Spurious

Language Itself

Language, says Sinthome, is nothing apart from 'the ongoing operations of language in its use by speakers'. There are speakers and nothing else; just bodies between which relations of feedback allow there to emerge language itself - an 'itself' that is given through those particular acts that take place in concert, together: language is thus an intersubjective act, an ongoing co-constitution that is channelled in particular ways.

Language 'itself' - but there is no itself; only practices, channellings that feedback in various ways, changing language and, no doubt, changing the referents of language, making perceptible different features of the world, insofar as relations and interactions have a primacy over predicates, properties and substances (to paraphrase another post).

The question is not what we can know about the referent, but what they are insofar as they are brought into relation with us and are nothing outside of this relation. There is no in-itself to the world, nothing that stands apart from what is involved with them. Language does not represent the world, but co-constitutes it and between us, changing the sense of that 'between'.

Then language is never given in itself just as the world is never itself, or in itself; it lives only as a relation, only in those relation of feedback that let it be channelled and hardened into particular idioms, particular natural languages.

And yet. Is there a way in which language might appear as it is set back from the capacity to refer, the way it calls forward a world? Is there a way of speaking, of writing, that would withdraw language into itself as claws into a cat's paw, with no link, now, to the world outside of language?

Of course not. Language depends upon its users, and the world it allows them to co-constitute and share. And yet - what if there were a way that, while referring, even as it refers, belonging to a world or to a fragment of the world it simultaneously suspends reference, holding itself back.

This might be understood as a withdrawal into that dimension from which language might leap forward again, constituting, co-constituting the world in a new sense, naming things anew. That language has disappeared into itself to gather its powers.

But what if there were no powers, and nothing to gather. What if language were lost in itself somehow, that it dreamt, but of nothing in particular, that it moved through itself like fog in fog? Language that refers but without holding onto a world and without changing it. That refers, but hardly so, touching the world, brushing it, but too lightly? Language that has hardly anything to do with the world, loosening its powers from within?

This a dream, not an argument. Language 'itself', language that as it were lifts itself from the relations that give it reality. The ties of relation slackened. Telegraph wires drooping down to the earth. And then drooping so far as to be lost as in an eddy, a relation lost in itself, turning in itself. In which the most ordinary word loses itself in itself, and all of language is there, groaning, rumbling and without saying a thing.

I wonder if this is what Serres calls noise. I wonder whether language doesn't become noise there where relation turns around itself like the tiger who ran round the tree until he became butter. And that all words between us might not turn thus, the most ordinary word becoming extraordinary, and no questions or answers making sense anymore.

Language itself, but not a substance. Language as relation, but that has withdrawn as relation, turning in itself, lost in itself, and dreaming of nothing in particular. And now imagine this wheel of fire turning through you, and that you, as speaker, as writer, are only that empty place where noise rumbles without words, but in words.

In words, with words, but apart from them. Saying nothing other than them, but hollowing out saying within saying. And saying itself, language itself, the cat's paw without claws.

Language itself, but with no in itself. Itself as relation, and the turning of relation. The messenger who's forgotten what is to be sent. The deserter who knows no longer what he left or what he's looking for. The nomad without destination. An event that happens because it does, and for no reason. The without why of Silesius's rose.

How to endure language itself? To let it pass, without getting in the way (but then it only goes deeper underground, looping there)? How to find that passage of language as smooth as a snake's back in the sand, pure streaming? By what formulas might you wait for it? What words that it might shake apart, the whole sea of sense swelling like a tsunami?

'I haven't said a thing', you will say, but your tongue is thick. Why are prophets inarticulate? Why are they said to stammer? I think prophets speak only of speech, and of the to-come of speech. Of the return of what was never there, noise at the edge of sense, language lost before reference and across it. Language that never comes in sense, never arrives, and for this reason belongs to the future.

A futural language, language itself, murmuring of itself and awaiting itself, as all of language seems to sink towards it, just as the sand must do to the ant drawn into the pit of an antlion. But a sinking that occurs between us, from one to the other. From one who addresses the Other, who becomes so (gaining a capital letter) only by drawing language itself forward, and letting it speak.

Language itself - is this what might be named by the saying, rather than the said, as it bears speech, the whole of what is said and might be said? Itself - and this as difference, as a kind of relief, the river finding the sea?

But it is not you who address the Other, but language itself. Language itself in you, as you, letting you become the anonymous current of speech, a river in which you have not stepped, and not even once. 'I spoke'. - 'You took up a position within speech.' - 'I spoke'. - 'Language gave you a position to speak, just as it will take it away'.

But how to speak this speech? How to let it resound? But you can hear it anywhere. In gossip, for example, in rumour without substance, mere hearsay. In the whisper of pages of celebrity magazines. In the oceans of wrecked blogs, abandoned and unread. In the mausoleum of vanished languages. Or in a old page of wood s lot, from 5 years ago, half the links dead. Or in a sky crowded with dead satellites, beaming no message to anyone. In Major Tom orbiting the earth ...

A neglected language. An automatic one, lapping between surrealists. Or returning on the couch of Doctor Freud. The speech of the savant or the medium, closed eyed, speaking without thought. 'I didn't mean what I said'. 'I forgot every word'.

Of course, in the end, language can never be itself, that is, separated from every relation. It cannot tear itself away, or not refer. It belongs to relation and to the movement of relation. And to that movement where it seems to lose itself, to be in lieu of itself, that is, without relation.

A dream. In gossip, in chatter, language looks for itself without knowing it.

The Meat of Language

Empty Forms

Tired, so this again and for the hundredth time....

The word 'I' is not a concept, that would grasp this particular tree in terms of a universal. Nor does it refer to that particular in its singularity, since the 'I' is wholly taken over by anyone who speaks. But here, it is not as if there first exists a subject who then expresses himself using language. The 'I' is a position afforded by language that gives birth to the subject.

Benveniste (via): 'In some way language puts forth "empty" forms which each speaker, in the exercise of their discourse, appropriates to himself and which he relates to his "person"'. But note the capacity of the speaker to relate such forms to himself depends upon his birth as a speaker. He does not take up the empty form of the 'I', since he, as a subject, does not pre-exist the personal pronoun. Then language is not first of all personal, but the condition of the subject who can then use pronouns. Somehow - strange miracle - the subject takes up a position with respect to the impersonal streaming, the 'empty forms' of language. It appears as a subject. But what appears?

The subject does not pre-exist language. And yet now there is a self that can speak. 'Can speak' - but from where does this power come? Is the self (is it yet a self?) fated to language? Can it not not speak? Either way, as subject, it has the power to speak: the ability, with respect to language (and not just over language), to be able. Somehow, it is given that power. The power comes from that movement that catches up the not-yet-self, the pre-subject, and makes of it a subject.

Fated to speak, then, and to have power over speech. But only by taking over and animating the empty forms of language. Forms, concepts, that pre-exist the subject and will outlive him. Language that streams with him - without you or I - but to which we owe what we can be. The murmuring of language that streams behind us like the tail of a comet, and streams after us, the tail of other comets, speakers, who come to themselves as you came, and so did I.

Lean Into the Wind

You speak; you've made a dent in the streaming of language. Speak - and you've made a stand in speech, although it is by means of speech that you've made this stand. But what kind of stand is this? To let the wind pass over the aeolian harp you are. To let current seize the vessel of your life. Not a stand then, but a granting. A being granted with respect to which you are not the origin and that is not within your power. Lean into the wind, like little Bernhard on his grandfather's bike. Lean into the streaming of language and let it catch you. And be gathered to the position of subject as the wind carries up the clocks of dandelions and disperses them.

We know Heidegger looks beyond idle chatter and aimless curiosity. That what matters is to speak in your own name (even if the power to speak belongs to the ability to be that being also grants; being is mine, says Heidegger - remember that), and as only you can speak. A stand must be taken; no - it has already been taken, insofar as being always gives itself in individuated Dasein. There is a stand to be taken, the position 'I' that must be reconquered. What else but authenticity is this? No longer the marshes and valleys of curiosity. No longer the fields over which rumour and idle talk pass like the wind. Speak as being-there allows you to speak. Speak from the mountaintop from which everything can be surveyed.

But those same winds - gossip, rumour - are ways in which the impersonality of language gives itself to be experienced. Notions belong to no one. Gossip never substantiated, that floats free of any particular event. And idle talk - where we speak of what happens to others and never to ourselves; where language fails to attach itself to the stability and self-presence of an 'I'. But stability? Self-presence? Does being really give itself as what is mine?

Perhaps we could say being is never mine; that it trails after me from the impersonal field of language an experience that belongs to no one in particular. Being is not mine, then; it is the impersonality of language, empty forms and concepts in their perpetual streaming. An impersonality that remains impersonal, and returns as such, dissolving the opposition authenticity-inauthenticity.

Then a different account of the genesis of the speaking subject than Heidegger. Prepersonal syntheses of various kinds (Deleuze, Simondon) and then the coming to itself of the 'I' through language (Hegel, Blanchot). (My version of what Sinthome said, one time or another).

Black Meat

Think of Bernhard instead, at his farm or away from it, in hotels in Italy or Spain, where he did most of his writing. Bernhard showing his manuscripts to his lifeperson, who pronounces upon them, tells him to publish or discard. Showing her beginnings of manuscripts, and asking, shall I go on? And in between writing - you can't write all the time -, overseeing the renovation of his farmhouse, or of the other farmhouses he buys.

Think of him as he first begins to write, as he finds the strength to continue. Narrators much like the narrators in all his books. Each pretty similar to the other. But the strength to begin again, to see through a book! The strength to hold it together, to write through the days and nights! To let himself be caught and borne up the rhythms of language. And in the breaks of that rhythm, like the hard carapace of a lobster cracked open: the meat of language in its density, its thickness. Language in its black, glistening darkness, there before any story, before anyone could say 'I'.

There are no autobiographies. Or none that can reach back into the black blood that surges before the beginning. Impersonal language, like a sea of oil. Language whose waves must part before anyone can say 'I'. No autobiographies. For how might you write of your birth into language?

What did Bernhard discover when he wrote Frost (or when his first story was published, or his first poem)? Language open to enclose him. As though he had struggled back up the stream; he found his way to the head of the waters, to the rivers rising on the mountains where there were no speakers yet. To write - isn't to come under the spell of the origin? To travel back through language until there was no speaker yet. Or is it to travel forward, when language breaks like black oil upon no shore?

And once you have begun to write there is no end, just as there is no end to speech. One book, another. One and then another, all the way up to the end. Newfoundland: wasn't that to be the last book, the last feast, when language breaks open its carapace? When it reveals itself as only black oil, black blood, black meat?

Speech Adrift

And now I think of the voiceovers in Malick's films. That drift across the scenes, almost despite them. Voices speaking, but saying what. It is as if, with Malick, what they say is the Same. A voice belonging to a man or a woman. Belonging to them, but also somehow, not of them. A voice that is not quite their voice, that stretches what they say into a membrane through which something else shines. The glow of speech behind speech. Of the 'that there is' that speaks speech. Isn't that the Same that is always said, the saying of the said?

Speech drifts across Malick's films. It is allowed to drift, until you're unsure who's speaking. As you listen, you know you're close to something. But to what? Not to the presence of the speaker who speaks with speech. But to the presence of speech, just that, the 'that there is' of speech, of language that sings neutral-voiced, neutralising, with all that is said.

Speech drifts in Malick's films. Until it seems to speak as speak the continuity shots - the chameleon half hidden against the bark, the vermillion parrot that turns its head - as part of a whole order of which the human being is part. Part of an order, but that is not that of nature, the natural. It is not that speech speaks like the parrots squawk.

I admit I distrust the visual, the splendours of the visual. Films seem a kind of pornography to me, that is, except for a very few. They're too visible, and so rarely have room for speech. But Malick is different, who sets speech adrift like a log that slips along a jungle stream. Malick stays close to the origin of the world, of subjects, of speakers. Not to nature, understand, in its simple immensity, but to that leap that lets speech lift itself from what is natural and makes it gratuitous, wayward. As though it had torn apart the immanence of what is. With Malick, speech rides the origin like the log its water ...

Why does Malick refuse interviews and to be photographed? There are no autobiographies. But perhaps, with Malick, everything is autobiography, whole films, as they let voices hover close to where they are brought to birth. Everything - as Malick diffuses his existence across the existences of those who are brought to life in his films. Everything is autobiography, but only as it is the entry into language that is allowed to express itself - that and the comet's tail it cannot help but trail behind.

Evisceration

Ill and at home, but well enough again to read. Which book? I have a wall of books piled up. That one: Duras, Lol V. Stein. That one again, and not because it is familiar. To reread this one is to be gathered up again around its mystery, as though it replaced my own heart. But isn't that the joy: to be gathered around what I cannot enclose, the outside inside, which means this new heart is as great and as wide as the night, and the space within is like the space without, as though I could take vast astronomical x-rays of quasars, planets' rings and stray comets. As though that evisceration of which Mishima used to dream was already accomplished, and I could know my innards were always bleeding outwards to the stars.

Duras's words are pieces of light, I tell myself, streaming above me. Absolute words, flashing like the light above the poles: how is it they have seemed to have detached themselves from anyone - from her narrator, and from Duras herself? How was she able to place word after word that it was another who spoke in her, that it was all of narration that gathered itself up to speak? As though it were the pressure of time, pressing itself forward in words that flash. Ah, but what does any of this mean?

The young Mishima felt words falling within him; he wrote. At sixteen, he was admitted into an elite literary club. His friend Kawabata - who eviscerated himself only a few months after Mishima (though he was Mishima's senior, his advisor, and, unlike him, a Nobel laureate) - knew that such a writer only appeared every two hundred years.

No doubt - but Mishima also felt those falling words a sickness and sought to hone his body in the sun in recompense. No doubt he was right to fear those falling words, that made themselves, with him, into stories, essays, plays of all kinds, in but a single draft, knowing that as they were given to him, they were also turned away.

Opaque pebbles. Markers on what gameboard? He didn't understand. They played him. They fell, indifferently, into the abyss they'd opened in his heart. No stalagmite in him could reach up to touch the source of their instreaming. For a long time, he bent his neck and words fell hard like rain across it. Then he raised his face, his eyes, and looked up through the words. High above, at the cave's summit, the sun. And it was the sun that he would reach to him.

I think it was the dream of his death that allowed his words to flash. Death, that would join him to a sun above writing. A dream, for certain. There is no silence, only murmuring. Pythagoras was right: the universe is noisy. The planets turn in their gyres and a great roaring is heard. It is that we must stop hearing to hear. To speak with silence, and not words, if only to hear what will not be silenced.

What did Mishima hear as he died in the characters he let die by evisceration? The roaring of the sun, heard from within the sun. What did he see? Light, as it's seen within the source of light. He knew what would come to befall him. It was the object of his erotic fantasies, and he staged his death over and again in his stories. He rehearsed for death - but death had already reached him. He wanted to silence the words, to make his body all surface without depth. There would be no dark, interior space within which words would fall, only brightness, as rain falls flashing in the sun.

But what does this mean? That it is my some kind of break that writing might be allowed to echo the ceaseless streaming of language. Some break, some block, as though there had to be a rack upon which the author is stretched. White sheets of agony - yes. But imagine an agony that is owned by no one and a rack upon which no one is stretched. Is it the body of the night that is pulled apart? Is it light that is torn into jagged flecks? Now I imagine it is all of language that turns there like a Chinese dragon. Turns, and is turned against us. Language seeks to attain itself. Molten language, words and sentences still, but running. Isn't that what flashes in Mishima's words and in those of Duras?

What are their characters? Wicker men and women to be sacrificed. What are their stories? Offerings to be burned. What unfolds in the time of their narratives? The setting fire of time; the sacrifice that must always happen again.

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.

Cynicism

Is it necessary to know whether we are being duped by language? It is perfectly familiar: the words which stream round us, directed by the media, ruled by the demands of sales and viewing figures, are motivated not so much as by imparting information as of attracting interest. The same for our politicians, who seek to appeal to what they take to be the desires of their audience. But whose attention do they seek? The readers, viewers and listeners whose desires they claim to discover in focus groups and surveys. What they seek is to confirm a consensual reality - the circulation of words and things, values and signs according to the general equivalent of what are presumed to be the narcissistic investments of particular groups: the ‘caps and gowns,’ the ‘pools and patio’ etc. Ultimately what matters is drawing a line between our friends and families, people like us and the outsiders, prowlers and scroungers.

Are we so easily duped? We expect little else; this is the age of Sloterdijk’s cyncism: we know what we do, but we will do it anyway. Our leaders appeal to words like good and evil which echo feebly in a direction they cannot reach. Are they, these words, the sources of value of an older, more stable world? A world in which, unlike ours, meaning had not began to volatilise? But it is too late and this is why we are cynical: the great unloosening has already happened. There are no longer names and the values attached to those names, but a kind of streaming, a flow of language deterritorialised from traditional markers. Like capital in the Communist Manifesto, such language is the great liquefier of reality, stripping away every value except its own, which no longer has any intrinsic worth. What matters is surplus value, or in the realm to which the media and politicians seek success, surplus attention.

What does it matter whether we are being duped by language? Words, signs, hollow idols, believe and desire in our place. new commanders of language are like the capitalists Marx and Engels tell us are born from the streaming of capital. Are we are the workers to whom will fall the great task of remaking language and remaking the world? Workers who have yet to awaken to their revolutionary potential? But we have already awoken, and this is the tragedy: we know too much; we are no longer innocent; we know, but we carry on regardless. The great lesson of 1992 General Election in the UK: polls predicting the victory of the Labour Party were in error - why? Because no one wanted to admit they would vote Conservative.

Outside

‘Outside language’: outside the language we take to be at our disposal. Words substitute themselves for singular experiences. No: the experiences themselves are already mediated, according to their significance in a system of discourse. But this significance, the sign they are made to bear, the values they are made to reflect, does not exhaust the being of language.

The language of the immediate – this is only a very crude way of invoking the excessiveness of language above signs and values. Language as indication – language which points beyond its letter in the manner of Apollo at Delphi; language as the speech of Pythia which calls for an interpretation which can never have the last word: this is an unsubstitutable experience. Singularity marks itself on the body of language. It is inscribed there.

Exhausted language, frayed language: perhaps it is not a question of the being of language but that experience which prevents language from suggesting any kind of permanence or stability. Language which does not posit. Irresponsible language? Certainly it is spurious (of dubious birth) – its illegitimacy arouses the philosopher’s suspicions: here is a language which will not settle itself into a thesis. A sceptical language (although scepticism is also philosophy). It is never a question of leaving philosophy behind, but of opening in philosophy, as philosophy, the experience which scepticism names.

Maintain this opening in the name of philosophy. In the name, perhaps, of what Kant called critique, or Husserl phenomenology: an awakening or vigilance, an insomnia which awakens us from a world which cannot help but totalise itself, lending itself to a movement of identification. Philosophy, scepticism: these names events in language. Events which find a locus in a certain kind of writing. In literature? – Yes, in a certain experience of literature. In what is called ‘ethics’? This word is too imposing. Write, simply, of the opening to the Other. An opening which is neither good or bad. Which marks itself into the play of language.

Shades

When you speak a kind of substitution occurs. Speak and the words you speak, if they are to be intelligible, are not your words; others have said them and others still will say them; there are always others to say the same, as if, over an infinite expanse of time, it is the same that would be repeated, the same sentences in the same order (however dubious this cosmological hypthesis might be). No escape: then language itself is infinite, everywhere, it is the condition of our experience over which we assert only a borrowed mastery. No exit! It is as if language were a fine, glistening web that had spread over everything, covering our faces and our mouths: impersonal horror. But this is still to evince nostalgia for a true speech, for an uncovered mouth, for an edenic language which would name everything again.

Proceed in another direction. It is a question of what is outside the movement of sense and was outside from the start. But outside with respect to what? With respect to the language that places itself at my disposal. For the most part, language functions. And when it does not? When I lose my power over language? When the capacity to speak, to find a word, fails me? When I fall from my capacity to express myself? Then I am lost in the frozen ocean where words emerge from the obscurity like ice-bergs, drifting, vast and in their stillness, they no longer offer themselves as the means by which I might communicate with others. My words? No one's words, for the ship of meaning has shattered against them and gone under.

Stranded words. Now they are detached even from the possibility of exchange, like coins from an abandoned currency. Yet, like those coins, obscure markers, they become nonsubstitutable, valuable to no one. Who would dare linger in their presence? Only those who have to linger there, for whom speaking, writing, for one reason or another, is no longer possible. But for these powerless speakers, another substitution has occured. Who are they, as they speak, as they fail to speak? Who are they, the ones stranded amid words (and not only words, but sentences, too - tendrils which lead nowhere)? Those who fall beneath the power to appropriate language and thereby outside the world which, through communication, is held in common.

Sisyphus

I admit it: I am completely lost before the massive task of writing the new book. I am too busy at work, for one thing: there are constant administrative tasks and a huge flood of essays to mark. Then there is a low level illness which prevents me from ever assembling any thoughts, or following from one idea to another. Still, these are good days: summer is here, my loud neighbour has moved out, I can get to sleep at a reasonable hour.... But the frustration of falling below the level of work!

The Sisyphean task, every day, to take out my notebook and try and write from what I have written there – it is absurd, work without work, a wheel idly spinning and nothing is done. A list of posts I shall have to write to fill in gaps in the book on my whiteboard: Levinas on illeity, the fragment, Hegel on Heraclitus, and, most bafflingly: exteriority – being (how pretentious!) Then there is W.’s book manuscript on a similar topics to my published book and the one I am writing with which I torment myself with – am I right? Is he right? We can’t both be right! What does it matter who is right? Isn't it philosophy that is at issue - the attempt to do philosophy (whatever that means)?

Doing philosophy? What a luxury! And one you can’t afford! You are a writer, a humble writer, I say to myself, knowing straightaway this is sheer affectation. Still there is the chance of redeeming the first book in the second – this is the ruse: write another book, always another, to erase the mistakes of the last one. But to write another book is to make new mistakes, so the path to yet another book is cleared.

Sisyphean task! Laughter at the great comedy of the academic writer. Who will read the book? What does it matter? It’s exhausting – it exhausts me! Where did I learn that ponderous style? Here I am, at the office. On a Saturday at the beginning of summer. Tomorrow, the Lake District – that is a consolation. Today – is too long; I know nothing will begin, that what failed to begin yesterday and all the other days will fail again today.

Outside Language

Why does the experience of the neutrality of language (as described in the previous post) escape most novels? Because they are content to reflect the world back to itself – because language is not uncanny, or its uncanniness lies solely in its capacity to effect a representation. Because language is made to bend to the virtuoso’s will– the novelist who is all too present, all too obtrusive. But then to allow sentence to fall gently after sentence – is it a matter of the novelist’s will? Is it a question, here, of what the novelist sets out to accomplish, or might one write of a kind of necessity or fate within writing itself? A fate that plays itself across the work of different authors?

The danger of imparting a kind of volition to writing is obvious: a dualistic metaphysics, where writing takes the place of what Schopenhauer would call the will. But to invoke writing is a way of figuring those movements which traverse the human being without being reducible to a particular will. For is the individual will not a way of connecting with transpersonal forces? Understand the human being in terms of the forces which traverse it without positing the primacy of the world of representation, and you have a monistic metaphysics.

Writing, then: no longer a question of the style of a particular individual (I will come back to this). It is a force – a becoming – but of what? Of language – and it will have been there from the start. Language, it appears, locks us into representation: call a cat a ‘cat’ and you have already assimilated it in its living immediacy into a category. But what if it was never even there in its immediacy – or if its immediacy was such that it is already given as a ‘cat’? Language articulates a world, it is true – but does not also co-constitute that world to the extent that to struggle against a determination of the world is also to struggle against language?

Fortunately, there is always an ‘outside’ of language - of any possible language: the ‘noise’ which separates message from medium, infinitely deferring the possibility of ever capturing the world in a language. This ‘noise’: rhythm, syntax, texture, sonority, colour offers a chance to resist. Irony, buffoonery, ‘improper’ and patois (Deleuze and Guattari: minor) uses of language can perform variations on major codes. Where is the novel in all of this? Perhaps what I have called writing falls into a genealogy of variations on a major language – variations linked to the literary work (as well as many other phenomena).

Plato allows Socrates to criticise the Rhapsode because he does not really know of what he would speak (he is only an imitator of Homer). And the novels which fill our bookshops? It is not, here, a question of what prizewinning novelists would know or what they would not know, but of the imitation of a particular model of the novel (a classicism). And to break with imitation? Perhaps it is to give way to an experience of writing that simply happens – and does so with particular vehemence in that period called literary modernism – in the joy of writing outside a classical idiom (the regulation of verse)? Perhaps this is too quick and too crude (for has this not already occurred with Cervantes and Sterne – and certainly with Holderlin)?

The classicism of the novel (of most, perhaps nearly all novels) is a retrenchment against the experience in question. Read Beckett's The Unnameable, Kafka's The Castle, Cixous's work in general (The Book of Promethea) and what do you find? Summary in place of a reading: writing without model, writing writing writing.