Language Blues

1. With some novelists, it seems their characters substitute for them in some way – and that they may ever be sacrificed to a fate the writer might wish upon himself. I have never written a line of fiction – I dare not – and I wonder if this is because language seems an impassable barrier between what I would write and what it is given to me to write.

I am strongly drawn to programmatic notes, to prefaces and statements of methods in works of philosophy, or, especially, those moment in which a text draws attention to itself, and meditates upon the conditions of its own appearance. What status has a written text of philosophy that would condemn writing? Derrida, of course, has explored this question with great brilliance.

For my part, I ask the question more stupidly, but still as insistently. Or should I say the question returns in me, or that I am sometimes very little other than the place in which it returns? And I admit, too, that I am drawn to those moments when texts that are otherwise theoretical become autobiographical – that refer, in an example, to the room in which they are writing, or to the circumstances of composition.

And better still, when the text is allowed to reflect on its own gratuitousness, on that peculiar bootstrapping that allowed it to be born, lifting from the life of the writer, allowing it to make claims  about what is true, and right, and just: yes, this is very beautiful, when the philosopher falls from her own text to confess that what she has written rides above her. When she asks, and who am I, husk of the work that has given birth to itself through me, and by pushing me aside?

I love to bring a reading of a text as close as possible to psychologism. Isn’t there that it becomes most striking how a text can leap from a life, out of it, transcending it? Isn’t it at that moment the text becomes most blazingly magnificent? As though the philosopher, too, had to sacrifice herself in order to write. That there has to be sacrifice, the dying of a life that, henceforward, is only the husk of the work.

And then I think I hear it again, that rumbling, that murmuring that precedes everything that might be said, and in any of our names. It is language that rises up – medium, vehicle of sense, that speaks itself and against the claim that is made through language. At this moment, I move from a fascination with what passes periously close to psychologism to something else: what is the name of that reading that would press a text back into the thickness of language, to the way in which it congeals even before any message can be delivered?

Nevertheless, of course, despite that thickening, there is still sense; words must mean. But I think language loses itself in every text; I dream of an ‘itself’ of language that wanders in its own labyrinth, that speaks of itself and sings of itself in everything written.

2. But what kind of song is this? Perhaps the one sung, in Blah-Feme‘s post, by anon who comes out of the forest, and that is remarked again and again. A possessing song, a dispossessing one, inhabiting language and turning it aside. Is it outside language, or does it, by contrast, turn language outside, tearing it from anyone who would speak in their name? The first person becomes the third, the ‘I speak’, ‘it speaks’;  language is as though snagged by itself, being drawn repeatedly to that event in which it loses the capacity to make sense.

Before song, before music, only noise without form and without rhythm. Isn’t the musical exactly this? For Kafka, as Blah-Feme says, the moment of writing was about pain, about discomfort. Certainly; but wasn’t it also about the transmutation of suffering – that strange crossover wherein to write of one’s pain and to ring changes upon it brought with it a remarkable shift.

By that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ is the pleasure of writing given; Kafka lies beneath his characters, dying as they die, but enjoying their death and pain. But his unfinished work shows, perhaps, that such enjoyment itself has its limit, there where dying cannot claim them, and where K. wanders without consolation and without death.

Kafka, too cannot die – is that why he broke away from the text and from what is unmasterable about language as it wanders in its own labyrinth, in language ‘itself’ as it no longers refers, no longer makes sense, even as it seems to speak by way of reference and by way of sense. It is here I find the musical – or perhaps only the noisy. Not a song, but a cry.

3. ‘This book ought to have sung’, Nietzsche writes in a preface to The Birth of Tragedy. Sung – and of its own pain, of the pain from which tragedy and music both issue. Then pain must be marked in song, and in the becoming-song of writing; music must sing in the text, with it, even if, for Nietzsche, music precedes what can be said and escapes it.

The sense of this escape, I think, makes him the last thinker of music as music – of music as it is unsubordinated to the fixity of language. But isn’t it curious that Nietzsche, the composer, gave way to the writer who thought language should be made to sing? And who seems to glimpse, in the preface to his earliest book, the chance of a writing of pain, perhaps of a musical language, that would re-enact, in our time, the birth of tragedy?

Are we too early for music as music, or too late? (The right response to these kinds of questions: incredulous laughter – is this how high philosophy has lifted itself? Higher than everything? – Too high; it rides above me, and who am I that has fallen beneath?)

Naively, impatiently, and nagged by the meditations of Deleuze and Klossowski, I have always supposed a barrier exists between ‘us’ and Nietzsche: that there were disclosed in the twentieth century, suffering so base, so basic that it fell below any redeeming performance of pain?

Wasn’t it with mass death that tragedy – the philosophy of tragedy, revived by Schelling, pursued by Hegel and Nietzsche and then completed in Heidegger – came to an end? I think the dream of a Dionysian music also ended there, in murmuring and noise, in a diffuse and general cry.

4. But there are other musics. What would it mean to claim that pain cannot be made to sing, not anymore? Only that the philosophy of tragedy is laughable, and that the idea of a great tradition of art music, that has come to hollow itself out is also laughable. Isn’t it necessary to violently juxtapose say, Heidegger, with, say, Madonna?

Music as a gleeful practice, with no lofty ambition, no link to what posits itself as the great tradition of European music – pop, innocent and new born, the eternal cheeriness of a song that spreads like gossip or rumour through the world. Escapism? Rather a lightness without nostalgia for the discourses of authenticity – to those gloomy callers to order for whom each person is to return to himself.

The lightness of forgetting – not of what happened and continues to happen, the great misery of the world – a kind of optimism of language. Late at night among the bookshelves of an eminent philosopher, it was for a CD of Dionne Warwick we searched to accompany our drinking. But to group the popular under the category of lightness is ridiculous: isn’t this another academic temptation: to take refuge in the forms that seem farthest away from academia?

Is this a call to acknowledge the debt of popular musics to that of slaves and the sons and daughters of slaves? A music that, one might think links itself to the plight of Israel, conjuring for itself a hopeful mythology out of abasement? But this, too, is naive: as if a music hasn’t already deterritorialised itself from what might be discovered by way of political economy. As if the idols of authenticity had not already shattered. Doesn’t Eric Clapton play the blues? Doesn’t the blues become simply a style among others, in the Imaginary Concerthall?

But perhaps there is a way of tracing this and other musics back, up the stream of deterritorialisation. If blues or jazz have taken on aspects of art music – the latter, in particular, entering the academy at the point at which it seemed to become most radical – what would an investigation of country, the Low Other of popular music, reveal?

Reading Richard Middleton’s Voicing the Popular, I read of the Gramscian notion of articulation as developed by Laclau and Mouffe and by Stuart Hall. But who are the people who might be reached thus? Are they the lumpenproletariat, raiding the dressing up box of older historical styles, who repeat history simply as farce, or the proletariat, the universal exception, who would reveal the tragedy of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century and then come to themselves? From tragedy to hope. Songs which sound that tragedy – ‘We’re low, we’re low, we’re very, very low’ – but in which there flashes the coming revolt, the last repetition.

But I always wonder about those who have fallen from the proletariat and from any proletariat – the nameless, the indefinite. The fallen ones. Not even a proletariat; not even a people.

5. I dream of a song that is born out of suffering just as Kafka describes his writing to be begin in that ‘merciful surplus of strength’ that carries him into writing, and transmutes the suffering from which he begins. A singing that allows a particular suffering to pass into the greater suffering that rumbles and murmurs in language. Is it the blues that sings? The blue note of jazz?

Or perhaps pain cannot be made to sing. Or it is the unlimiting of the song, the passage from music to anonymous rumbling. Today I tell myself – foolishly, stupidly – that it is only in falling that you will let sound the language blues. ‘Who am I?’ – ‘Anon.’ – ‘Who am I?’ – ‘The one in whom language lets sing what cannot be sung.’

Writing, Non-Writing

A writer faces eternity or the lack of it every day: is that the quote? Eternity, then would be a passage of writing – to take that, at least from the day. And the lack of it? No writing; nothing done. What misery! But here I remember a passage often quoted at Red Thread(s); it’s from Duras:

There should be a writing of non-writing. Someday it will come. A brief writing, without grammar, a writing of words alone. Words without supporting grammar. Lost. Written, there. And immediately left behind.

Of words alone? As though there were a word for each thing, for everything. And to place words a certain way would be as to paint a still life. Those words – there; perfectly placed, perfectly connected to one another, like Cezanne’s apples.

But then of course there cannot be a word for everything – or rather, what names everything is what denies the indefinite multiplicity of everything, the great sprawl of the singular. To write a still life must be to make a poem that would avoid, in its operation, the idealisation of the world it would lay before us. Can the poem become itself a thing; can it thicken itself into a still life of words, ideal words, it is true, but composed so that they have, in their arrangement, the semblance of singularity?

So would language be reborn; so would it give birth to itself and as though for the first time: words, now, like things, and arranged into a thing; language roves in the world as anything roves; it speaks like a fallen branch or a leafy stump; it speaks like a rockpool or the spreading surf: how did it make the leap out of abstraction?

A writing of non-writing, a language of non-language, that will come, beaching words without grammar. Words, just words – arranged, placed like sea shells on the sand at dusk. Sea shells placed, unplaced by the sea. Lost – and then left behind.

By what divine neglect would such a poem be born! Words lost as the items in a Zen garden – lost, placed, unplaced – by what skill to aspire to a divine neglect – to that indifference that lets a word be lost? It is a god who writes, or the poet is a god. The words placed themselves thus. The words asked to be placed thus; they stranded themselves here; they asked to be lost here.

Or: it was language that asked. Language weary from signifying; language tired of transporting sense. That said: I would like to lie down. I would like to lay down in words that lay down. Eternity – or the lack of it, each day: but doesn’t this still bind the author too strongly to what falls away from the divine? Doesn’t it make writing a matter of will, of the deliberate placing of words?

Only a god can neglect. Only a god can turn away from you as she faces you. I think that’s what the ancients knew in their sacred groves. I think that was what was known when names were invented for the gods of the earth and the sea and the sky. What was named thus – what gave itself to name a god – were words unplaced – lost words, words content to lose themselves, and asked to be lost.

Eternity, the lack of it: there is a writing, a non-writing that dissolves this alternative. Words lost, and left to be found in their loss: eternity and uneternal, ordinary words that seem to call out to the farthest parts of the universe, but for all that they are ordinary.

A writing of non-writing, a non-writing writing: is this what is at issue in a book called In Pieces that I received from the post? The fragment, here, is the gathering of words to be neglected. Often, they are dated as in a diary (the same is true of Red Thread(s)); but doesn’t the date only recall the unlimiting of the day, its blossoming?

A Greater Age

I always thought of you under the sign of neglect. Who watched out for you? Who appreciated you? No one at all; and what could I do from a distance? I was always too far away. Still, I always wonder about distance. Is there a kind of attention which can only reach you from afar – that is necessarily distant?

I was always in the North, and you in the South. But wasn’t that same distance carried in the letters that used to criss-cross the country? Just as our friendship was never really a friendship, and our relationship never a relationship, I imagine the distance rising into a kind of plateau, a way that can only be crossed when you could lift yourself to that height. As, perhaps, we lifted one another.

Distance: we barely saw one another – did that matter? We barely spoke – did it matter? Perhaps there is a kind of speech that can reach you only by way of distance, by a kind of neglect.

I am with you, I am not with you. Or: I am with you, but also far away, living my own life. Or: with you, but something else is happening here, many things are happening, of which you will not know; with you – and despite what happens here, despite what happens from day to day, and isn’t this the testimony to my love? A neglectful love – but is it love? – that would reach you only because of distance, for the reason of distance.

There must be a threshold, a space. No instantaneous communication, no telephone – except very occasionally, and unexpectedly (the rule: keep each other’s numbers). None of the temptations that would allow a kind of camaradarie to our friendship. For isn’t the danger, despite the many joys sharing a day to day life might bring, that that distance would disappear which was always the third term in our friendship?

Distance – and in relation to which each of us could meditate upon the whole of our lives. The whole – wasn’t that at issue each time we wrote? Wasn’t it a question, each time, of meditating upon our lives and before the threshold, before distance? When we met – rarely then, and now almost never – it was always by way of what separated each of us from our daily lives.

It was a rare event, an exception. Did I want to see you sometimes, more than you me? And were you sometimes frustrated by a distance that always kept us apart? But over the years, it was the distance that kept us; we reached each other by way of its strangeness. Letters – emails – in which we would each report musingly on the whole of our lives.

Such relationships as these – where you meet very rarely, and writing only occasionally – amidst some crisis or another, perhaps, or simply because there gathers in you the need for distance, and to write, to speak, by way of that distance – are too rare. How often I think of friends with whom I am no longer in contact! Women, exclusively. Women – and I have no idea what has happened to them, nor how I can get in contact, nor, if I do, whether it will be welcome.

What does it matter now? I suppose I want to learn of the shape of a life, and to speak to others of the shape of mine. To write, to speak, by way of separation. I suppose I have a good memory, or that I spend too much time alone. The past is alive for me; I remember, I like to remember, not to press myself against the details of a vanished world, but to experience it by way of the temporal distance that separates me from it, diffusing event from event, insinuating itself into what happened then, even as it seems to suspend the order of completion.

Nothing will complete itself; we are still walking through the woods in the dark, as we used to do. Still meeting on occasion in the town centre on Sunday afternoon, you speaking of a new boyfriend. Do not keep memories – neglect them. Do not impose continuity on what has gone before, but neglect them, let events be incomplete, let sentences trail off into nothing.

Isn’t this the wonder of Tarkovsky’s Mirror? Neglected memories, events freed from themselves and rising into the air. ‘I can speak now’ says the cured stutterer at the beginning of the film. But isn’t it better to say, ‘I cannot speak’? I cannot speak; speech has neglected itself in me. Speech lies down. Writing lies out beneath the stars. ‘I cannot speak’: what neglects itself in me? What neglects itself as the past, in me?

This is the joy of being alone: never having to recount, for another, the order of the day, of a passage of weeks, of a life. And then letting the day return, and those weeks, and that life as if from afar. Letting them come, by neglecting them, as they neglect you. Freud said we had to kill His-Majesty-The-Baby in each of us: the imperious child who is the centre of the world. Kill him by neglect. A kind murder.

Neglect that lets the world turn away from you, and welcome you in its turning. That allows you to relate to others without seeking attention from them – to be one among many, a walker among walkers, conversation lightening itself of anything in particular. Happy neglect! Life without contour! What do you want? Nothing in particular. What do you require? No more than anyone else.  The tyranny of the question, How are you? The lightness of the answer, Not too bad.

I suppose this is how I understand my relationship to other bloggers, by way of their blogs. How is it I’ve come to know something of the lives of those whom I have barely met, if I’ve met them at all? And isn’t it the more beautiful when a blogger writes under a pseudonym that is rigorously enforced (as mine is not, alas): then anyone at all could have written the blog you read. And couldn’t you speak to anyone as though they were that writer (it could be him, or her – or him – or her -)?

Do I want to know who you are? Or do I prefer the gentle neglect of your anonymity, the way it falls peacefully around me like snow? Foolishly, stupidly, I wonder if the world of blogs isn’t that world Handke is said to open in a book forthcoming in translation next year (via This Space)?

… ‘a greater age’ in which contemplation, love, goodness, beauty and peace are not only construed as utopian possibilities, but can be generated and made viable propositions  by telling stories.

And isn’t that a reason  not to have comments on the blog? To neglect my readers (are there any?), and to ask for neglect in turn, which is to say, start your own blog (if you haven’t started one), or carry your comment to your own blog, and let it bloom there in solitude. A gorgeous, generous solitude that can give of itself only because of this solitude; that will reach me by way of its separation. I am close to you; I am not close to you. I can hear you breathing; I can hear nothing.

Literary Research

An idea can also have a kind of life. An idea – escaping, now, the psychologism or the historicism that would confine it to a peculiarities of a life, or to an historical context – and that even contextualises those contexts in turn: an idea from which you live, and to which you owe duty.

Isn’t this the way to read the biographical data Blanchot allowed to printed on his books? ‘Maurice Blanchot, novelist and critic was born in 1907. His life is entirely devoted to literature and to the silence unique to it.’ Isn’t this the first way in which one should understand his life? But I suppose the idea that contextualises a life must also be contextualised: it is necessary, too, to trace its origins, even if, as it comes to itself, it slips back before it and runs ahead of it: even if, as idea, it begins to live its own life and to impose its own imperatives.

Blanchot himself gives the clue in the little text Les Recontres, where he sets a few names aside one another: Levinas, Bataille, Char, Antelme, in terms of the friendship with whom the course of the idea might be understood. This is not to say the idea is unoriginal, or that it was formed in collaboration: it is more complex than that, for what drew him to each of these men was also the idea, even as it sought to give form to itself, to live.

With Levinas, the reading of Heidegger, and the negotation of his thought. With Bataille, ideas of communication, transgression and experience: each friendship must be understood in the context of the destiny of an idea. Imagine that: isn’t it what it means to live deliberately: to be caught by an idea, to be claimed by it, and to let it lead you into friendships and perhaps through them, as Breton discarded certain Surrealists from the fray. The idea can exhaust a friendship. Move on, move away. It must burn between us, the third, or we are nothing.

Of course, with Blanchot, it is still more complex, for the third is the exploration of the conditions of the genesis of the idea in friendship. Then it is friendship itself that is at issue in his friendships; it is the third term. Just as it is community that is at stake whenever Blanchot allows enters into political life. And it is literature – writing – that is the third term whenever he writes. Each time an experience – each time a kind of test that friendship, community and writing must endure.

Does he live for an idea? His life is not his life because of that idea. It is more than him – or less. And to its demand he responds wholly, making a gift of his life, giving his life to silence. But a gift that is not quite a self-sacrifice – that isn’t only the result of a deliberate will. What effort did it cost him not to be photographed or interviewed, or not to meet researchers interested in his work? Perhaps very little. Perhaps it barely bothered him. Nevertheless, each time, it was the conditions of his work that mattered. His work, his life – the gift he was given: the idea. The gift he could give: his life – but only as it had already been caught and implicated by the idea.

Who doesn’t want to live for an idea? To blaze with certainty? I am only certain in the mornings: then, for an hour or so, I have a fanatic’s zeal. It is beautiful, even if in the rest of the day I am a  husk. Could I say I was in the grip of an idea? – that an idea had reached me? Later, on, as the day tilts towards evening, I will say: I’ve never had an idea, not one. Slightly earlier, in the afternoon, I might say: its was his idea, not mine. And earlier than that?

Is there really a kind of research that is literary, or at least writerly, where it matters not only what is said, but that it is said, and in a particular way? In The Unnameable, Beckett allows him to name narrators of his previous books, and not only in the Trilogy, as if he had always been following a single path: Malone, Molloy, Moran, but also Watt. And Blanchot’s récits seem to recall one another, and to follow on from one another, in a single trajectory. What is being sought, and by what means? Or rather, what seeks itself, and by way of what kind of sacrifice?

The Third

You can be pretty – beautiful – enough to feel a responsibility towards your beauty: what does it deserve? how might I curate it? Hasn’t it marked you out for an extraordinary destiny? High cheekbones, let’s say, a slim waist, let’s say, a soft skin: haven’t they come to live their own lives, those cheekbones, that waist and that skin? Hasn’t beauty become, for you, a kind of fate, demanding to be curated and bestowed to the world?

‘I owe it to myself’: no, you owe it to your beauty, and it is as though you lived in a National Trust property. There are rules to be followed; what is yours should also be for the good of all. What beauty! they will say when they see you, and even you are surprised. But doesn’t beauty also demand a kind of modesty, that you efface yourself before what you have been given by chance?

Beauty lives its own life; it unfolds a fate for you of which you are part. ‘I was beautiful then’: said when you were very old, meaning: in me, across me, beauty led its life. But what beauty can ever say to herself: I am beautiful? Whoever admires their own limbs, or the brightness of their face? True, these limbs, this brightness can become part of an armory: a device to ensnare whomever will give you what you want. But still, even then, your beauty precedes you; it advances ahead of you into a room; it catches you in intrigue. And don’t you owe it to your beauty to be intriguing?

When I remembered, with her, the immense beauty of X. (another X. – those posts are gone), she said, everyone young is beautiful, and perhaps she was right about that. Perhaps it meant, beauty travels through the faces of the young; it seeks itself there – it finds itself and doesn’t beauty seek out beauty to mirror itself, to play lightly across bodies? Those faces are so young they haven’t an expression of their own – they’re not owned, not particularised. Who is responsible for them?

Then beauty can be caprice, cruelty. A single look and you are slain. Better not to be hypnotised by beauty – better not to be lost where it leads you. Everyone young is beautiful, said X., and didn’t this mean everyone was also no one, and that a young face, as yet uncarved by smiles or frowns, as yet ungrooved, unwrinkled, was also everyone’s face, anyone’s face?

No doubt beauty’s wasted on the young, like youth: what do they know of what, for a time, will possess them? What do they know of it, the beauty that passes through their faces, their bodies, giving them the chance of a great destiny? Do you really want to be picked out by your beauty? Selected, as though light was always shining on you?

What was the name of that beautiful nun who held a hot iron to her face? Beauty was her trial; she wanted to sink into another anonymity, far deeper than the anonymity of beauty. And this is what X. said, modestly refusing to acknowledge the beauty that once played across her and even condemning herself for letting what she called her prettiness lead her through life like a unbridled horse: hadn’t it led to to risky adventures, to misery in a foreign country, where she was whisked away like a prize?

This is what she said, although her beauty had taken her everywhere, all around the world: she wanted to be the anonymity of obscurity, wanted all eyes, all attention to turn away from her. She was happily obscure, she said; still beautiful, although her beauty was softer, more dispersed. Although it was like a mist through which also shone a great benevolence.

A little girl, alone on an island, will make jewellery for herself: where did I read that? and isn’t it nonsense? Still, beauty asks to be supplemented – ornamented. It asks – and don’t you deserve to give it what it asks – to be set into that frame that will let it shine still more brightly? Eyeliner and mascara make the eye into something to be watched – the most delicate register of passing mood.

She looked away – she looked at me – each time it is as though the whole universe had turned away from you, or turned towards you. I’ve been selected, picked out – to be seen, and by her, a beauty. Or I was selected not to be picked out, for her glance to pass over me, and forget me. Divine forgetting! Divine neglect!

And mustn’t it be a dreadful pest to be bothered for your beauty? Who’s sent over champagne? Who’s dancing next to you? Who spoke to you on the train? ‘I wanted to stab his eyes out,’ said X. many years ago, of man who looked lasciviously at her on a train. Not to be seen, to subtract sight from sight, to be allowed, for a short time, relief from your beauty: but that isn’t part of the deal.

You are exposed to sight all the time. You are beautiful when you wake, and when you fall asleep, beautiful dressed up or scruffy; your neglect only sets beauty off more strongly; your indifference increases the charm of your beauty, its insouciance. What will you ever know of the world? Who will ever tell you of anything bad, or dark? You charm everyone, they want to see you laugh, and your eyes to shine out yet more brightly.

His aunts, David told me, used to take turns to comb the hair of the prettiest sister. And didn’t I see it for myself, girls grooming another girl, the most beautiful one, as though they would each have a share in its brightness, its light? Console yourself with this: the beauty will learn little of a world that is drawn to its best whenever she is seen. It will part for her; the world will make way, and she will think it is the kindness of the world and not the kindness of her beauty to which she owes her life.

The women of Blanchot’s novels are often called beautiful – and young. Each time, beauty and youth live their own lives, unfold their own destinies. Blanchot often writes of the way the corpse seems to absent itself from the world and draw the world with it: this is the source of its fascination. But doesn’t he write, even more often, of beauty, of youth? For both, each time, are impersonal – both are possessing; both become a kind of fate, a way you survive without yourself. For neither can be kept, youth, beauty. They keep you; their play is that keeping, remembering and forgetting itself in your face, your limbs.

Divine sport! Divine caprice! – and isn’t it cruel to you from whom beauty begins to withdraw, whose face is like the world that is made by God’s absence, even as it still remembers him, and dreams of him. Beauty’s withdrawal can also be seen, like a beach at low tide, stretched out, expansive. Yes, that is where beauty was; it is there that beauty loses itself and dreams of itself, in those shallow pools that look upward to the sky.

Beauty withdraws – and who are you now, half-beautiful, quarter-beautiful, in whom others can see only traces of what once possessed you? But X., like the former Miss Yugoslavia in Handke’s No Man’s Bay, welcomes beauty’s retreat, her new anonymity. Who is she? One who can lose herself anywhere. One who is happily lost, one among others, and she could not have been before.

Who was she, then – all those years ago – when her beauty was sufficient to turn the world from its axis? Who was she, for whom an adventure might begin as she walked up the street? It came to her, the world – it ran up to her like a puppy, or a child: trusting, wanting your love, wanting to be bathed in it.

The adventure could begin today, or tomorrow, and you were young even as anything could begin, and at any moment. But this, too, was the temptation: couldn’t beauty lead her from where she should remain? Couldn’t it chase ahead of her, her fate, leading her away from what was most certain? But while she was young, she was also this will o’ the wisp. Wasn’t that her youth? Wasn’t it what let the world hover on the brink of adventure?

Dangerous adventures, though. Quagmires. Happily, in the end, she was rescued – she rescued herself; she stayed in the room in which I am writing with a worthy beloved, and I thought, beauty has released her. Beauty is leaving her behind, and I could see she was happy.

What is happier than watching beauty anoint itself – those ceremonies of perfuming and the application of make up? Once, in my naivety, I asked Y. why she made herself up at all, and in that high Manchester bedroom, she said, ‘watch’ and I did watch as she talked me through her beauty ritual. She had become beautiful; she’d assisted beauty, letting it come to herself. I was impressed; in a few minutes, I had learnt a great deal. She sprayed perfume on her wrists and she was done; beauty was in the room. Beauty was the third, the other one, accompanying us. ‘Do you see?’ Yes, I saw.

Insouciance

To wake in the morning carried by what was begun the morning before; to rely on writing, to lean back on it: isn’t this the dream? And to have spent the previous evening enjoying the glow of what had been written before, as though, after an adventurous youth and prosperous middle age, there was time to dwell in the satisfaction of what had been achieved. Or that the evening was also a time of work, and this a way to combat tiredness: to open morning in the evening, or at least to experience as promise what is ordinarily a gradual shutting down, a kind of coming to death. A morning that remembers itself in the real morning to come; rebirth both times – to be born again in both cases, living again through writing what was once lived in life.

The gods thought the ascetic Shiva was still too inexperienced to have renounced the world. Had he really tasted the life of a householder? Did he know the joys of marriage and fatherhood? so Shiva let himself be born into a human body; he lived, married, rose children and then, in time, died like any other mortal. But a whole life on earth is an eyeblink in heaven; and when he opened his eyes, the other gods bowed in veneration and went away. Truly Shiva was above temptation; truly he had come to the end of life, and lived beyond it. Then he closed his eyes again in meditation, already dead to life, already living beyond life.

Then is writing like Shiva, closed eyed and meditating on itself, only on itself, even as this ‘itself’ comes apart, even as it disperses itself to the farthest corners of the universe? All that remains is desire, a kind of impersonal movement that gathers itself from the disparate. So will writing, like the universe, move on. But writing is not life, but a kind of death, wherein everything that was lived returns again, but in a new form, and as though under glass. Yes, writing is always the subject of writing – and its object, too. As though writing only sought to return to itself, to that dispersal in which it is lost anew, even though, as its condition, it first has to construct an effigy in the form of a narrative, a kind of wicker man it then has to set aflame.

That is why I prefer to all others narratives that come close to the condition of writing – their own condition, but simultaneously, their own uncondition, since it disperses what narrative would hold apart, and disperses it as it is held together. A writing, then, that places form at stake, and whose content is always voided. How is that such narratives have always seemed to have begun before, to have attempted to tell themselves a thousand times? And that their narration is an attempt not only to reach us, but to reach themselves, to join the past they would recount to the future that will let them live? Cursed narratives, or narratives which seek to undo, by narrative, the narrative curse: how will they shake themselves from the linearity on which they seem to depend?

I once saw, on a tropical island (X.’s island), a wave roar up that held in its cross section large fish, facing in a single direction, suspended for an eternal moment before the wave broke. How to keep before it breaks such a form in a writing that takes itself as its own theme? The green wave broke, that is true, and the fish shimmered back out to another wave – I suppose they were big enough, strong enough, to hold themselves thus: but how to find a topic that would also survive the irregular waves that pass through narrative, and hold itself there, a form quivering in the formless?

Perhaps it is not strength that should be sought, nor size, but a kind of filigree delicacy: a net whose filaments would let the wave pass. Is this what happens in the second half of Blanchot’s Death Sentence, where a series of events are recounted that seem to reverberate as though shaken equally by the return of the ‘push’ of narrative, of writing’s return to itself? A series of events, of unimportant events, but important for that they concentrate what would otherwise be lost by that return. Did it take strength to write them? Or, as I imagine, a kind of sublime carelessness, a detached insouciance that let each event crystallise from the others, making a shimmering lattice, event linked loosely but surely linked to event?

Such a narrative is not written from divine caprice. Its lightness is the price of its engagement; what happens can only do so when seen, as it were, from the corner of the eye. And isn’t this the miracle, that separates Death Sentence from the last of Blanchot’s novels published in the same year, the turgid The Most High?

I will read neither narrative here, remembering, instead, what Thomas Carl Wall wrote about the former:

What the narrator recounts, and would like to end, are those things that distracted him: his seeing someone again whom he had forgotten even existed, his multiple dwellings, his strange and unpredictable moods (neither of which he takes very seriously), odd encounters with neighbours, comings and goings in and out of the rooms he and others enter enter by mistake […]

None of these things had anything to do with his important and consequential work as a journalist at the time of the Munich crisis[….] While the events of the war years are dead, these inconsequential happenings have managed to live on and remain undead and unrecorded by virtue of their insignificance.

They are of secondary, inessential, non-primary importance […] They are what happens when nothing happens, just as writing only happens when nothing happens.

Nothing happens. There is a kind of urgency to Blanchot’s telling, it is true, but there is also a lightness, even a neglect – I have already called it an insouciance – that seems to have lifted what is written from itself. But still, this is not the light, creative joy of the deity who creates one world and can then dance away to create another. The lightness in the details, that bears them, is not arbitrary.

There is effort here – a narrative effort, even as it becomes possible only in a kind of gliding, where disparate events seem to bring themselves together into something resembling a plot. An effort, perhaps, to let the narrative be engaged by what it will henceforward take on as its own necessity: the task of narrating what undoes the narrative, and breaks it apart. And yet the narrative holds; the wave rushes through the net.

The Open Door

Do you know as it happens that a particular event is the last of its kind, that henceforward it will harden itself into a kind of icon of a relationship? Everything is there, if you think about it. Everything is concentrated there, and in the future that’s how it will sum itself up, in the event that becomes the last, even if it is not the last.

So the last day with X., even if it was not the last: the Bacon exhibition in a white roomed studio, then to the London Review of Books bookstore for how long? Did I persuade her not to buy the three volume Marothy? But she bought more Bernhard, I remember that. ‘I remember’: and isn’t it difficult to become a kind of archive, to contain more, in memory, than lives in the present?

It’s very early. I woke three times in the night. It’s the beer, I thought to myself. The bottle of Leffe from Londis. ‘A man who drinks becomes interplanetary’, writes Duras. Several times, she took the cure. Her liver was ruined. If she drank anymore, she’d -. But she still drank, she and Yann Andrea – her lover, her non-lover, then in the 1980s, after giving up filmmaking and retreating to write a series of books.

He met her at a book signing or somesuch; he wrote a few letters – and eventually, she replied. And then he visited her, a young gay man. They were lovers for a time – she was in her 70s now – but he would still go out to the hotels to find men. They drank together all night, all day. He soon caught up with her. They were both alcoholics, both wrecking their livers.

I think of them often, not, no doubt as they were, but as I imagine them to have been. Duras writing her journal of the year 1980; The Atlantic Man; The Slut of the Normany Coast; The Malady of Death: should I call them absolute books? And they drank, and walked on the beach, and she wrote, and he went out to pick up men.

They rowed – screamed at each other. Then, reconciliation. Departures and returns. She had to take the cure; she took it more than once. And she wrote, she continued to write, discovering a kind of absolute idiom, an absolute book. Only she could write it.

We have to write what only we can write, I tell W. sometimes. What can we do that no one else can? But who is this ‘we’ – he and I? Each of us, separately? Or more of us – more like us? ‘Develop your legitimate madness’: who wrote that? Nin? I took her books, along with Henry Miller’s, to Oxfam a long time ago.

Your legitimate madness: Sebald, to the last, considered himself a scholar first, a writer second. Austerlitz, of course, is a terrible book – self-consciously grand, inflated, grotesquely exaggerating the tropes that made his earlier books so wonderful: the narrator who wanders, who comes close to madness, the presence of ghosts, of great events … And the book is incessant, immodest; it rambles without cease.

Remember, instead, the story of Ambros in The Emigrants – remember as his journal writings release themselves from the narrator’s account of his life and mental collapse. The writings from his journal, that he wrote when still young, accompanying his master through the Middle East. Ah, lightness itself, and full of youth.

Lightness like Duras’s account of the year 1980, her published diary, that lifted itself into the air of Neauphle like a seabird. Will there have been one time in my life that lifted itself thus? A stream of diary entries, or letters, or posts?

Sometimes I think nothing has been left to chance in my life – there’s no drifting. When was the last time a friend, passing, knocked on my door? Not once over five years; and barely before then. Besides, I wouldn’t welcome it. I like to move undisturbed from one room to another.

Staying at Blah-feme’s during the renovations, I once woke and went out to the toilet, past a sleeping Norn, and found the front door open. It was late – or was it early? The front door was open. I thought: this is like a dream. And then: Blah-feme’s flat has entered my unconscious, and this is how I will remember it, and these days, when, rising early, we would sit at the table and drink capuccinos, before forming our little peloton to head to work.

It’s been a long time since I lived with others. Five years – and wasn’t it unbearable, then? Didn’t R. and I go out to the garage and stare back at our big house, thinking, why are we here?, why do we live here? R. still phones, always drunk. I bought a caller ID phone so I know not to answer him.

Drunk, he has great plans for us. We’re very funny, he says, we should write comedy together, he says. He might join the Foreign Legion, he tells me. This is his last year – you have to be under 40 to join. But it would sort him out, he says, and besides, he would learn French. They’d give you a new identity, too. R. could leave his debts behind. When he gets drunker still, R. tells me I haven’t lived, that he’s lived and I have not. I should write about his experiences, not mine, says R.

I moved into his room after he’d left in a hurry, being kicked out, and not for the first or last time, for drinking. I found a play he’d been writing. He admired the Beats; he left Kerouac’s books, too, in that room. We used to quote favourite lines from Burroughs at one another. Drinking, taking drugs – it was his Beat adventure. R. was an adventurer, he told me; he was truly alive. He addicted himself to crack so he could descend into the underworld. ‘It’s what Burroughs would have done’, he told me.

Meanwhile, Duras and Yann Andrea are drinking. She calls him Yann Andrea Steiner now – another Steiner, another character in her fiction. She writes – what is she writing? She collected some old photographs and decided to write a commentary. So The Lover was born. That’s how it came together – as a kind of commentary.

Once, in a student house, on a visit to the careers service of my old university, a friend of a friend quoted the whole first page of The Lover from memory. I remember two phrases: ‘one day, when I was already old’, and ‘ravaged’. That’s what he quoted, drinking tea in his dark room.

It’s not so early anymore. I should be writing my review. Should be doing anything else but writing here. But I need to wake up – to wake myself up, and there is a kind of writing that does that. Tilt your head back, says my brother-in-law. It’s good for you to look up at the sky. Tilt it up then; look up: is the dawn coming? Not yet; soon.

Sometimes I imagine my unconscious is full of rooms, like Doom, or like Quake. Pass from one to the other. That room opens onto that one, unexpectedly. Doesn’t the artist’s room in The Trial open unexpectedly on the court? And I remember Wolfe’s Peace, too – the ghost awoken in a vast house whose doors open into rooms of his past: the orange juice factory, the party at which he plays at Indians with his mother, the room beyond which he knows the Christmas tree is, burning by itself. Open the door, I tell myself. But it is already open, like Blah-feme’s front door, letting in the orange light from the streetlights.

Duras died in her Paris flat, I think. At least that’s where she used to receive her biographer. Monique Antelme is the last of them, the writers who used to gather at the rue Saint-Benoit. Blanchot had returned from the South; Mascolo and Antelme were already at work on le 14 Julliet, then came the drafting of the Manifesto of the 121 …

This morning I tell myself I stand at the end of a whole history, that the door has opened onto a final room. Everything’s been written; that world, the literary one, is finished. Pick over the remains, the memoirs. That there are some who can link you to the past: this is marvellous. That there are others, like you, who remember – this, too, is important, but in the end, your knowledge is for nothing, and you will die like one who is the last speaker of a language, with no one to understand you.

It was over, the literary dream drained away, when Duras moved back to her apartment to Paris and then – as I learnt from the only edition of Le Monde I ever bought – died. Back to the rue Saint-Benoit, no. 5, where Merleau-Ponty used to visit, and Lacan; where she would prepare ‘steak a la Blanchot’ for him to eat very slowly (he was always ill – that photograph of him as a young man, sitting with Levinas on the back of a car already has him with a cane). Duras, who would drink with the others every night.

Didn’t I see, in Paris, the last time I visited (many years ago), a Duras cookbook? How funny! Her son published it, I think – the one they nicknamed Outa, the mite., and whom she spoke about in the interview attached to the English edition of Destroy, She Said, as belonging to a new, blank generation who cared nothing for the future. She placed all her hopes in them, the new generation, but what happened?

Picture it: Duras, between Blanchot and Leiris, their arms joined, during the Events of May 1968. Later, Leiris would condemn Blanchot for playing revolution in his journals. How indiscreet! How disrespectful! But I have always admired Leiris for the pictures of himself he allowed to circulate. An uncalm man, a man disturbed: yes, I like him very much, this rich man, this Sunday writer (he only had one day a week, he said, on which he had time to write.)

I think the dawn is coming. Open the curtains: is that the dawn? Outside, the big box that contains a dishwasher delivered to me in error. Should I sell it on, or let it rot there, outside. I’d asked B and Q to pick it up, they’d send delivery men, they said, but I waited a whole Wednesday in vain, and in the end crossly pushed it outside, scratching my wooden floor as I did so. But staying in, didn’t I discovered the new joy of my flat, which I used to leave as early as I could in the morning, even at weekends, even on Sunday, to work, instead, in the office?

A whole life with X. finished in the summer. John Sandoe books, the London Review of Books bookshop – and World’s End bookshop at the bottom of the King’s Road. I think we saw Anthony and Cleopatra at the Globe the last time I was down – too much of a pantomime, played for laughs, X. and I standing stiff-legged among the groundlings.

Isn’t that where Corin Redgrave stood when he came to the Globe? Where else? Where else would he stand? Was it a year before that we went to the last night of his King Lear by chance? And I remember cycling across London Bridge in the rain to see Kevin Spacey as Richard III. But that life is over; the door is closed, althoughI think it stands slightly ajar in my dreams, like the door at Blah-feme’s house.

R. rang twice last night. Neither time did I answer. How loudly the phone rang! But it was his number that showed up on the caller ID. Doesn’t he understand that while he drinks, he belongs to the past. The door is closed; I’m pushing it against him.

‘In Paris’: and that, too, was another life. I remember looking for the bookshop, Des Femmes, to see Cixous books all lined up. It was closed, though we took a long time to find it. The bookshop by the Sorbonne, that was the best. But I didn’t belong in Paris, just as I didn’t belong in London.

Another life. Did I know it then? Did I know it was an episode? Your affairs are like novellas, David used to tell me. And I thought, no, like recits – events that never quite seemed to happen, to complete themselves. That turned around a moment that could never come into the present.

Affairs – that could never be lived in the present, leaving memories oddly stranded, without context. The Rodin museum. The Picasso museum; his glorious ceramics. The day out at Versailles; it was my birthday that day; I had turned 30, and I couldn’t accommodate the size of the gardens – were those dots people? How far, then, did the water stretch?

Later, we walked through the woods, and I thought of the House Absolute in Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun: a House whose rooms opened to the outside, a House so vast, so ancient, that huntsmen pursued their prey through its corridors. But did I know it was only an episode – that that day, like so many others, would set itself back in my memory, as though it were behind glass? But an episode that did not complete itself, and set out to look for writing, like a hunter searching for its prey.

How to Live Deliberately?

Nearly three years of the blog, the three years of my mid 30s, recording how I gradually fell away from academic work, from writing papers and books, and to my current fallen state, writing nothing in particular, doing nothing in particular, barely reading anymore. How do the days pass? Administration? Bureaucracy? Not even that.

Was it this time last year I enjoyed writing autobiographically? I remember writing a great deal; I haven’t reread those long posts, written as summer became autumn, and finishing (I think) as winter came. Then the time after I returned from India, my jet lag waking me very early in the morning, long before dawn. And then, another phase – the drama of job applications earlier this year, intense work on papers, stress of every kind.

And then, the long phase which brings me to the present – the pretentious phase, as I like to think of it, which I  seemed to arrive at through a kind of ascesis. Other forms of writing fell away; I deleted many older posts. What is going on here now? I don’t think that question is easy to answer.

Sometimes, especially early in the morning, after a coffee, I feel a great certainty about what is perhaps ridiculous to regard as a ‘project’ (a project of what kind?) I need nothing else, I am carried along, from one post to another. But then, there come quite suddenly, great waves of tiredness, when writing is impossible. Tiredness, especially, in the late afternoon, as everything seems to be for nothing, as though I had already lived a whole life.

I admit I’m still surprised that I have not been able to turn out a book a year. I lost interest. Perhaps, as my job became more secure, I discovered a sense of shame. No more books, I thought. And no papers. Read; work in private. And so I did – two years ago, Marx, Deleuze … – for a whole summer. X. was here; we played tennis in the evening, and crossed the cowfield home. Was that a happy time? Either way, the reading didn’t continue. How intensely I used to work! Night and day! This morning, finishing something like an article, I thought: you’ve already peaked. I thought: that was it, your peak. How laughable!

How strange to move into a new life, without work! Without the great struggle to find a job, and then to keep it. After the struggle – what? ‘What are you working on?’ – ‘Nothing, nothing.’ Last summer was the great summer of going out. Every night, and until late; the Ouseburn Valley. A sundowner at The Free Trade, then to The Cumberland to sit outside in the evening.

Every night! I’d never lived like that! It was marvellous. This summer was its echo; so many nights out, but then the sadness, too, of the long breakup with X. And then to find myself alone, and in the middle of life. We drank Cava and cassis in the evenings; we ate together – again, the happiness of life, its substance. I said to Blah-feme to write about food, but I should have done so myself.

Yes, that was the summer, which ended as the workmen came to transform the flat, at last, at last. A new ceiling, a new bathroom; the central heating fixed, the electricity made to work again, the damp driven away, the drains cleared … of course it came back, the damp, and worse than ever. And then we found it, the swearing plumber and I, a great leak from upstairs.

An insurance job. Phone the insurers, then. And phone B & Q to pick up the dishwasher they misdelivered. And write a letter of complaint to the dampproofers for ruining the floor. And to Comet for not the delivering the fridge until all the food had rotted. Banal, bourgeois dramas, of which I feel ashamed to write. I always remember, rather stupidly, that line from Thoreau: ‘I went to the woods to live deliberately …’

And all the time, the blog. Ceaselessly, blogging. To escape life? But it is not that simple. To work? No – it is not that, either. The explanation lies in the posts themselves, which I have to reread to remember. Why does it seem that I’m a ghost of the certainty I feel as I write, early in the morning?

A curiosity: I cannot help linking the posts I write to particular places. That bridge by Plymouth station which reminds me of ‘The Arm of the Sun.’ The roundabout by Morrisons, which recalls the long piece I never finished, on Kafka and the everyday. As I walk round town, I will suddenly remember a post.

‘To live deliberately …’: but what can that mean? I only give Dogma papers now, and almost always collabaratively. Nothing to publish. I’ve written about love, friendship, my favourite music, my favourite book. But I could barely finish the last paper, the one to which only one person came. I had the whole of August, but for half the month, I was exhausted, and for the other half, I lost myself writing here, I think only because I’d been so tired before, because I’d fallen away even from writing about falling, that old stalwart …

Richard Wollheim’s Germs lies on the floor by the bed. I should read it, I though, to reawaken memories. To give myself, as I did last year, the vastness of the past. Because in truth, my present is narrow; the nights are very long. For a long time, earlier this month, I went to bed as soon as I came in from work, and watch episodes of The Simpsons, the whole lot, from series 18 back to series 1.

Exhaustion. Was it the change of seasons? Something else? This weekend, I stayed in, rather than going out to the countyside as I had intended. In, passing from room to room, eating tinned fish then bowls of plain yoghurt and jam. A coffee first thing, and half a green tea, later. Tuna and brinjal pickel. Hard boiled eggs with pepper. Ikea crispbread with good olive oil.

Passing from room to room, my new neighbours quiet, and all the while thinking, what should I write? How to live deliberately? A pile of books arrived this morning. The Marx I don’t already know. And another pile of books to arrive soon, by or on Lacan, to help my with a long review I’m writing. Piles of books, but I have to force myself to read.

How to live deliberately? There are many friends from whom I don’t take phonecalls. Write, I tell them, I don’t want to talk. It’s true I am out most evenings. To talk – no, that’s no good. But to write instead …

In the summer, I got a new mobile phone and a new phone with caller ID. I got broadband at last, and I was given a mini ipod and a laptop. Everything was to work, I told myself. Everything, at last had to function; and so it did. Next, a new television, one that takes freeview and a scart plug to play DVDs. All to clear the space for a deliberate life …

It is a kind of indifferent speech that has come to obsess me. An indifferent speech, an indifferent writing – without know what is meant by either phrase. As though I could smooth down writing. Or as though, by writing, I could reach an absolute smoothness, the ice on which nothing can live.

To write: what might it mean to achieve that: the bare infinitive. To write … Do I think I’ll find my way to it tonight, that to write without forethought, to ramble, is a way to surprise writing writing? Laughter: I’ve caught writing out in me. Writing wants to write, to say nothing in particular. And I should be glad it will keep me up – it’s nine o’clock, nine bells, and I must not give in to sleep.

Papa M playing in the other room. Succeeding John Fahey, one album after another on the computer. Live from a Shark Cage. You can still hear Slint in his playing. I have so much music now. All the music I want. But how to live deliberately?

Some posts I wrote were very popular. I do not write in those styles now. Pare it down – less styles, always less. No more Bernhard-isms. And shouldn’t I drop Blanchot, the last companion? And what about these kinds of questions, stolen from Handke to enliven a line of prose, to awaken it?

There’s no doubt: I was much more careless when I began. I hadn’t written in this way for a number of years, not since all my correspondences finally fell away. It was a struggle to begin, and even to find my way to a beginning. I remember I made datelines of the activities of this or that member of the Rue Saint-Benoit group.

Yes, that’s how it began. And then, very slowly, completely alone in the days after Christmas here in the city, I began to write of the narrative voice in Blanchot, and found my way to quote Kafka on the ‘merciful surplus of strength’. That was the beginning, the barest beginning, and these are still my concerns, although I am not alone in the city anymore. And still I ask myself, how can I live deliberately?

And I’ve lived in the city for nearly five years. Five years, up and down the passage that runs to the back entrance to the office. It is a peaceful city, a benevolent place. Will I be here forever? Moving around is no good. To begin again, to start over again – it’s no good. But didn’t I come close, this year, to getting a job in X.? And mightn’t I chance, soon enough, on a job in Y.?

I’m keeping myself awake. By writing, I’m awake; I’m even thinking of the future, of that little place I might hollow for myself in these hours before sleep, like a kind of snow burrow. Freezing to death is like sleeping, I’m told. You’ll be given the choice: sleep and die, or keep awake. And to sleep is to fall sweetly into death.

I read an interview over the weekend with Terrence Davies and felt great anger. The interviewer wrote of X.’s campness, of his upset as though he was a specimen under a microscope. I like X.’s films very much. It means a great deal to me that he is British, as I am.

I remember his three early shorts, the last part of which showed the death of the man we had met as a boy in the first short, and as a young man in the second. Now he was dying, and it was not a pretty death – sputtering, coughing. A black and white film.

And I remembered, long ago, at university, watching a South Bank Show on him in the television room in student halls. The others were laughing at him. He was so camp! The director spoke of recreating a street from his childhood. There it was, the street. The Long Day Closes: was that it?

I think again of the interviewer and sudder. I feel a great rage – Davies is to be admired first of all, and unconditionally. For what was the interviewer fit for, who would separate himself from Davies as a scientist does from a specimen? Typical Guardian rubbish, I told myself.

And then another memory: the wordless refrain at the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s third symphony, and a shot of black water. Everyone sang in those Davies films! Always singing. And another scene: fists through glass, yes that was beautiful. Like the arms of the prisoners in Genet’s film, that reach one another through the bars.

Genet. Say that name and you are protected. He sought to live deliberately. He lived deliberately, exemplarily. Five novels, a few plays – he knew when to stop. And then Prisoner of Love, the coda. And then death. A beautiful life.

And now I know what I want tonight. To write a post that would resemble one of the songs John Cale and Lou Reed wrote for their tribute to Andy Warhol, Songs for Drella. The song is called ‘A Dream’, and Cale narrates it. ‘It was a very crisp, clear Fall night …’: its supposed to resemble a diary entry by Warhol. Who knows, it might have been one of those entries! It is desperately moving, because Warhol is already dead, and I fancy I can hear something of him in his words, spoken in Cale’s Welsh accent. Warhol who is another figure close to me, someone else who lived deliberately. Now I know what I want to write.

Sometimes, readers write to me. Emails, making connection – a flurry at first, and then nothing, and then, perhaps, another flurry. Most of it forgotten straightaway. I have an enemy, who likes to write to berate me. I have allies, who want to tell me they appreciate me. I reply to them simply. I think in addition to writing, these readers should start blogs of their own. Everyone should start blogs of their own, that’s what I tell myself, in what I imagine is Warhol’s voice.

I used to have a copy of his Diaries, Warhol. But like so many books, it couldn’t come with me from place to place. You can’t keep all the books you buy, nor all the photographs you take. The Diaries were too big, anyway – and too inconsequential. But I admit it was the inconsequential that drew me to them. Nothing was said, never anything in particular.

Warhol would ring his friends every morning and speak, just speak. I like this, too. Cixous used to ring Derrida and just speak. He would keep quietly. Sometimes, Derrida would ring Blanchot. And Blanchot wrote to Monique Antelme that she should call him whenever something good happened to her, or something bad.

Letters! Do you remember when they used to arrive? Do you remember the last letter you ever sent? I used to wait for letters every day. Letters from … yes, every day, for years on end. And then – how many years ago? 5? 6? that desire came to an end. It stopped, simply.

Was I free? I gave myself to academic writing. Several hundred thousand words – it kept me busy. Nothing I wrote was very good. Did I learn about writing? What I learnt, I forgot; I can barely put together a paper.

The last letter. An interval; academic writing, and then – the first posts on a blog. And then, a few months later, my own blog, now that I was free from waiting for letters, or desiring to send them.

Isn’t this where it was all coming, to the blog? Wasn’t it all leading here? As though a gathering wave had finally met a shore to break against. It broke and spread – so much writing! Not necessarily good, nor bad, but – there could be writing!

Laughter, incredulous voice: and you are proud of this? With all that’s going on in the world, you are proud of – this? W.’s apocalypticism. He made me listen to Godspeed’s Dead Flag Blues in silence. ‘These are truly the last days.’ The last days: ‘we’re finished,’ says W., ‘it’s over. We’re fucked. We – are – fucked.’

Papa M.’s cover of ‘Turn! Turn! Turn!’: play until the tape ends, he decided. Write until your hour’s up, I tell myself; and it almost is. I’ll finish when he finishes. I’ll finish – now.

(‘This is an idiotic voice. It’s inane.’ – ‘But I like it’s inanity. I like it’s idiocy.’)

Garden Aeroplane Traps

Five years, and nothing happened. Nothing happened – that’s what we decided as we walked down the stairwell. And wasn’t it doomed – five years ago, it nearly coincided with …? It ‘began’ the day after the catastrophe. A bad sign. Everything that has happened since has done so under a bad sign.

Events want to complete themselves, to fall into linear sequence. Each episode wants to be caused by the one before it, as in a novel. How then to narrate those moments that seem to slip out of time, that are not allowed to come to completion?

The récit, the tale is supposed to bear upon what happened in the past – a single event, that a narrator mulls over in the present. But what happens when that event never completed itself, and thus never really happened, detaching itself from all linearity?

Did it happen? You cannot be sure. It has not coalesced, has not rounded itself off into an episode. What happened? But even that is unknown. It was not allowed to happen; it was not supposed to. But what did not happen broke into the order of time, it turned there. The détourned instant, the fragment broken from time’s course: what does it want but completion, the future in which it could arrive?

It hasn’t happened yet. It isn’t finished. Or: it still hasn’t happened, and that is what is happening. So we came to incarnate that non-event, the future of what will not happen. Until what happens is trapped by what does not, unfolding against it, a tragic struggle, freedom against necessity.

Time has passed. How old are we now? How impossibly old? We have outlived the event, missed our appointment. Or it is that it has outlived us, but not in time, not in our order of time.

Somewhere else, in another life, we are becoming younger, together. Younger: and all the way to the inception of the event.

And meanwhile? I miss you even when I’m with you. Or: am I ever with you when I’m with you?

Faith: it will happen. It will be brought to completion, now as for the first time. Yes, that is our freedom, lived somewhere else.

And meanwhile, this ‘other’ freedom, the instant stranded by time, which asks for mercy. You said – or was it me – ‘is it ever going to happen?’ I said – or was it you? – ‘another five years …?’ Each time, it was the unfinished instant that spoke, we knew it.

Was it pitiful? Resigned? I’ll use this word instead: indifferent. It was indifferent to us. And wasn’t that its charm?

Charm: the ‘background’ of speech, always there. Indifferent, but there. We could depend upon it. Everything we said it tore apart, gently. Everything said was dispersed across its surface.

Like the wind that passes among the table things in Mirror, turning them over. A bottle rolls and falls to the ground. Isn’t that the miracle of Mirror – that it is made up of the continuity shots that are supposed to pass unnoticed in a film? Continuity – when a camera is held onto a face for too long, when it lingers over a detail. What happens then? What fails to happen?

Isn’t it very beautiful, the sense that what happens does not do so for you? Indifference: that I do not possess the world, or myself. That I barely possess myself – and you? – who are you?

As though you can only see it from the corner of your eye. As though it is reached only by indirection. – ‘I cannot find my way there.’ – ‘Ah, but it will find you.’ To be found – but by what? By what is indifferent to you. Finding you as it would find anyone. But you, now, are this anyone. Happiness: to be no one in particular.

It is His-Majesty-the-Baby, as Freud calls him, who must be killed. The brilliant, charming child, centre of the world. But how is the child – the child who still lives within you – to be found by someone other than his parents, or those around him who are like his parents? How to live an obscure life? How to be found by the obscure?

Write not to find, but to lose. No: write to be found – write every day so it will find you, what does not approach directly. Then a blog is like one of Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Traps.

Five years: waiting waits beside us, without object. Waiting turns in itself.

Write until you are neglected by writing. Until writing writes itself. ‘Itself’: there where it is not, and you are not.

Wait until it does not know you are waiting. Until waiting loses itself object and all transitivity. Only then will it come. Only then will I be able to say to you, come.

Letters

Sometimes, apart for months, years, we corresponded. I wrote too much; you wrote very little, and what you said seemed to say nothing. Pure froth – but was it that? There was a letter; something was written – and wasn’t that enough, that you’d addressed me?

Occasionally, a more serious letter would come, and you would speak with great brevity. I have been very unhappy. I’ve decided to leave my job. Absolute letters. Decisive ones, in which a new turn was announced. Why did you need to tell me? Why that need, to join what was said to what could not be said, the written to the unwriteable? For it was also in order for speech to rest in silence that you wrote, and that I wrote to you. To rest, to be addressed – speech was lightened by that crossing, by the letters that were sent over the body of England.

Sometimes, alone, I imagine my words are addressed to you. My words – not mine, and you as the guardian of my speech, just as I am the guardian of yours. Peace: I wanted them to rest in your silence, to find peace there. And then it is as though we are still young, that this day joins itself to another, half our lives ago.

Language Doubled

Language doubled, language that no longer disappears into mediation: how does it call you, how does it come to claim you? When the right word does not come, perhaps: when the word that would allow you to speak eludes you and, in its absence, seems to unjoin your capacity to speak from itself. When you stammer, and language seems to stammer, according to a rhythm that interrupts the rhythm of speech. Or is it arrhythmical, the voice that joins yours? Stuttering, hesitancy – distrust the ability to speak. Speak by way of blocks and breaks. Then what you cannot say joins what you say. Speak, and it is not only you that is speaking.

Or – another example – speak by way of what everyone says. Engage gossip, be engaged by the rumour – pass speech along without detaining it; speak of nothing, of nothing in particular, and least of all yourself. Lightness of a speaking that belongs to no one. Light speech, that seems to stream without reference to what is said.

And then there is the speech of the infatuated – errant, wandering because it cannot yet pose what is obvious: the fact of attraction. Speech wanders from what both parties would want it to say. Wandering speech, that speaks by way of what cannot be said. Think of the dialogues of Henry James.

And still another kind of speech – the one that accompanies images, but seems to have little to do with what is presented. That belongs to itself, that clears a space for itself, letting those images become more dense and more strange. The poems of Tarkovsky’s father in Mirror. The dialogue in Godard’s In Praise of Love. What are they saying? What is going on? And the image of the Seine, the bridges: what does it mean? Errant speech, again. Wandering speech, once again.

And finally, the free association of the analysand, the automatic writing of the Surrealist: it comes close that murmuring that undoes the sense of speech, that seems to indicate a secret meaning only for meaning to withdraw its measure. Who speaks? What speaks? ‘A modest recording device’, says Breton, and now we cross from speech to writing.

Write, tell, until writing chokes its own channel. Write until the grit fills the filter. What was it that you meant to say? What did you mean to write? Writing lives its own life, away from you. Lives it, and draws what you write of your life into its streaming. Indifferent to you, turned away from you, concerned with itself, only it has no ‘itself’ and has no face. Setting your life quietly aflame. Setting what you have written coldly aflame.

Or there is a practice of fiction that leads narrative away from chronologically arranged sequences to their interruption and their condition. That speaks of what makes writing strange to itself and its writer as it pushes back before the capacity to speak, to write, was first granted. A before that never issues into a beginning, but accompanies it, doubling, mocking it, parodying the certainty with which it cannot coincide. Dub writing. Hauntology.

Or poetry, performative writing, that burns up a life, sacred speech that catches flame in words detourned from the world, in a naming that names the world’s absence, its interruption. Or the painted word, Cy Twombly at the Tate: what is he trying to write, aphasiac, in the half-light. What has written? But writing has written in those blazing words. Writing where words let speak the speaking of words.

Or song, where the voice floods sense with nonsense. Flooded sense, pools where darkness burns in darkness – a singer possessed, dispossessed. Who has lost herself by way of her voice. Her voice is loss. Lyrics that double what is lost by way of that loss. Cat Power. The desolation of singing. You Are Free: but by what freedom? The voice lost in its own corridors. Lyrics lost without sense. But the ‘without’ blooming like a night flower.

Or the choked blog, like a dawn marsh with steaming fog. A blog running nowhere, standing water, stagnant water. Or that is like rusted metal, turned all colours. Or the objects from Stalker’s nightstand underwater. An encrusted hull in drydock. A throat filled with mucus.

Language Itself

In the beginning there was language, say that. In the beginning, language set itself back from the beginning, the fact of speaking from the capacity to speak, so that it might always return, regardless of the will of anyone who spoke, who wrote. But what returned?

Failed language, language whose sense was suspended in sense: a word that referred but also suspended this reference – a sentence that presented only a parody of sense. Language seemed to be given twice over – firstly as that gift that allowed you to speak of the world, but then again as what robbed speech of speech: the fascination of words, the drone or the mantra, the sung words of ritual or the magic words of incantation. Right away, language belonged on the side of the sacred – it separated itself from itself, and the world from the world.

Language itself: but how can language be experienced as language? Only when the sacred is reduced to itself, when there is nothing divine. The sacred, the separate – certain kinds of writing, of speech follow the detour of sense, but by way of sense. Language was led to itself, but only because its author, its speaker, was ensorcelled, was lost in a trance. Led to itself, but not by one who would use language, who would dispose of it.

In the beginning, language, but language set itself back from the capacity to speak, to write. Always the chance of a writing, a speaking to come. Always the chance of return and by way of what spoke, what wrote, without the will of the speaker, the writer. By way of fate, then – by necessity. But also by freedom, language’s freedom, as it opens, through a sudden leap, that space that gives speaking and writing life anew.

Their rebirth, their eternal novelty, but only by way of came before – by that writing over which none of us could exert our power. Does this mean, then, that language only belongs to a greater order of power, that, like God, it lets open the field of creation, the playground of possibility? But the terror is that no power belongs to it; there is no language itself. Unless this names only that wandering that lays claim to writing as it fascinates the speaker, the writer, and fascinates her listeners, her readers in turn.

Writing’s Idiot

Saturday evening, with Cava. Should I pour another glass? A whole day in with a cold, in the refurbished flat – new kitchen, new bathroom, electricity working again, heating working again, only the great hole in the ceiling I opened to find the source of the damp that, I found out, has rotted away the load bearing joists, along with staining brown the newly replastered walls.

But no, someone says inside of me, you cannot write in this way. Or, write away, but soon it is writing that thickens itself into a glutinous double of what you meant to say. Writing, then, as what interposes itself – as interposition itself, that kind of mediation which refuses its mediacy.

No loquacity. No chatter. Unless it is the chatter of writing itself, of the ‘itself’ of writing, speaking as it withdraws from sense, and to carry sense along in its withdrawal. Then writing becomes a kind of parody of writing, the fruitless repetition of sense and its withdrawal.

Sense given and taken; sense interrupting sense: how stupidly simple it is, this sense that what gives itself by way of writing is withdrawn by the same stroke: that the written is the body loss gives to itself. But a gift that is lost as it carries away its body, as it becomes parody, overwriting, that grotesque doubling that offends the good sense of the communicator for whom language, in some degree, must offer itself as mediator.

The experience of language: a simple, stupid phrase. Experience – trial, suffering, endurance – and of language: as language reaches its limit and is trapped there. As the limit is the sticky foam in which an insect traps its prey. The limit becomes limitless, you wander along the edge of sense. But as you pass, the limit clings to you and you are gradually immobilised by what wants to write with writing.

Are your trapped? Dying? A last chance remains to you. Begin a fiction; send the spool of writing ahead of you and let it return. Fiction: the writer’s fort-da. Characters who live and act, mirrors of the living and dying of others in the world.

Tolstoy only knew his mother by a preserved silhouette; he made Nathalia in the image of the this absence of image. He loved her, and we love her, too. Coetzee’s suicided son becomes the dead son of Dostoevsky. Travel very far, write a great deal, but like Kelvin in Solaris, it is your father you will embrace, there on the surface of a faraway planet.

But what happens when you know it is not your father whom you hold but some ghost of writing? Not your suicided son, but the undead one who supplants the living and will supplant everyone?

Now the truth of all characters, of all characterisation returns, like another version of Hamlet’s father, to prophesise the dying of the author who created him. Or to say to him: I am your dying gone bad, the corpse of Lazarus with his winding sheets and stench. Even your mother, Tolstoy, is death given life, and she will come apart, dust lost in the wind.

Write not to preserve something from death, but to give yourself more thoroughly to it. Write to die not once, but over and again. Writer, prophet: isn’t it the experience of language you touch as you dream of the farthest future? A dream that is the cause of your writing as it belongs to what is always to come?

Then what you have made by your novel is a ghost-ship; the Marie Celeste that everyone has deserted. What you have written, but also what gave you to think you have made it yourself, is part of the fort-da of writing; it is writing’s game that lives with you and lets itself die again with your death. It is writing that gave you life, and will withdraw it. Given and taken, and through everything you write and have written.

But then you, too are a character, the persona writing gives itself into order to send itself out into the world. Proxy, your substance is borrowed; the author is in search of his authority even before the characters come looking. And what would they find if they found you? Another character, not an author, and one already engaged on his own quest: to stand face to face with what called him, and to call it to account.

In truth, writing only writes of itself. Language lives by a great reflexivity. Your life is lived in the return of writing to itself, writing’s death-drive. An ‘itself’ that thickens itself into a counter-world, into the spider’s web of writing, on which everything you lived was allowed to catch itself. There it is, your flat, your open ceiling and its joists; there is your yard, with the pots of grasses and heathers, but covered in a thick, strange substance, like the spit from a spider’s mouth.

This world is already Solaris; it is already the Zone of Tarkovsky’s Stalker. And who are you, proxy, writing’s idiot? Who are you, born into a life that was never yours? A character in the fiction by which writing lives. The narrator who is lent writing only to have writing withdraw, turning his books into a quivering indication whose every element is magnetised by what is to come.

Why does it need you? To give itself substance. To let you rise like an avatar, and live a life in the world. But then to fall back, with your death, into its own deathlessness.

Could you pity it, then, language, for this desire to give itself flesh, to go out into the world, in order to return? Might you pity it for its dependency, its love of the first creation it immediately overlays with destruction? More terrifying: there is no one to pity. Writing is not itself, or its ‘not’ is also what it is.

Language’s experience – living, dying, and unfolding the game of life and death in its own recurrence. Sense given and taken, fictions made and unmade, but everything pointing to what is still to come, not because it will save and redeem what has gone before, not because it will complete it, but because it is from there it will come again, the necessity of writing’s fort-da, the freedom it gives by way of its return.

Put Your Hand on my Forehead

I have never dared to give birth to myself again in the creation of a character. By what strength to cross the line between the literal and the fictive? But I suppose, from another perspective, it might seem a weakness. In living again through a character, and bringing his life to an end, isn’t this a way of taking revenge on the incessance of writing, of its inexhaustibility? As though you could bring to term what, in life, you could never end.

Kafka says to Brod he will be content on his deathbed, providing the pain is not too great, and adds, ‘the best of what I have written is based on this capacity to die content.’ Which I interpret, remembering the bloody scenes of execution in ‘The Penal Colony’ and the banal death of The Trial, as pointing to a kind of relaxed happiness in the murder of his characters.

Their discontent mirrors his contentedness; they are his proxies, Kafka, who among all authors understands the demand of writing draws him through and beyond any tale he could tell. Let them take his place; let them die in his place – he is still alive, he lives and he suffers, but somewhere, too, he is dead; he has also brought his death to term.

In the end, of course, Kafka died a painful death. But remember the conversation slips he wrote to communicate with his friends when, towards the end, he could no longer speak.

That cannot be, that a dying man drinks.

Do you have a moment? Then lightly spray the peonies.

Mineral water – once for fun I could

Fear again and again.

A bird was in the room.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

My fantasy: now death is coming to Kafka, but slowly, so that it seems to become eternal. Did it seem, discontent, that death was as far away from him as ever? Now perhaps, it is the turn of the characters to die in his place. Wasn’t it the proofs of The Hunger Artist he was correcting on his deathbed? Perhaps death by starvation was already preferable to a dying that had lost its limit.

Now I imagine the conversation slip was written by Kafka to his characters, the ones who had always died for him.

Put your hand on my forehead for a moment to give me strength.

Die and give me strength by your death. Die and give me the limit of death. I imagine they all stand around him, his characters, woken by the coming end of their creator to assume his suffering. And then that it is what does not pass of Kafka’s passing that returns as I reread him.

I do not die content as they are brought to their deaths. Death wakes up in me; dying opens its eyes: it is as though Kafka knew he would suffer in advance: that he wrote from the discontent of dying, letting it mark itself in those stories that never came to an end. Is that why The Castle is important to me?

But what does not end in The Castle is also what fails to complete itself even in Kafka’s finished tales – this is what I tell myself, although without proof, without argument. But who will die for me? Who will put his hand on my forehead?

Bernardo Soares

Perhaps The Book of Disquiet could never be a novel, or even a fiction: Bernardo Soares is too obviously Fernando Pessoa – obvious by the diffuseness of the prose, written over so many years. Unconvincing pseudonym! But Pessoa preferred the word, heteronym – to be other-named, to be named by the other: how to bear that namelessness which writing also demands – the anonymity which abides in place of the author who would lay claim to the book? What you write will not come back to you; what you sign will not be countersigned. Unless the counter-signature can become a name for the absence of name, the heteronym. Whence Bernardo Soares.

Blogging Does Not Exist

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?

My ‘Work’

… 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.

The Dead Sea

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.

Writing’s Desire

Mark it here, that which will not be arrested by a mark. Let it speak itself here, that which will not bring itself to speech, and has no ‘itself’, unless this indicates a wandering without cease, the darkness on the other side of the mirror. ‘Itself’ – infinite detour. Passage into passage, without a promised land.

Unless the wandering is itself promise, and the incessant is a kind of freedom into which writing would set itself. To reach writing’s desire, not your own. Or to let your desire catch fire with the desire of writing, cold flame that does not burn. Are you alive?

Blind Oedipus is led by Antigone, looking for a place to die. But now imagine that place withholds itself, and that they wander without cease, this blind man and his daughter. How is it that what appeared as fate allows itself to become freedom?

What are you trying to finish, to bring to term? Or is blogging, for you, to accompany the whole of your life, as though it were already beyond it, or before, or that it ran along another track, parallel to what you accomplish in the course of time?

Nothing finishes itself here. Strange mirror that recalls you to the interval that sometimes opens, as fatigue, as indifference, such that your time is  unfolded and exposed. Mirror in which it is only the weary one who sees himself, without knowing what he sees, and lacking even that capacity: the gift of sight.

Isn’t it it that his vision coagulates in that space between what he tries to reach by sight and sight itself? Itself: but now vision passes by way of a detour, it sees what it cannot see, it sets itself as though in the earth and opens to a sky without stars.

Nothing will finish here. Nothing begins. What is it you want to achieve? What do you desire? I want the interval to be lost in me. I desire time to turn me over to eternity. ‘I’: but this word, now, is cited by another speech. ‘I’ echoing in vain, having never discovered itself. The laughter of streaming words: you are no one. Laughter of what writes in my place: no one writes here.

The Ram

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.

Eternity

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 Inexhaustible

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.

Why Are You Telling Me This?

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.

Waiting for Waiting

A day waiting for a delivery. Waiting, until waiting falls from itself. No longer is it a matter of the time I might have spent doing something else – of what I have lost by waiting. That still presumes a time in which tasks orientate me towards the future, and behind them, the projection that is my relation to time. A relation that withers as waiting falls from waiting, and time is no longer lost, nor gained.

Errant time, time unemployed: I pass from one room to another, boredly lying on the bed and watch The Simpsons on my laptop, and then up again to check my downloads. And there is the yard, no longer disappointing, though there is still the big tear in the wall that will soon be repaired. And the day – white, blank, in which nothing at all can happen. Or the day is that non-happening, the passing of time wiped out.

Time without project, time that does not live from the future: the day spreads out indifferently beneath the sky. Stagnancy: time is going nowhere. I’m waiting – but for what? Waiting without object. Superfluous time, that lacks its sense. Do I ever wait for waiting, wondering when time will return to its course?

Eventually, waiting draws itself back to itself, the day, stretched, begins to stretch back to itself. I think to myself, I should write something. Think: I should at least mark the moment when the time began to flow again, and waiting no longer waited for itself.

Now the day is spread before me like a plateau. What is to happen? The delivery will come – now that event exists on the same plane as me. Yes, I am certain of that. And I can write, too – I’m certain of that. But how to bear without betrayal that waiting that no goal could alleviate? How to write of what loses itself before it is found?

Sometimes, I want to awaken in myself a sense of urgency. How old am I?, I ask myself. And then: What ought I have done? But this ‘ought’, which used to awaken me, leaves me indifferent. How old am I, anyway? This is the plateau, the long afternoon that opens out into middle age. A decline so gentle it can hardly be felt. The long afternoon – I know how I’ll pass it; my world is secure enough, stable enough; it turns steadily on its axis.

A delivery is coming: even that is enough. To wait as a customer, to have afforded to buy what is arriving. To wait as one to whom things are owed: yes that is already a great deal; I know it, as it can only be known from the perspective of one to whom this chance might not have been granted.

Wasn’t there a time, after all, when all the doors were shut? A time – scarcely a time. Waiting fallen from waiting, waiting lost from itself: unemployment, illness, the one turning into the other. Illness, unemployment, and a great weariness that crossed out the sky.

That’s what returned today, when waiting fell from itself. Returned – as it also returned then, the first time (was their a first time?) Strange autobiography that would have to include long tracts where moment unjoined itself from moment. Strange testimony that would keep fidelity with what failed to occur.

Before, one task gave itself into another; there was a struggle, a series of struggles – to find a job, to keep it; and now? Tasks are worn away from themselves; projects fail before they begin, and this is happiness. Adrift in life – life, completely adrift, with no desire to leave my name behind when night comes after the long afternoon and the evening.

But the act of writing has caught me out. The faith that carries all acts as they belong to time carries the words in which I would answer to waiting as it falls away from waiting. How then to attenuate this faith, to wear it away? Let it wander without course. Set it adrift; give it to chance. Write without thought, or without forethought.

Nothing is to happen here; nothing is to gather itself into an event. Blanched writing, etiolated writing – worn away until the act falters, until the step forward is also a step away. How old am I?, I ask myself that. What am I doing here?: I ask myself that. No answer – today is any day, and I am anyone.

The Trial

1. Why does it seem, as I try to write again, that I’ve never written before? ‘Begin.’ – ‘But I can’t begin.’ – ‘Begin, drag the non-beginning into the beginning, let writing make itself from its own impossibility.’

Isn’t this what tiredness reveals, and by way of its impossibility: the leap that writing must be – the leap that lets writing become a kind of fate? Pass through impossibility, traverse it; experience what cannot lift itself into the beginning. And then – strange chance – there is a beginning amidst the non-beginning, and what is written now marks itself with the memory of what it could not accomplish.

It is this trial that lets writing be writing – that allows it to appear as itself at its own limits, there where it shimmers before you as the impossible. That’s when it begins: then when it cannot begin, and it has no future.

2. But how does this trial mark writing? How does it leave its trace such that what is written turns around it? I don’t know the answer, except that I sometimes know that what I read has passed through that tiredness that has come to the end of itself. No: that passes through tiredness and continues to pass there, that never has done with the unlimiting of the limit.

Then writing is also lost in writing – or there is another current that bears what is written away from what signifies by way of the text. Bears it away – and brings it back, returning, as the trial of a writing that tears itself away from reference, from signification.

‘Itself’: but what does that mean? Slave of sense, slave of reference, language could only arrive at itself only as came to its limit. But the limit is undone. The limit undoes itself and the end is not the end, and nothing can begin.

Then it is brought back and by way of writing: the end that never arrives. And it is recalled to the present and by way of writing: the beginning that never lifts itself from what does not begin. Future and past are joined there, in the present of writing. Joined? But only as they void that present. Only by turning it aside, thickening it, and casting it outside the succession of moments that pass.

The present of tiredness – the future that does not come; or the past that is never left behind. So is writing anticipated. So does writing wait for itself, ahead of itself, and dream of itself before it begins. ‘And do you wait, too, writer? Do you dream?’ – ‘Something in me is waiting. Something in me is dreaming.’ – ‘But waiting for what? Dreaming of what?’

Waiting relinquishes itself in waiting, and dreaming within dreaming. Waiting unlimited, and the dream unfolding, at its heart, what turns it aside from anyone in particular.

The bloom of dreaming, the bloom of waiting, writing comes as memory is forgotten, and anticipation loses its hold on the future. Comes to itself, from the forgotten past, from the unknown future: this is the miracle of writing, its mercy, its surplus.

The Retreat

Dream: a writing in retreat, a writing that empties itself as it moves, as the people of old Russia retreated as Napoleon’s armies marched toward them. Retreated and opened the land they left as a terrifying, aching absence. The advancing troops died of Russia’s space and its people’s patience (but this a dream, and nothing to do with what might have been the case).

Absence: Napoleon’s troops passed through empty towns and along the empty roads, lost in a country that was indifferent to them. Or that lives its own life, and now I think of Stalker’s Zone: what resists? What comes forward as resistance? The deserted country – the objects on the nightstand reappear under water. It is not Stalker who dreams, as he lies down among the puddles, but the Zone itself. Then it is only the Zone that is real; only the empty space of Russia in its massive absence.

Writing’s remove: allow absence to dream of itself. Of itself – and across pages covered in writing.

2. What does writing, in its retreat, open behind it? Simone Weil’s God opened the universe as he fled; he is always turned in the other direction. And doesn’t he flee from himself? Isn’t his fleeing first of all that? The protagonist of Blanchot’s Death Sentence rents a series of rooms all at once in which to enjoy his absence. He is not there – and how offended he is when he knows a child has been looking into one those rooms, as though it had caught out his absence, seen it, instead of allowing absence to absent itself in darkness. 

How to let writing be? How to turn your back upon writing by writing? And how to read such that writing does not give up its indifference?

3. Sometimes, foolishly, I think to myself: music without a voice is nothing, art without a face is nothing, even if the voice is torn up, even if the face is burned away. To drive away the face – to deafen yourself to the voice, but by way of the face, and by way of the voice. And then: writing needs plot, needs character; it needs an orientation, even if it is to point only to what tears plot and character from themselves, even if it is to allow writing to absent itself from itself.

Kafka’s skill: immense precision of writing. No detail is extraneous. But every detail (Klamm’s pince-nez, the peasant’s faces in the snow) seems to retreat from my reading, leaving that remove that is indifferent to my attempt to discover meaning. The eye passes along a glazed page. Sense refuses itself to sense, or meaning carries with it the retreat of meaning. What does the book say? What does it not say?

I discover something of the same in the best of Appelfeld. Not Badenheim, but The Iron Tracks, or The Healer; not The Story Of My Life, but For Every Sin, or Tzili. Could I say that it is writing’s retreat that fascinates me in Appelfeld, that lays claim to my reading? Then this would be a response (but an unsubstantiated and oblique one – a project for a response rather than a response) to Ellis Sharp’s post at Barbaric Document.

With some books, reading is drawn over a threshold, and, as Steve, from the first. ‘There are some books whose first lines, whose opening lines are enough’, he writes more recently. As though the fictions that follow them are gathered up into a threshold. Cross over. Pass. But you pass into nothing. Reading is only passage; the space opened by writing is already in retreat.

The Nonexceptional State

A relationship ends, and what interwove your lives no longer interweaves them; what was held together is held apart, and this is the discipline: to keep the decision enforced, to let the past be the past and to put it behind you. I suppose the degree of upset depends upon who instigated the breakup; that is obvious enough – for one, perhaps, there was closure, whereas for the other, an irruption from nowhere.

Sovereign is the one who can decide the state of exception; sovereign, too, is the one who breaks up with the other – who is outside the law of the relationship. (But there are other possible perturbations of sovereignty here: how would you read from this perspective, the relationship of Cordelia and Johannes in Either/Or?)

Best of all, of course, is a mutual breakup: closure for both, and you both knew it was coming. The End, then. Let the past fall away – you are both sovereign, and the state of exception is that open space which precedes the beginning of new relationships.

And now that past is separated from the forward-streaming of your life like an ox-bow lake from a river’s meander. The water does not move, and slowly it will silt up, and more slowly still, will close up, and close up the scar that evidenced its presence. A closed-up past like a closed-up house: who lived there? who shared jokes, and friends, and ways of speaking? Closed up – and from you who lived there, for you cannot discover alone the life that made sense only as it was shared.

Now, for you, a different life, and the chance of a different set of singularities that will be caught in the memory of a relationship. But now wonder about a relationship that never began such that it could end, that teetered on the edge of a beginning into which it never fell, mourning in advance what it never was. No End – because there was no beginning.

How to date the beginning of a relationship? Perhaps only the future anterior that allows what happened to make sense only retrospectively; before then, there was only a kind of speech before speech.

And for you who have only what failed to complete itself? You are not the lovers who rejoice in the fact of their love, and can recount its story: ‘that was when we met’; ‘that was when I caught your eye.’ What, then do you have? Perhaps the dream that one day you can speak of it together, and what did not happen can be called to account. ‘Why didn’t we speak about it before?’: now ‘it’ has a consistency, a substance: it has come together like love’s future anterior. The non-event is at last born as an event.

It happened – not then, but now, and can be called a failure by the measure of loving. ‘It couldn’t have worked out for us’; ‘it could never have begun, not then’. Imagined scene: the two of your talking, at last, about what did not happen. Together, at last, and talking about it, and happy in their speech.

To thicken the past into an event: isn’t this to exert a retrospective control of an event that would have otherwise fallen into obscurity. Time is ours, the past ours, and now we will affirm it so that it may truly pass. Now it can pass, as all time passes, and it will fade away like an ox-bow lake fades into nothing.

But imagine this, instead (the novels of Sarraute): the non-event that remains non-event, that refuses the measure of love, and what is called a relationship. Now it is a relationship without relationship, one whose terms are not symmetrical, and in which neither will ever have been a lover.

Who am I, then? – and who are you? Who were we, then – and who now? I imagine a succession of ‘whos’ sounding out without answer. The ‘who’ that returns as your heart, that speaks there. How to be loyal to what you are quite sure might have happened? For what kind of fidelity does it call, the non-event?

Non-sovereign is the one who cannot decide. Non-sovereign is the anteriority that is never joined to the future.

Fidelity to the Non-Event

(I have often wondered what I have tried to name with the phrase ‘lightened speech’. Strange path of research that lets a phenomenon crystallise around such a name, without knowing yet its significance or what it means, but only that it works as an attractor, that it seems to push itself forward as something that will one day have to be thought as such: doesn’t it work according to the logic of the future anterior as Sinthome discusses it? – ‘It’s clear only now what I meant all along.’ – ‘Is it clear?’)


Lightened speech: ‘but we never said anything’, that’s what you said later. Yes: nothing was said, or rather, nothing was decided. A feature, perhaps, of adolescent romance, which does not yet know in what direction it reaches, or even that it reaches at all. Looking back, I can say: ‘I know what was happening.’ Or: ‘if only we’d spoken of what we felt!’ But a retrospective glance can unify what happened on the basis of what had not yet happened; what did not happen accompanied its happening, and by way of speech.


And that was the point: like Bergson’s sugar melting in the water, its duration was given in its unfolding, or rather, its unfolding could not be detached from it; to know what has happened today is to know nothing; the experience was made of our unknowing, that’s how it was lived and that was its delight. But I suppose there’s always a moment like this before any romantic relationship begins: to not-know, to speak without knowing what is said.


‘It was then I realised …’; ‘suddenly it came to me …’; not love at first sight, then, but love as it gathers itself from disparate, inchoate beginnings. That comes to harden itself into a decision, and then to that kind of contract that is made in a relationship. That remains, yet, part of indeterminate speech. (I always think of Donnie Darko: Donnie walking up the road with the new girl in school …)


There are relationships that never begin, or that teeter on the edge of the beginning, still drawing with them what does not begin, like that drowsiness that can seem to draw waking back into sleep. I’m half-asleep – nothing has quite begun, or the non-beginning is still returning in what seems to begin. This is what is lost once they have made a pact that allows each to rest in the awareness of the other’s regard.


Nothing is certain, even now, but there is at least a beginning place; a relationship has formed. And before the beginning? The relationship is not yet itself, or it is not sure of its terms. The other has not been engaged, not fully – or rather, that engagement has not been redoubled in the commitment that is the beginning of a relationship.


The suspense of not-quite-loving before it is commitment. The engagement, the call, that is only half-avowed. What, then, of a relationship that remains in suspense, or that retains, in its happening, what did not happen and could not happen? I think at once of Duras’s The Malady of Death: is it the male character’s homosexuality that keeps the lovers apart? Is it his masculinity (read Duras on men in Practicalities …)? And then I ask, not really sure what I’m asking, what would fidelity to the non-event might mean? Or a fidelity to what did not reveal itself according to the logic of the future anterior?


‘It did not happen.’ – ‘It keeps not happening.’ Non-happening happens, opening out the instant to what does not pass in time. Bergson’s sugar never melts – or is it that melting never melts, never completes itself?

Alles Klar

Early morning, at the airport. ‘Beer,’ W. commands. ‘You can pay for this.’ Later we drink beer in a railway carriage, passing through the German countryside. ‘What do you think of Europe?’, says W. I look around. – ‘Very flat.’

The best train journey, of course, was the long one from Warsaw to Wroclaw. Small round tables like in a cafe, but in the dining carriage of a train. And waiter service. We drank, steadily. Europe passed by the window, flat and green. All was well: our guide was with us, we felt secure, safe; like small children with their parents, we had nothing to worry about.

This time, we have look after ourselves. Of course, it’s already gone wrong. We steel ourselves: we have to concentrate. Are we on the right train? Is it going in the right direction? Left to fend for ourselves, we become panicky. Then the conductor comes round to take our tickets. Alles klar, he says, in a voice that is infinitely calm. He soothes us. Alles klar: we’re in safe hands, this is a safe country. Over the next few days, we will only have to repeat his phrase to feel safe; it watches over us like a guardian angel.

W. and I know we don’t really belong in Europe. But walking through the boulevards at Strasbourg, we grow calm and quiet. We find a bistro and drink Alsation wine from tumblers. W. speaks soft French, his voice lowered. ‘Bon.’ But we don’t belong here. It’s not long before inanity returns. ‘Why can’t we stop ourselves?’

W. once lived in Strasbourg for six months. He could have stayed forever in the calm boulevards. Why didn’t he stay? He missed the British sense of humour, he says. Self-deprecation, the deprecation of others as a sign of affection: how did we, the British, ever become so contorted? But we decide this is our saving grace. ‘We don’t take ourselves seriously.’

Sometimes our inanity frustrates us. Why couldn’t we have a more sophisticated sense of humour? But then, at other times, we know our inanity, in its simplicity, will get us through anything.

Every morning, away from the other delegates to drink orange pekong tea in the town square. We are simple and joyful creatures, content with inane chatter, which always arrives from nowhere and bears us along for the afternoon. If only our stomachs ached less! If only we were less bleary from drinking! ‘I haven’t had a single thought all conference,’ says W. I search my head: no, neither have I.

Sometimes, to our amazement, the clouds part and we are able to think. There was a moment on the train, coming back from Strasbourg. We held forth for some minutes, speaking clearly, calmly, sketching our philosophical task. W. was transported. ‘That’s exactly it! Write it down.’ But I’d forgotten my notebook. ‘We’ll have to remember it!’ But of course, we didn’t.

Then, on another occasion, walking out on a promotory at Mount Batten, we had another few minutes of insight. W. was amazed. In the water taxi heading back to the city, I wrote down a few notes. But when we look back at them, we have no idea what we were thinking. Today, just like any other, we are both perfectly free of thoughts; we’re like smooth stones, worn down in the river of our inanity. – ‘Alles klar.’ – ‘Yes, alles klar.’

Indifferent Speech

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.