Spurious

3 Live Bands

Slint: a hard name, suggesting stone, flint, a dark surface which reflects nothing but darkness. Is it because it refuses to reflect us that Spiderland is loved? Do we love it because it brings the unknown very close to us? Because it passes by us without allowing itself to be recognised according to the signs to which we are accustomed to classify our music?

Spiderland, enigmatic meteor, an album from the day after the last album is recorded, music from the other side of the end of time. Rigid, hard, austere, it gives us nothing we can accommodate. What words can one throw at this dark event? Unease? Disquiet? Above all, this is a sober album, it is dry, it opens a kind of desert through which it is difficult to pass.

Album without precedent and without successor.

2.

The singers of Modest Mouse and Arab Strap are burly, angry men who swig from wine bottles. They move from fearful sincerity to drunken laughter to ironic bonhomie and all the while tremble on the void. Marvellous to note thes elf-deprecating humour of the singers: men afraid to take themselves too seriously lest they usurp the void.

3.

The members of Explosions in the Sky are men interchangeable with anyone else, plaid shirted, bejeaned, and who speak between songs with simpleness and humility. Theirs is a music, unlike Slint's, on this side of the end of time, music of the novas and shooting stars, of deafening roar that might be like the music Pythagoras claimed roared all around us.

Here is an impersonal joy, a correlate to the impersonal anguish of Slint. A music of the upper atmosphere, the fiery element where the aurora borealis burns. We were carried, the audience, into the ghostly light where the air is on fire.

The Day After the Revolution

‘Language has been given to man so he may make surrealist use of it.’

Surrealism is the faith that language might permit the great overcoming of the antimonies and contradictions which prevent us from realizing our total existence. All difficulties will be resolved; this new language we speak will attain what language always struggled to be (the places of struggle? Lautréamont’s Maldoror, Rimbaud’s Illuminations, Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Earth …). And what does it want? To attain itself as thinking itself and not a means of thinking, to attain the truth of immediacy, of immediate life and not its mediation. Language will no longer be an instrument through which the human being might realize its freedom: automatic poetry is freedom, not freedom incarnated, but freedom absolute – freedom acting and manifesting itself. My freedom does pass through words, it is realized in them; I discover, through writing, a relation to myself without intermediary. Whence the surrealist attack on the hackneyed notion of individual talent, on the artwork as hallowed cultural object, on the great museums and galleries of our culture. For it is an equality that is issue; we are equal with respect to the gift of automatism.

Surrealist poetry is a poetry of freedom, of spontaneity, of automatism. How then to understand the Surrealists’ avowal of Marxism, of communism? How to understand the poetry that would give itself in service of the revolution? Because to write freely is also to take responsibility for what freedom is not; it is to brace oneself against the conditions of society, to flash against the darkness of our present condition – to flash, and, in this flashing, to expose the cracks and interstices, the great contradictions in the present state of society.

The Surrealist knows that the problems that we take to be important are only a function of the contradictions implicit in our society; it is only after the revolution that one can begin to understand what freedom might mean. Freedom will be grasped negatively until it is grasped no longer freedom from oppression, from exploitation. And on the day after the revolution? Ah, but that is the day from which automatic poetry is written. It calls us on the pages we read and write. It is bound to the affirmation of a freedom to come; it is already there, ahead of us. Inspired, automatic writing is also critical; if it appears uncommitted this is only because it is belongs to another order of commitment, because it burns like a star which has consumed everything but itself; it is total, absolute.

Human possibility, human capacity – are these words appropriate for a poetry which reaches us from the future and calls us towards an unimaginable equality? Perhaps it is better to write of what is humanly impossible, or what at least reaches us from the day which arrives on the other side of time.

Frayed Time

Fear of the afternoon when you fall below the level of work, of the capacity to work. And then what? Drifting time, the moments lead nowhere, seconds swell into hours, hours into days. You focus on nothing in particular, you notice nothing, no changes. Impersonal attention. The blank, white sky. You can’t say: I can do nothing - you can’t find the words, or any words. Pass an afternoon like this and it is as though you have lived forever. As though the afternoon had happened a million times over and is now worn down and exhausted. Frayed time, time worn down. Space drawn thin over the void.

Six Matchboxes

A favourite Giacometti story repeated by Michael Kimmerman, via Cahiers du Doute.

In 1939, Giacometti chose, for a while, to make figures from memory rather than from life, but no matter how hard he tried, the figures kept turning out smaller than he wanted. The problem persisted two years later when he decided to visit his mother, who was then in Geneva, promising friends and also his brother Diego that he would return to Paris with works of a less absurd size.

But with one exception, the figures he made in Switzerland came out tiny, too. He would start over and over again on the same one. It was a sculpture of his friend Isabel standing one evening on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The memory stuck in his head. “It isn’t the lack of a visa that’s stopping me coming back,” he wrote to her. “I can come back when I like. It’s my sculpture that’s keeping me.”

It kept him in Geneva from 1941 through 1945. When he finally boarded the train back to France, he took with him three and a half years’ worth of work in six matchboxes.

Nudity

I cannot resist commenting once again on these lines from the last piece I am aware that Blanchot published ('The Watched Over Night').

Slowly, during those nights when I sleep without sleeping, I become aware – the word’s not right – of your proximity, which yet is distant. And then I convinced myself that you were there. Not you, but this repeated statement: ‘I’m going away, I’m going away’.

And suddenly I understood that Robert, who was so generous, so little concerned about himself, wasn’t speaking to me about himself, not for himself, but about all the extermination sites – if it was he who was speaking. He listed some of them. “Listen to them, listen to their names: Treblinka, Chelmno, Belzec, Maidanek, Auschwitz, Sobibor, Birkenau, Ravensbruck, Dachau”.

I’m going away: but is Antelme who is speaking, or, somehow, the extermination sites themselves, these terrible names.

“But”, I say, speaking, not speaking, “do we forget?”

“Yes, you forget, the more because you remember. Your remembering does not keep you from living, from surviving, even from loving me. But one doesn’t love a dead man, because then you escape meaning and the impossibility of meaning, non-being and the impossibility of non-being”.

One doesn’t love a dead man – one doesn’t love the dead: but why not? Is there something about death which prevents love? Perhaps, in loving, we love the other because of the singular way of being, of his or her particularities, because of all that makes him or her familiar to us. And in the death camps? It is difficult to recognise the dying and the dead. Difficult, too, to retain a hold upon oneself in confronting them. Can you love? It is not a question of capacity or potential. Do you love? Yes, if you love the other as the unknown and are, as a lover, yourself the unknown. Yes, if your love strips you down to your nudity and you love the other who is no longer anyone you know. But is this love?

Impossible love. But why is it neither non-being nor the impossibility of non-being? Because it will not settle into a simple negativity which could then be put to work, nor indeed into a simple thesis which could then be negated. Nor will it allow itself to translated into meaning even as it refuses to disappear into non-meaning. Neither one nor the other: ne uter, it trembles at the boundary of sense and non-sense, being and non-being.

Rereading these lines, I realise that I have already lost sight of Robert Antelme, of the incomparable friend I had known. He was so simple and at the same time so rich in a knowledge that is lacking to the greatest minds. In the experience of servitude that was his, even though he shared it with others, he retained that true humanity from which he knew not to exclude those who were oppressing him.

The SS, as The Human Race attests, are driven to a compulsive rage to destroy because they know the prisoners belong to the same human race. What does Antelme know? That to so belong is to belong as no one in particular.

But he went even further. Not recognising, in the infirmary, a companion he had come to see, who was still alive, he understood that even in life there is nothingness, an unfathomable emptiness against which we must defend ourselves even while being aware of its approach; we have to learn to live with this emptiness. We shall maintain our fullness, even in nothingness.

I commented on these lines a couple of posts back.

This is why, Robert, I still have my place beside you, and this watched-over night where you just saw me is not an illusion where everything disappears, but my right to make you live even in that nothingness I feel approaching.

It is our nothingness, our common unity which binds us together.

Slash and Burn

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Poetic genius is not verbal talent (verbal talent is neccesary, since it is a question of words, but if often leads one astray): it is the divining of ruins secretly expected, in order that so many immutable things become undone, lose themselves, communicate.

Remembering the question from the last blog, asked with respect to Bataille: what does the poet sacrifice? This, perhaps, is the wrong question, for the slipping word is not merely a strategy among others in the poet’s armory. Even if it is a question of writing of this silence or this forest, it is still not a question of making this word or that slip, but a slippage of the whole of meaning, of the economy of sense. This, of course, counts only for the Bataillean poet, who is unconcerned with literary reputation. This is the poet who would sacrifice sense itself, and sacrifice herself just as sense is sacrificed.

I wrote - crudely, quickly - of a component of language which refuses to allow itself to be taken up into the idea. The philosopher, perhaps, regards it as only the remnant of language – a kind of appendix or vestigial tail (this is a characiture ...). But for the poet, it is, this same richness, the very richness of language, it is what cannot be removed from language; it is the plenitude which remains when language is no longer employed to make sense (sense and non-sense must be thought together, sense opening against a background of non-sense and non-sense struggling in turn to present itself in its withdrawal as the 'richness' in question ...)

It is this material element, which, in the articulation of sense, allows language to sacrifice itself, which the poem offers to the sacrificial fire. The 'matter' of the word (the vestigal tail, the remnant ...) is the poet’s fuel. It is akin to the wicker man or the potlatch which, through its destruction, points to the world which burns within our world (towards our burning world ...). If Bataille writes of a ‘sovereign silence’, this is not the silence one might see and not say. It is not a question, here, of ineffability. A sovereign silence arises from the interruption of the struggle between sense and non-sense.

Heraclitus associates what he draws the logos close to a kind of cosmic fire, which periodically scorches the cosmos only to let it be reborn again, like those tribes who slash and burn the forest in order to renew the fertility of its soil.

Let’s say I am the Bataillean poet who writes the word fire (I admit, I haven't clarified this at all ...) The sentence slips. The poem, transforming itself into a thing, would enter the flames, giving itself up, yielding itself to the flames. A blazing poem, pure sacrifice. A blazing incarnation of thought without determinable content: a thinking born and killed over and again in the crucible of the poem.

For a moment, then, it appears the poem is the salamander who lives in the flames. What is sacrificed? The dream that the poem can reach pure immediacy – that it can achieve, by itself, the silence, the forest ... It is not, then the immediate which commits itself to sacrifice, but the dream of recapturing the world in the poem. It is mimesis, understood crudely as the representation of the world, of the shackling of language to a shackled understanding of the world. Then the Bataillean poet is the enemy of the novelist whose ambition is to represent the world back to itself. One might say this: at some level or another, the novelist fears the poet – for in the poet's words, the novelist knows there is a flame which might leap across to the pages of his own book. Bataille’s poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And Bataille? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from his death, his continual dying.

Set the novel aflame. Watch five hundred pages crinkle and burn. The poem has been awoken in the novel. A poem that is language, that is the matter, the dregs of language, which has been set aflame. Nietzsche: Night itself is a sun.

Perhaps it is possible to write of an autopoetry – of a fire which is always burning in the words one normally pushes around like coins. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the unexchangeable. 'Fire is an exchange for all goods' Heraclitus writes; yes, but it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces coin with the destruction of coins, where the coin is valuable because it destroys itsely. Autopoetry - because sacrifice is automatic, because it is ongoing and the poem is only one site of the great sacrifice that the world also is.

It is said whoever sees God dies. The poem turning itself towards the immediate comes face to face with what sets it aflame. Face to face? But the poem does not have a face which could bear the face of the burning world. Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its brightness: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the world to the page and then from the page of the poem to every page in every books ...

Holderlin: 'Now come, fire'. Come, then, in the poem which puts fire to the names in order to reveal an experience which burns at the heart of the flames. Heraclitus allows that physis itself is fire; that beings burn in the light of what withdraws as they come to presence. To which one might say: everything that exists is sacrificed at every moment. Further: there is only sacrifice. What there is is sacrifice. And perhaps the word 'is' is sacrificed (it is there the poem lives, opening up a difference in the 'is' and as the 'is' ...)

Hear the roaring of the logos, and know the fire which burns in all things. What does the poet sacrifice? The world, the poem - but isn't the poet herself sacrificed (but then it is not a question of the poet's accomplishing anything - doesn't sacrifice begin as soon as everything begins? Doesn't a poem - or the movement of a sacrificial poetry - burn within the most sober sentence? And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), do you, the reader, burn in turn?

Perhaps this is how Bataille's Inner Experience gives itself to be read (this is how what there is gives itself to be experienced in its pages).... Thus, as for Heraclitus, the cosmos is killed and reborn from fire, but now it is the fire of the poem that is the crucible from which everything dies and rebegins. Blanchot: 'I am alive. No, you are dead'.

Sovereign Silence

Among various sacrifices, poetry is the only one whose fire we can maintain, renew.

If I have known how to produce the silence of others within me, I am, myself, Dionysus, I am the crucified. But should I forget my solitude ...

The poet sacrifices, Bataille writes in Inner Experience, but what is it that is sacrificed? A first answer: that of which shthe poet would speak; the world, in its presence, its immediacy. Think of the word silence (this is Bataille's example). The poet celebrates a silence she remembers - a singular silence, which belongs to a particular time and place. But to write of silence is, in one sense, to lose this it; 'the word silence is still a sound ...'

Compare it to a performance of Cage's 4’33". Of course, what Cage gives us is a singular silence, the silence of this auditorium, of this orchestra before this audience? 4’33". is not made of the sound, but of silence; here, silence is another kind of sound; something resounds even when the musicians do not play. Is Cage’s ruse open to the poet? Might one write a poem called Silence and leave the page blank? Or must poetry be made of words?

If the poet cannot do without words, or if words are in some sense important to the poem, then one can only indicate silence by way of words. To invoke the materiality of the word, the heaviness of language, may not be to lament the awkwardness of matter, as Hegel lamented the heavy obscurity of Egyptian statuary, from which form had yet to free itself. True, these are heavy images, but it is the weight of language – its rhythms, its sonorities – which are perhaps the poet’s chance.

For the one Bataille calls a philosopher, this heaviness is an obstacle; classically, the philosopher attempts to leap over the idiom of a natural language in order to write of the thing itself. The philosopher’s doctrine elevates itself above its expression; language is a medium, the tool which subordinates itself to the delivery of the message. Rhythm and sonority – the material of language – are, from this perspective, just so much static and noise. And for the poet? Perhaps it is possible the poet might the poem answer the presence of that silence by deploying the rhythmical and sonorous properties of words. But isn't this, once again, to have lost the silence of which one would write, or at least, to have regained it in a manner which can only disappoint?

What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its subordination to the order of signification. Isn't naming – poetic naming itself something more than signification? To indicate, to point - but towards what? To the silence which has already been lost?. But this is still too simple. Rather, to the distance between the immediate and the mediation which appears to occur through language. 'Appears to occur': because it is not clear that silence is mediated when I call it 'silence' - or at least that such mediation is not a loss of that silence, a deafening roar. The word silence is too noisy. But isn't silence, for this reason, Bataille asks, 'the most poetic' of words (16)? ‘Most poetic’ because it reveals both the limits of one conception of language (signification), disclosing what lies, in language, beyond a servile representation of the world. Here, we have passed beyond the question of the ineffable.

The word silence undergoes a kind of slippage. It slips in the sentence. And through that slippage, by means of it, Bataille can attend to the ‘incessant slippage of thought’; this is how, through language, he can attempt ‘the project of abolishing the power of words, hence of project’ (22). The movement of mediation is interrupted. The slippage of the word has released another experience of language and, perhaps, an experience of a thinking which does not mediate or abstract. A strange thought: to open, a sovereign silence by means of poetry ('by means of' ... surely this is wrong).

A sovereign silence? This is no longer silence which awaits mediation through language, nor indeed what is mediated in the word silence. A silence of discourse - or, better, a silencing of what subordinates language to signification, to the articulation of sense. To attain a sovereign silence is to make contact with a reader such that, in that reading, there is a break with the demand which governs signification, that is, the subordination of the world to the demands of the project, to identity, to unity.

Ordinary language, let us say following Bataille, is servile. But then, because the poetry is composed of the same words as ordinary language (even if signification is suspended), it cannot help but fall back into the regime of sense. The poem can appear to be an edifying work. Can the Bataillean poet - the one who struggles towards a sovereign silence and whose poetry might be said, for this reason, to be itself sovereign - avoid this fate? But the Bataillean poem is made of words; even if it does more than signify, it also signifies; it signifies nonetheless and therefore must bear the risk of falling back into servility. This means the sacrifice of discourse in the poem is never pure; it cannot happen once and for all. It is necessary to begin and rebegin - to read, to write over and again ...

Sacrifice, sovereignty, the disobedient. Perhaps this is a struggle which occurs ceaselessly, at the edges of sense. A secret battle which reveals itself only for those who cave hears to hear what presents itself even as it disappears (presents itself in disappearance, as what withdraws, as an indication) in the rhythms and sonorities of our words, in laughter and tears?

It is not a question of severing ordinary language from poetic language, because this is already to forget laughter and tears. Might one hear a sovereign silence in a kind of irony that is quite different to the one Socrates and Kierkegaard employ in order to allow their readers to discover the truth, the hidden truth, by themselves? Imagine, instead, an irony which does not seek to recover truth, a madness by which words dissolve into a laughter which carries them in another direction: the contagious giggling of children, the buffoonery of Dostoevsky's underground man.

And perhaps, too, there is a thinking of sacrifice - no, that is the wrong expression - a sacrificial thinking which attempts to bear within itself the sovereign silence towards which the Bataillean poet struggles. Here, I remember Artaud's early letters to Rivere (I do not have them to hand). One finds in those pages a suffering-thinking, a thinking which is suffered, passively undergone (but the word 'passive' is too simple ...). A thinking which cannot help but sacrifice itself, which is mired in suffering and cannot lift itself from the crucible of the instant.

Common Presence

Common presence: these two words, translating a poem and an anthology by René Char, indicate what I would like to be able to think.

Char’s anthology Commune Présence, published in 1964, includes no records of the dates of the poems it collects in eight main clusters; there is no chronological ordering here. To what does its title refer? To an experience shared by poet and reader – to an experience of the poem that allows a presence to be shared. One cannot help but be reminded of Heraclitus, always an important presence in Char’s poetry, for whom the logos is said to be common. Common presence: does this refer to Char’s version of the logos which maintains itself beyond what we take to be opposites, but which Heraclitus tells us are always in struggle and interchange?

Char's poems are shards, fragments. Each poem is comprised of autonomous phrases – one leaps from phrase to phrase. There is not harmony here – or if we are to use this word, it would in accordance with Heraclitus, for whom harmonia names a kind of accordance. Do we know what harmonia is? Do we know what this word meant to Heraclitus and how to read Char alongside Heraclitus in view of the stakes of this word harmonia? Thinking of the last few blogs, which were an attempt to understand the phrase 'commune présence', I would like argue that Char's poetry returns us to the harmony-without-harmony of Heraclitus.

'Harmony-without-harmony': why this cumbersome and ridiculous phrase? Because the accordance between the fragment and the matter to be thought, to be indicated by the fragment is a harmony of strife, a struggling discord. Here it is a matter of attending to an event which Heidegger indicates when he writes of physis - of the coming-into-appearance of things as it is accompanied by a withdrawal; the process through which things are given such that they come to stand even as this determination is accompanied by an indetermination. Ah, but it's more complex than that - for are determination and indetermination not given in the event that physis names?

The Simplest Speech

From Leaves of Hypos, trans. Jackson Matthews

Ce qui m'a mis au monde et qui m'en chassera n'intervient qu'aux heures où je suis trop faible pour lui resister. Vielle personne quand je suis né. Jeune inconue quand je mourrai.
Le seule et meme Passante.

What brought me into the world, and will drive me out of it, comes to me only at moments when I am too weak to resist. Old when I was born, She will be young and unknown when I die.
The same, the only Passer-by.

A few lines in the margins of Blanchot’s The Infinite Conversation. When will I understand what he means by le neuter?

What are the characteristics of Char’s poetry? Blanchot lists: 1) There is the emphasis on the substantive ‘the absolute inextinguishable’, ‘the impossible living’, ‘pleasure’s moaning’, ‘Chilling’ [Transir], ‘Bordering’, 2) an extraordinary density of images, which multiply along the phrase, 3) ‘a tendency to paratactic order; when words having no articles defining them, verbs without a determinable subject (‘Alone dwell’), and phrases without verbs speak to us without any preestablished relations that organise or connect them’. These are all part of the articulation of a fragmentary speech [parole]

The fragment – not a negation of an existing whole, just as it is not part of that whole. Neither privative nor positive, then; one must think in terms of a separation and discontinuity and even an exile. In these terms, one must think the fragmented poem not in terms of what it does not accomplish, but in terms of an accomplishment measured by another measure. It is a matter of writing, of a questioning, or an affirmation linked to the multiple, to what lies beyond unity.

Is the fragment an aphorism? No, Blanchot insists: the aphorism has a horizon; it closes itself – it is bounded. By contrast, the peculiarity of Char’s poetry is the way it is composed of separate phrases each of which seems separate from the others – each isolated and disassociated to the extent one is obliged to leap from phrase to phrase across blank spaces of text. A peculiar arrangement. Here, it is not a question of harmony, unless this is understood by analogy to what Heraclitus thought as the invisible harmonia behind paired contrasts: that hidden harmonia linked to other enigmatic words to which he granted a new profundity: logos, aletheia, physis. As with Heraclitus, it is a question of what is disjunct, of a divergence or breakage which permits the opening to an exteriority beyond a simple signification. Is it possible to say that something is named thereby – that an indication occurs by dint of that relation which reaches beyond what can be signified, that, as with Heraclitus, there is a revelation of something that is common and hidden, which reveals and conceals?

Heraclitus often speaks in the neuter singular; one finds phrases like ‘the-one-thing-wise’, ‘the not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-expected’, ‘the-not-to-be-found’, ‘the-not-to-be-approached’, ‘the common’. What do they designate? Neither the Platonic idea nor the Aristotlean concept. The neuter – not a third gender so much as that which cannot be assigned to a genre. It is neither general nor particular; neither subject nor object. Does this mean it oscillates between the two, or that it awaits determination? It is, rather, a question of another kind of relation which escapes us for as long as we pass over what is specific to a thinking-poetry, a movement of research. Another relation? One which opens onto a height analogous to the one Zeus assumes when he measures with his scales the balance of forces at the Trojan War?

In Char’s poetry, an archipelagic speech permits the open sea to surge between phrase-islands. Something passes – but who passes? Does ‘the passing’ refer to the one who passes or to another movement? ‘How does one live without the unknown before us?’ asks Char. Poetry, the relation to the unknown. Not the not yet known, nor indeed the absolutely unknowable one would approach by means of a process akin to negative theology. Poetry: the relation to the unknown as the unknown, keeping it unknown, allowing it to remain under cover. It is a question of indication. Poetry: speech which indicates. It is, for Blanchot, the simplest speech. Why? Because its speech is the way the unknown is indicated, the way it is named and brought to language.

Understanding Endgame

One reads with Heidegger of the first beginning [Anfang], the Ereignis, the originating event of the West through which the great names physis, aletheia, logos appeared etc., etc. What then of the event called Auschwitz – or for which the name 'Auschwitz' is a synecdoche? Did it give us a new set of primal words, or does it exacerbate the ones we already have? Did it accomplish a glorious new Dichtung, bringing names forward in the fire of a new experience of the logos, or did it, rather, mock that same Dichtung and that same fire?

Adorno on Beckett, in the famous ‘Trying to Understand Endgame’: ‘Understanding it can mean only understanding its intelligibility [Unverständlichkeit], concretely reconstructing the meaning of the fact that it has no meaning’. It has no meaning? It is set after an indeterminate disaster; the apocalypse has happened. In postwar Europe, ‘everything, including a resurrected culture, has been destroyed without realising it; humankind continues to vegetate, creeping along after events that even the survivors cannot really survive, on a rubbish heap that has made even reflection on one’s own damaged state [Zerschlagenheit] useless’. They talk, the characters, they repeat lame jokes, they babble and mutter. There is nothing to talk about, nothing to do. Movement is ritual without meaning. What happens will happen again. Dead time.

In the face of this, understanding cannot, as for Kant, bring intuitions under concepts. Do not try to understand Endgame – but do not try, likewise, to grasp it under the heading of Heideggerian Dichtung (which itself bestows understanding, bringing beings to a stand). Does it call for a new beginning – for us to dream of a new Dichtung, a new happening of the Ereignis? Or does it attest, rather, to the impossibility not only of such a happening but of the ‘first’ beginning [Anfang] of which Heidegger writes?