To leave a blank Word document open – the promise of writing as I go about the house, clearing up in preparation for the visit of R.M. Outside, a white sky, inside, a white Word document: two expanses. Did I drink too much last night to write this morning? I think so. Five pints and two tequilas, spread over a long night, it is true. Too much. Last night we sunk pickled eggs into our porter – an old Stoke practice, apparently, from the potteries. How lovely they looked! It made the four of us, the usual four, laugh happily.
I am listening to Malone Dies and clearing up instead of writing. Listening to Beckett’s words make it difficult to write my own, but there are several things I should write. I have printed out Steve Mitchelmore's essay on Roubaud here beside me on the table and then the book itself, much read, annotated, and I wouldn't say loved exactly but one which I waited my whole life to read. Which was prefigured in every day of that life.
Here is a passage on which I would like to write. Alix is the name of Roubaud's wife:
1178 days. I knew Alix 1178 days, and the moment of this new beginning (months on end have elapsed, vanished between the first and second fragments of this bifurcation) is the first to go by, 1178 days after the day she died. My obsession with numbering correlates one day of grief with each day of her love.
This is not going to be a proper post - a well-rounded little essay on Roubaud, a mini-treatise on his use of interpolation and bifurcations, however much I'd like to write one. I am hungover, for one thing and although all the signs are propitious for work, strength fails me (why did I let myself drink those two late tequilas in the nightclub?) And then there is the perverse desire to answer Destruction with a destruction of my own. But what does that mean?
Conversation (a while ag0) with W. He says he wants to be as clear as possible in what he writes. I tell him that's not my aim. He says, that's obvious and we laugh and then, speaking of the commentaries I've written I say: I want to let Blanchot's prose as it were carry my own prose, to bear it. To allow the book on which I write to continue a movement which began and continues to begin in his writing and that before everything. To exhibit a fidelity which would not be a simply imitation, but something else. Ah, I didn't put it in those terms, and besides, I completely failed in my ambition. But it is a pleasant hope, one which Derrida himself had and not just of Blanchot (of writing on Blanchot).
Weber distinguishes 'classical' deconstruction from what was to come later, after the second cluster of three books were published in 1972. Is this plausible? W. dislikes Derrida's attempt, as W. puts it, to become a writer. What do I think? The prose is so laborious. I'd rather read him speak about his prose than read it, with a few exceptions. And then, late on - in the 1990s - even the interviews come to disappoint, again with a few exceptions. But who doubts we are in the presence of brilliance? As I read, I ask myself not what Derrida is working towards but why he works in this way. He speaks wonderfully on the subject and says he feels distant from the others around him, all the others, except Lacan, the other one who takes written risks, for whom writing itself is a risk. He feels close to Lacan for this reason, he says, but then on another occasion, will write that it is to Deleuze he feels closest, even though their works seem to differ in so many ways.
I tell W. I've always felt a tenderness towards Derrida's texts. W., demurring, speaks of a sincerity possessed by certain writers, perhaps those who have passed close to death. You can only write when you've died, says W., and he mentions Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. When you've died and come to life again. That's what he said, and I remembered a passage in Derrida's 'To Speculate - on Freud' where he suggests that the death of Freud's daughter Sophie is prefigured by Freud's 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'. Yes - prefigured, and not, therefore, remembered in Freud's speculative essay as so many commentators would have it. Prefigured, meaning the temporality of Nachtraglichkeit would have in some strange way have to be reversed. It is not the trauma that awakens itself long after the original event, but a strange anticipation of the event.
I would like to use the expression 'dark precursor' here, thinking of its French sense as the gathering darkness before the lightning strikes, but I'm not sure how. 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' would be the stormcloud that gathers so the lightning-strike of Sophie's death could burst through the sky. That dreams in advance of the death of it's author's daughter.
Now I remember another peculiar scene. As recorded in 'The Instant of My Death' - a text repeated word for word, in its entirety in Derrida's Demeure after Blanchot wanted to withdraw his little tale from his publisher, who was preparing to print some anti-Semitic creed - Blanchot records what we must take to be his escape from death. In 1944 (but on what date? - I've forgotten) he was put up against the wall to be shot as a member of the Resistance. Then the resolve of his captors withered. He was free to go, and so he went.
I know it - do I know it - that the one at whom the Germans were already aiming, awaiting but the final order, experineced then a feeling of extraordinary lightness, a sort of beatitude (nothing happy however) - sovereign elation? The encounter of death with death? In his place, I will not try to analyse. He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead - immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.
What is strange is that the relation to death this incident would lead to is prefigured in Blanchot's earlier writings - his Thomas the Obscure and Aminadab, not to mention the manuscript confined from the house by his would be murderers and the many literary essays he had already written. Then he was bound to death in friendship before the the event in question.
Between W. and myself there is a contretemps about death and writing. I remember what W. said about Hugh Selby Jr. and Bernhard. Yes, they came close to death; perhaps they might even be said to have passed through it (how beautiful!) But I think of a marvellous commentary on Derrida's essays on psychoanalysis by Maud Ellman where she writes, after noting Derrida's claim about the prefiguration of Sophie's death:
Is this an attack of mysticism - or numerology - on Derrida's part? Or is he imputing to Freud's text the temporal inversions of Nachtraglichkeit [...] whereby the psyche strives to master trauma after the event by generating the anxiety that should have been aroused before the unforessen catstrophe? Or is he tracking down the deadly work of the compulsion to repeat, which overrides the boundaries between life and text, before and after, cause and effect, disseminating symptoms that refer to nothing prior to their own proliferation. If so, Sophie's death, rather than preciptating this compulsion, is swept into its maelstrom, rolled round in its inexorable revolutions.
It is a lovely passage. Derrida is fortunate in his best readers, but then he created the texts which allowed them to so read. What a gift! But then what happened, later on? What happened as more and more texts appeared while around them the swirl of commentary moved ever more quickly? Derrida, marvellously, knows that of which we might suspect him. Guiltily, promising myself not to tell W. of my purchase, I bought Derrida's Counterpath. There he recounts a marvellous dream about Blanchot he had on my birthday (May 2nd) and remembers his friend Blanchot's anxieties about his (Derrida's) willingness to travel the world to give lectures. It is a humorous moment. I laughed, and thought: Derrida knows, it's clear to him ...
I read Counterpath on the train returning north. That was some time ago. I didn't buy Rogues; I forced myself not to. Enough, I told myself. Writing this post, the issue that bothers me with respect to Derrida, to Derrida and writing, has crystallised itself in a question: can we speak of an experience of death through which the writer has to pass in order to write? Ah, you might say, existentialism! How hackneyed! But I would say in turn, this is a time which needs resoluteness and decision. How many books there are! How many books! This is the age of philosophy, whether you want to call it theory or not, when everyone in the humanities and the social sciences reads philosophy. Yes, it is everywhere, but that is also to say nowhere.
A decision is required. A decision about writing and about philosophy. One into whose space I cannot bring myself. I am lagging - why? Speaking of this to W. we come to a similar conclusion: it was literature. I am caught, snagged, by an experience of reading. Of reading literature. The same is true for W. Is this why we devised the rules of Philosophy Dogma. I am laughing as I write this, but still ...
The decision, then: for Derrida, the death of Sophie was prefigured in 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle'; death would be woven into a repetition which allows life to live, on this account. One need not think of a particular event as instigating that trauma which will then repeat itself according to the logic of Nachtraglichkeit (yes I know I should put in the umlaut). But then what of death? What of that death through which one would have to pass in order to write as it were on the same path as Plato's eros is said to wander in the Symposium. That path not towards philosophy but that is philosophy itself. A loving, a friendship - with death? That's what reverberates for me in Blanchot's text (in the passage I quoted).
Candour: I suspect it is Derrida who is right. What does this mean, then, for the decision, for resoluteness, for the whole thematics of assuming death in which 'Beyond the Pleasure Principle' is implicated? I began this blog for many reasons, but one was to surprise myself writing, to learn of my unconscious as I wrote quickly - of that realm populated not only with images of fathers and mothers, the whole Oedipal drama - but of desires which might then turn me in the direction of philosophy. Laughable ambition! But a persistent theme - its persistence surprises me - is that of inadequation and impotency, of the fall and the buffoon. What do these themes announce? They prefigure an encounter with Derrida's philosophy (but also with Deleuze's): of an experience of difference and repetition. But an encounter buried deeply in my life, prefigured there from the first.
Now I would like the book which began 1178 days before Roubaud met Alix, prefiguring it. I would like to write the dark precursor that would end in a flash of lightning. And what is that flash?
... night for night, the palindromic distancing of time (palindromic in relation to recollection) brings me back to the moment of our meeting, then to the moment before our meeting, when from the tiny Mitsou car I happened onto the site of an incipient coincidence exactly below the window from which would give rise the sound of a delivery van that I mentioned at the start of the very first fragment of this story.
The book - my imaginary one, the destruction of Destruction - ends with Roubaud meeting Alix.