and why is it the way it is? In the ‘why?’ we ask for reasons. The strict formulation of the principle of reason: ‘nothing is without rendering reasons’ can be formulated thus: nothing is without a why.

4. No ‘why’ with writing. No writing without presumption. No need to mark the surprise of writing. The question of idiom need not arise, because it is already there, it already speaks. That it is. That there is. Writing.

Gerrude Stein: ‘a rose is a rose is a rose.’ Writing is writing – and that surprises the writer. That there is writing – and writing first of all. Isn’t this what Blanchot understands? Isn’t he pre-eminent as he knows writing demands a writer in order to return to itself? That the writer is like electricity – not a thing, but a way things happen?

But then writing, too, is not a thing. It is also an event, but one that is different from those which have a straightforward relation to agency. It happens. The most ancient figures of inspiration combine passivity with activity: you are set back into the origin – and it is from there you will write.

Write – and as though you life depended on it. As though you lived for nothing else. But more: as though your life had already run out, and isn’t this it, the criteria which divides, in my fantasy, one kind of writing from another? You have to die before you begin to write. Or better: bear dying with writing. Die with writing, and as you write. Begin writing as you begin dying, as it comes to you, bears you. And then writing binds itself, too, to what cannot begin, and what cannot be written. It is marked by what it cannot do.

The impossible: begin from that. The urgency of the ‘cannot’, which pays no regard to talent. Urgency, gratuitousness: even the most refined writer writes crudely. The beginning must be crude. Writing torn from nowhere, from itself, autochthonous: how crude it is, how simple. The fact of writing, and that first of all. Begin from the fact. Wrench what does not begin into a beginning. Or rather, receive from the non-beginning that turning that gives you – merciful surplus – the power to begin.

5. Why are you telling me this? Bataille, writing Inner Experience: because you, my unknown readers, are part of this community, and are there from the first. A virtual community – to be read by unknown eyes – this already breaks the horizon. Why are you telling me this? Because you, too, are borne by dying.

A mortal community, then – but dying, now, seems to leave physical death behind, and not because it has become a metaphor. Dying as passage, as errancy, as a movement away from the world in the world. Oedipus led by Antigone, looking for a place to die. The last man of Blanchot’s story who draws those around him into the uncertain space of their dying. Duras’s Vice-Consul, who is in some way already dead, though he carries on living.

I am dead: impossible sentence, unless it is framed as a fiction. I am writing: impossible phrase. I am reading: likewise impossible, when what is read gives you to dying.

6. Why are you telling me this? Give me an account. Tell me of what bears you. Thinking, once again, of what Steve wrote, I think I want from a fiction only a kind of irruption – a block, a break – a tearing that tears the book from the world, so that when I begin to read, I know I am also at stake in what I read. As though I were participating in a kind of sacrifice.

Perhaps this is why the first lines of a novel are so important: will I find it there, that block, that break, so that I am gathered up into the urgency of telling? As I read, I hope with the hope of the narrative – I live from its life. It carries me and shows that I am carried – that I live two lives at once, or that my life is divided between what is possible for me, and unfolds according to the measure of my ability, and what is impossible, and measures the one that I am.

Measures me, and then sets me back from myself and the world, suspending those relationships that usually hold me in place only as it, the telling, relates itself to itself through me, by sacrificing me. And then I know that it is in my own sacrifice that I have participated, and I am already dead. Or that sacrifice is what continues away from everything, Cratylus’s river into which I cannot step even once. This is also what is told in the novels of which I think: the return of what never began in the fiction, of the non-beginning in the beginning.

Beckett, Stirrings Still:

One night as he sat at his table head in hands he saw himself rise and go.

Here is a tale that knows the gratuitousness of its beginning. That carries it, without rendering account. As though the narrative act had laid itself bear, in its freedom, its surprise. And now the ‘why?’ that would seek to render account is set back into a question that has no answer, and only turns in itself, as it asks reader and writer (and the writer, now, is only the first among readers), whom each of us is to whom writing lays claim.

6. Why are you telling me this? Jodi shows us how blogging leads to new practices of reflection, affinity and self-cultivation. I dream of a reflection in which language sees itself in its own mirror. Who am I?, it asks, and by way of you, reader, writer. Writing itself, lost in itself, but suddenly awake and asking who it is, and by way of what is written.

And I dream of that affinity in which writing, too, is at stake, as though there were a secret between us – but a secret now, that allows us to share that to which we are each vulnerable. Dying measures us. Dying has reached us. It is as if we live two lives, or that life divides itself from itself and from the world. The better, perhaps, to come to itself – not to arrive, but to enter that waiting that detaches itself from waiting, in which life gives up its self-identity and forfeits the possibility from which it seemed to begin.

‘Why’ without answer. ‘Why?’ that erodes its own answer and is set back from itself as question. Then it names a responsiveness, a vulnerability. It names that exposure, for writers, for readers, that lets a kind of light shine through the stretched membrane of the personal. A dark light, the darkness become light. The ‘why?’ turns in itself on the other side of writing. The ‘why’, lost from all reasons, a question that has become a wandering, and turns there.

Automatic speech, free association: to be brought into an experience of language where every word is as though cited. Every word, belonging to you, does not belong to you: language becomes indifferent, writing speaks without enunciator, spreading like a delta until it covers the surface of the world.

Automatism, streaming writing, what would it mean to speak without you being spoken? To speak: and now language is like a stone or the sky; it has attained itself, labyrinth wandering in itself without referring to the world.

No reference – or rather such a play of reference that language refers to any possible world – to all worlds, and even beyond that, to the wearing away of worlds, of possibilities, being indifferent to everything but its babbling.

And now every word sets back behind it like a comet’s tail a murming stream; every word carries with it the reserve it must also cite. Cited words, cited murmuring, where what speaks is also the background of speech, that vast indifference of language lost in its labyrinth.

When you cite me, I hear that background behind my words. Behind them and carrying me away: what does language become without intention, without reference? A stone in my own mouth, a river in my fingers.

To be linked to – touched, by a writer or another blog. Touched – to say, I agree, or I disagree, or with great generosity, here is something worth reading; here is something new, or extraordinary. Touched – or brushed, as by a tangent. To say: I was passing this way, and over there, another is passing.

Company, community – and especially when the link is made in passing, and without fuss. When it is part of a block of writing, and integrated within it. But then integration is never complete. Doesn’t the link touch the linker? Then what reaches out to touch is already touched; the tangent carries with it the whole of the blog of the one who links, like the miraculous swerve of the atomists.

What is touched touches back – no, it had already reached you, it had touched you so that you could touch, it gave you that capacity. Peguy’s wound, he said, preceded him; he affirmed the accident that fell upon him by chance. What would it mean to affirm the alteration that happens when you are touched by the writing of another, and especially when you reach out to touch it in turn? To what kind of friendship does it attest?