Spurious

Out of Our Idiocy

We were never witty, W. and I agree. We are not raconteurs; we do not have conversation, as we imagine others have conversation. Of course W. can do an impression of a wit, of a conversationalist, he can sit with others at the high table, but he is at home, much more at home with crudeness and simplicity.

Strange chance both of us were admitted. Strange that we found our way in; we wouldn't have a chance now, we know that. They do not even hate us - who, after all, are we? Would they hate us? We wouldn't be acknowledged. Us least of all (and our friends) - we were admitted by accident; it was a mistake; it will not happen again. Still, we have learned a great deal about stupidity, and about our own idiocy. We've studied as we've wandered this strange, stupid land.

A simple distinction: stupidity is replete, and content with itself. Stupidity, sated, has no need of anything else; it has already been fulfilled. And idiocy? Idiocy wanders; idiocy is outside itself and this is what draws us together, us idiots. Outside ourselves - we are inside this stupid land, but we are also outside. W. does a good impression of an insider (I do not), but it is still an impression; they'll sniff him out. Is he one of them? His wit is sham, and his conversation dries up in his mouth.

Idiocy, then, which begins only when idiot is joined to idiot; when idiots meet and idiocy speaks, if only by burning up words. Idiocy speaks. Idiocy addresses W. in me; and it addresses me in W. To address, to be addressed: this is idiocy's relief; it lightens speech (the heaviness of words), it lightens stupidity. I no longer suffer alone (but can you ever be an idiot on your own?) Friendship: that's how idiocy discovers itself. That's how it lets itself be discovered.

Two of us, and the table between. A bottle of gin, and ice from the freezer. Slices of Emmenthal in a plastic packet. Open jewel cases and dirty CDs. 'Listen to this!' - 'You've got to hear this.' Speak, and there is idiocy; it is our speech itself, and all its reality is borrowed from outside it. Speak of this, of that - but only to clothe idiocy, only to give it form, only so that idiocy will have something to sacrifice. For doesn't idiocy shake stupidity away as a dog shakes water from its coat?

Idiocy laughs. Everything said is a decoy, it is all indirection. Idiocy laughs: it is the laughing path of words crossed between us. Then idiocy laughs too hard and the words fall. But what does it matter what was said? 'What were we saying?' - 'Where were we?'

Gin and the ice, sliced cheese and dusty, thumb-marked CDs: this red-walled room is a wicker man built to be set aflame. Laughter: what stupidity, and all around us. Stupidity of politics, stupidity of work, stupidity of honours, titles, and professional competence (of what Levinas calls 'ontological tumefaction').

Idiocy: a block, a break. How can we speak in that land, so strange and stupid? By what right can we speak? No wit; no 'conversation'. Then idiocy is interruption, just as our lives, inside, are interruptions. We are tolerated - for the moment. But then they haven't noticed us, not really. Tolerated - so long as we remain out of sight, in peripheral vision. We'll disappear soon, they know that. And meanwhile? The idiots are in the room with red walls. Idiocy is laughing across the table.

Ah but to think from idiocy - to think stupidity out of our idiocy, our gift of idiocy: will that be our revenge?

Pure Idiocy

'Pull out another chair', I say to W., 'not for Elijah, but for idiocy'. But idiocy does not come to sit down; he's already here. Between us. Idiocy is between us.

Plymouth Gin is the path; it opens the way. Plymouth Gin, the table, W.'s front room: now it opens: the route to idiocy. Now will we run up against what everyone is capable but us. Claustrophobia of idiocy, the sense of being pressed up against it. There is no escape. We are idiots, we are becoming idiots.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Gin over ice, no tonic, no mixer. Gin: absolute alcohol. Alcohol that has burned everything away but itself. What burns? Alcohol burns; it has become a star. Alcohol, igniting itself, is sheer ardency. Drink, and speak of what you have not done. Speak of your failure; share it. Share your failure, and your sense of being outside. You are both apes, imitators. You are idiots, and your idiocy is growing pure, as pure as alcohol.

Burnt engine oil: that's what opened the way to the Red Room in Twin Peaks. But now it is Plymouth Gin, and it opens nothing but our own idiocy. Let it complete itself, that idiocy. Let us experience its completeness, its fatality. From the first, our idiocy. From the beginning, and before the beginning.

How could it be otherwise? Idiocy set itself back in us. It was our fate, our fatedness. It set itself back, it fell into our past, and into the past before the past: the a priori. Idiocy was our a priori, our condition, our uncondition. It is what sets us apart, and apart from ourselves.

How could it be otherwise? But it was also our gift. A gift from idiocy to itself, and by way of our idiocy. Two idiots, drinking. Two idiots, invited by idiocy to drink in a room with red walls, a table between us, and ice, and two glasses, and a bottle of gin, of Plymouth Gin.

Blanchot recalls that passage in Bataille where he speaks of reading and drinking with X. We know who is, says Blanchot, but that does not matter: X. stands for friendship as much as the friend. And to drink with X.? To read? A kind of community happens, says Blanchot. Drinking, reading, are its condition.

Plymouth Gin opens the way. Drunkenness is the path, and this is what distinguishes us from Socrates, who knew he knew nothing. For we do not even know that (and isn't it the same for Bataille's' Socratic College'?). We speak of our failure. 'When did you know that you'd failed?'

We speak of the thinkers we admire. Do you remember X.? and Y.? and Z.? Ah, that conversation I had with Z.! And with Y., that summer's day? And X., when we had him to ourselves for a whole evening? And more distantly, we speak of the thinkers we read. 'How is it possible for a human being to write like that ...'

Later, we will go up to W.'s study and look in wonder through the pages of Rosenzweig or of Spinoza. 'How is it possible ...?' Above all, it's not possible for us; that first of all.

It is enough that Rosenzweig and Spinoza existed. Enough that they were alive once and wrote these books. The books are like facts, great looming facts, like mountains, like the flashing stars. How was it possible? How could a human being write such books? And above all: how impossible it is for us, and especially for us. And the curse of that impossibility, its very impossibility.

So does idiocy presses us up against itself. Idiocy calls, and by way of the Plymouth Gin, the red walls of W's room, and the open copies of Rosenzweig and Spinoza. We are idiots. Do we know we are idiots? Not even that. We are not even Socrates, who knows he knows nothing. It takes gin to get us to that point - gin, and the open books in W.'s study. And by that time it's already too late. Know? What do either of us know?

Between us: what does it mean to share idiocy, to wander out in the mountains and the flashing stars, where books loom and thinkers are gods? To share it: now I wonder whether it can only be shared. For who can attain idiocy, pure idiocy on their own?

Blocks and Breaks

First sign of a thinker: the insistence there is a gap between them and their thought. Who are they after all? 'I'm not very interesting', said X. to W. and I two years ago, 'but the book's interesting'. He insisted on that. But W. and I scared him when we asked him to become our leader.

Another sign: the thinker experiences blocks and breaks when it comes to writing. Sometimes they write, and it is like the flash of lightning: everything is written, and all at once. But that 'sometimes' follows the darkness of many years. For a long time, there was no writing; and then - there it is, all at once. To write as by a single stroke - what does that mean? To write after thinking - but thinking is not the word, unless thinking happens in those blocks, those breaks. Unless thinking begins by facing its impossibility and then enduring it, riding it, that same impossibility, folding it into something that might be lived.

Not like us, I said to W., everything is possible for us. But for them, thinking is a risk, it is exposure. A kind of aloneness, that separates them from others, even if it allows them to return - even if it is all about return. I tell W. for the hundredth time about my two great conversations with Y., when he spoke of the category of repetition in Kierkegaard. The first time, with great urgency, on an afternoon when the sun blazed down. It changed everything for me, I told W. And then the second time, the following year, when he spoke to me of his relationship with his son. Pure repetition, he said, with incalculable joy. Did I understand him? I'm not sure. But he set fire to the word repetition; henceforward it would blaze, and Kierkegaard's book became the urbook, the first book, from which others had cooled and fallen.

And the third time we could have spoken? W. and I remember it well. W. was speaking to Y, and I was not. Someone else - who was it? - insisted on talking to me. I was aghast; I moved my chair closer to W. and Y., I tried to overhear, to participate, but I had no chance. It was a great conversation, said W., unhelpfully. A great conversation! But I was being monopolised; someone thought I had something to offer. Couldn't she see I had nothing to offer? Me, of all people! When all I wanted was to be drawn again into the circle of conversation. To listen as new words were set on fire; as books of philosophy became those scorched paths through which the thinker - thought in person - had blazed.

And a third sign, which is always marvellous to W. and I: the thinker has an absolute pellucidity with respect to  their ordinary life. It was like looking into the clearest of rivers, I said to W. after speaking to X. And it was true: how frankly and absolutely X. spoke of himself, and to everyone who asked. Frankly, absolutely: as though life was something to look through, and not to live. Or that life was lived at another level, at that of blocks, of breaks - a level of which we had no idea.

Complete seriousness, said W., not like us. He was right: we are the apes of thought. Complete seriousness! But isn't there a sense for them, the thinkers, that there is a lightness in seriousness; that thinking is a kind of beatitude. What will W. and I know of the infinite pleasure of thought, thought's laughter, which laughs in the eyes of the thinker? They know more about joy than us, I said to W. There's no doubt about that. The play of thought, the game of thought: Blanchot's phrase of which W. and I always remind ourselves.

Remember what he wrote about Bataille, says W. for the hundredth time. We remember: absolute seriousness, absolute play, both at once. And I remember Blanchot's letters to Bataille (those that Bataille did not burn): almost contentless, expressing solicitude, expressing friendship, as friendship became a name for the play of thought between them.

Blocks and breaks: but now thought was a kind of turning, that orientation where speech, too heavy with itself, was turned to the other. A kind of shuttling (though Bataille's letters do not survive) where speech lightens itself as it slips from the one to the other. Speech? Is that the word? Rather, the 'there is' of speech as it returns from the impossibility endured by thought. As it returns after the longest absence, having traversed the greatest distance, but still young, younger than either thinker, announcing only itself, and the possibility of the impossible.

And now we remember Z., around whom the room becomes quiet. She speaks, and everyone is quiet. Here is a thinker; here is thought, in person. She lives differently to us, we know that. She lives a different life, and silence is a sign of that difference. What does it mean, that she does not speak? What does it mean, when her speech is light, quiet? Everyone in the room knows: what is spoken so lightly burns with the greatest urgency. The room is blazing, but these flames are like those of the aurora borealis. Thought is here; thinking is here, and we are touched by a cold and fiery hand by what it is impossible to think.

Touched: and it seems for a moment that we have faces with which to face the impossible; that we can be brought there, to the edge of cold and fire. The dross is burnt away; the whole of our lives become clear and still, like pools of water in Northern forests. The play of light across us, across the whole of our lives: we live; we are alive. Everyone in the room knows it. The room - but this is scarcely a room. An expanse - we lean in, listening. She speaks so quietly, and we must be more quiet than her speech. To be that quiet! To listen, with the whole of our being!

Thought is here, we know that. Thought that needs nothing to think, that thinks itself, like a star that has burned its substance away. Philosophy is burning. All thought is burning. And don't we each burn from that same burning? Hasn't it set something of ourselves alight? Wow, I said to W. when we came out. We sat in the courtyard, completely quiet. No more chattering. No apishness. Wow: I said nothing, I said everything. To share what had happened was only to repeat that non-word.

Dear X. ...

For years we corresponded. Sometimes many letters, one day a day, and at other times, none; weeks and months passed, years passed: nothing. But it would begin again all at once - suddenly, when a letter came which began, Dear X.

We wrote of this or that, mundane events, thoughts, hopes, desires. Of this or that, but isn't that to say: of nothing? Then we wrote to greet each other by way of writing; wrote to greet the absent friend.

But that is not it. There is also the gift of writing, which speaks by saying nothing. Cold gift: gift that gives itself. Writing spoke, and it was no longer your address, or mine.

Dear X. ... Dear X.: so did writing, the 'there is' of writing, come towards each of us. So did it come, in letters that grew shorter and more inconsequential, that writing which spoke only of itself, but which had no 'itself', and was always to come.

Writing came, drawing itself back from what was written. Drew it back, and let it speak in this withdrawal, interrupting us by letting our words sink back into themselves. Our words? But what did they matter, when they were bowed by writing like grass in the wind?

You were there before us, writing. You set yourself into that 'before' as soon as we wrote, as we began to write. You came forward when the words sank from us on the page. And now friendship changed. Friendship was drawn from itself. Who were we, you - then me? Who, each of us, joined, unjoined by what spoke between us?

Who spoke? Was it you, writing? But you never said anything. You never said a thing. Unless it is that you spoke by what we wrote, that your saying passed through our written words to unwrite them in turn.

Could we say we suffered you? We suffered; that was the content of our friendship. You gave yourself movement, passing from the one to the other, each time unilateral. But that was your weakness: you needed us, and you needed our writing.

Weakness: you could never remain in tautology. You, who could not act, needed someone else to act, and we were your proxies. You spoke, and we were the echo of your speech. We wrote, and you wrote by way of our writing. You gave writing to us, on condition that no one was there to receive it. And didn't you give us friendship, too?

Dear X.: X. stands for that friendship as much as for the friend. Dear X.: call of a writing that stands, each time, outside each of us. Outside: as though each of us, writing, were only the passage of writing, what it is when it is nothing yet. Outside: but now our friendship, too, is outside, and who were we but the points of its turning?

You were silence, the placekeeper of silence. The placekeeper? But you had no place; we gave you a place to take, each time. 'No one': relata of our friendship. You - then me. Me - then you: each of us addressed, each of us was X., the addressed and then, in turn, X. who wrote, and was written.

Perhaps it was this which kept us writing long after we had forgotten one another. And wasn't it, then, after this forgetting, that writing became easier? Me - then you. You - then me, and each of us X., named, unnamed by writing.

Spurious and I

I suffer you, that's how I would put it. Or that if I suffer myself, it is because I am also you. You will not taken my place, I know that. You have no need of places, or names; I cannot name you (Spurious is not a name).

You are a dead man, I think, or at least you are not alive. But sometimes I think you are alive - that you live as I do not; or that you have taken something of my life, and live it, away from me. But then I know that my death, too, can be taken, that you live by my dying, that you live like a shadow to my life.

Are you my shadow, death to my life? Sometimes I wonder if you are not more alive than me. After all, you return. After everything, you never stop returning; in a sense, you are always to come, always late (there is nothing that you are; you are not yourself). 'You again?' - 'Who did you expect?' But you are early, too - you wake me up. I am up too early, you drive me to the computer. 'Write', you say. Or that's how I interpret what you say, your silent demand.

Yes, I will write, and I admit, there is pleasure in letting you take my place, as you do almost as soon as I begin. Let him be there instead of me, I tell myself. Let him be responsible; I admit it - I'm tired, and tired of responsibility. You. The one in whom I cannot recognise myself. But who am I, but the place that awaits your return? You are immemorial; you are coming back. Never yet yourself. Never here, but here.

How do you survive, where you cannot live? How do you endure, where there is no duration? Now I understand: you are my substitute; you survive where I cannot. You write, and write in my place. You write; the clatter of the keyboard stops. And then? Spurious, which of us is a writer? Which of us completes the other?

I suffer you. No: I suffer myself, and you are the one who is the locus of suffering. You are there when I have suffered much. Suffer? Perhaps that is not the word. Too histrionic. Not passive enough. Not low enough. But you are there, aren't you? You: outside me, waiting for me; you are that waiting to which I sink when I cannot write.

I suffer you. I suffer, and you are there, locus of suffering. I suffer - but is it I who suffers anymore?

You are here. I called you forward; you are my delegate. You bow your head. You will taken my place. Very well. Take it - or rather, reveal that place to have been a usurpation. Take it, untake it, reveal that it was always untaken, my place, and you are here where I am not.

Here: but are you here? Outside of me, that's where you are. But are you here? Rather: you are the outside-inside. You are 'he' who I am outside myself. Outside, but inside. Opening, inwardly, like a flower that blooms the other way: inside.

'I am here', you said. 'Come, let me take your place.' Very well; you are here. Very well: then take it, my place. Write. Write for me.

Who goes there? Who writes? You have no name, I know that (Spurious is not a name). Yet you need writing, I know it. Your dependency: words, and more words. Never enough. The 'never enough' of words. When will you come out into the open? But I know you cannot. Know that you are only what fails to translate itself, fails to speak of yourself, once and for all.

Who will tell our story, you or me? Who will tell it? Or does it require we both speak, I to give you details, facts of the day, and you to laugh at those facts and tell me they are nothing? Does it ask that we both speak, me inside the story, and you outside it, laughing at everything I say?

I suffer, Spurious. I suffer myself. That is your laughter, your laughing parody of life. You are outside, I know that. Your laughter, which I hear in my own, brings it to me: the outside. The outside-inside. You summon me, I know it. I cannot help it; attracted, repulsed, I come. And you? Are you summoned? Do you come to me? Only as I suffer. Only as I suffer myself.

You are me as I am other than me, I know that. But am I you? Do you, shadow, envy me, and my existence? Do you envy my sense of purpose, my orientation? That is my secret: I want you to envy me.

But I've said nothing; or what I have said is very vague. I don't think you are alive. I don't think I'm alive. Which is it? Which of us wrote this post? Who writes? Who laughs? Who dies? I have lines under my eyes, I know. I'm tired. Why do I have to get up so early? Why, as soon as light is there behind the curtains, do I have to rise?

'Come', you say, 'let me take your place.' I suffer you, who is only myself. Myself - no, myself become other. The other I am; the one I am not, even as I am. But you do not live, do you? Your life is not there, wild and free, on the other side of writing? You live by writing - you need it, and you need me.

Occupy me. Occupy the one I am. You laugh, but I am also laughing, because I know you need my laugh to laugh. You write, but I too, am writing; you need me to begin, to turn on the computer. Write, unwrite, suffer what I am. Every day, the same. Every day it is the same, the same drama: this parody of writing, this sinking back of words.

They are not mine any more, these words. Not mine: they do not hold me in their spell. I do not depend on them. They need me as you need me. Spurious - is that what you are called? is that a name for the nameless? -: you are nothing but saying, nothing but the to-say that shimmers across these words. Shimmers - changing nothing. Nothing happens.

'Come', you say. You come by way of everything, by way of what is said. 'Come', you say, and: 'I am coming.' When did you start your journey towards me? How did you know we would meet here, on the screen?

I suffer you. I suffer myself. 'Let me take your place.' Very well. But I will take it back, there, on the other side of the page. I will take it back, then, when I stop writing. Laughter: but you will not stop writing.

Arm of the Sun

Imagine it this way. Just as the sun sends out great flares from itself, great fiery loops which arc back to its surface, so is what you write an arc of the day. Imagine a sun that was made of such arcs; that is nothing more than their leaping. You, writing, are an arm of that sun, a mirror held up to the day, and by which the day will know itself.

But this, too, is analogy, for what can the day know? Its first trait is blindness. It does not see. Its second trait is unconsciousness. It does not know.

Sometimes I imagine that it dreams, and its dreams are those solar arcs. Or imagine that, as a writer, I am like the astronauts who orbit Solaris. The day speaks; I write; but it does not know that it speaks, and I do not know what I write. Do I dream? Or is it that the day dreams in my writing, that to write is also to dream with the day?

Now I know: my first trait is blindness. My second trait is unconsciousness. I am an arm of the sun, of the day, by which it continues to unknow itself. To unknow, to forget: isn't that the task the day sets for writing? To betray the day: isn't that what it wants? To betray it, yes, but only by way of telling the day - of speaking of those events, great and small, that belong to the continuity of time.

Tell. But the sun arcs through you. It speaks, and you do not. It dreams, and what you write cannot reach it. But you know its return. You know it by writing, by the whole of your writing, as the day uncouples it from itself.

The Day and the Blog

'Why does the day need the blog? Why does it need this mediation, this detour, on its return to itself?' - 'Because it can only approach itself through detour; because that detour is the whole world, and everything in it as you retell it. Write of the world - tell everything as it happens, the most extraordinary, the most banal, and you will indicate this detour, without naming it.'

- 'Then it is something more than a detour, or it seems to hold itself back from the events of the world.' - 'It is held back, and held back, too, from the recounting of the world, its telling.' - 'Then how to approach it? How to stand facing it, as I face the sun at noon?' - 'All telling is indirection, like the magician who tricks you by distracting your attention. You will not face it. There is no sun. The day is not itself, it is only the approach to itself, and you, blogger, are the means of that approach.'

Sacrifice

There is a fire that does not consume, but that burns nonetheless in all things, and in what can be written of those things. Offer what happens by writing to sacrifice. Repeat, through sacrifice, the burning of things. Sacrificial writing, pyre of the world, let the day offer itself to itself. For is fire not already the day, burning in all things?

'Then the day sacrifices itself to itself?' - 'The day is sacrifice; returning to itself through the burning of things.' - 'But nothing is consumed. Nothing is destroyed.' - 'Every word is already a destruction. Everything, as it comes to stand by the word, is already destroyed.' - 'But where is destruction? Why can't I see it? Touch it?' - 'Because you are also burning. You are also sacrificed.'

Friendship

Let's say, for today, that there are two forms of friendship, one inside the other, one outside the other. The first: affinity, conviviality. Not reciprocity, only the redoubled enjoyment of the world, redoubled delight. We like the same things, we hate the same things; there is no ideological separation. Let the great things of the day take care of themselves; we are here; this is our privacy, our retreat. The pub every night after work. We pass around our ales, 'taste this'. We entertain at each other's houses, and burn CDs for each other, and whole days pass in each others company. Joy: life can be simple. Joy: shut the world away.

Then the second, much more difficult to invoke. Friendship without terms, or whose terms cannot be thought as is measured by a life closed in upon itself. No interiority - or rather, friendship for the other - for the one who draws you from yourself - already brings you up against the limit of what you are.

The limit? This is a thought of finitude, and of finite friendship. Where you are death is not, and where death is you are not. Very well, but when the other is dying? When the other dies before you? There is death, in person. There is a dying that crosses over and demands that you, too, run up against your death. But death presents nothing to run up against; there is no limit, or rather, the limit becomes infinite, a play of prohibition (you will not know death) and transgression (death is here, where you are not). An infinite spiral, the limit turned inside and out and back again.

But the other is not always dying (or rather, it is not always a question of the limit of death). Unless dying can be thought in another sense. This becomes difficult. A dying, now, that is the refusal of negation, of the measure of negation. Neither of us is the master, neither is the slave; that dialectic is suspended - halted at the point in which I become aware that the other shatters my egotism. I am not who I am; the other is also within me. The outside inside, but an outside with which I can never have done. There will be no fight to the death. He is here, there where I am. Or that 'where' is exposed, or turned inside out. Who am I, that lives outside himself? Who, whom the outside has reached before there was an inside?

The early Levinas (first half of Totality and Infinity) will claim this is due to the presence of the other: a presence in terms of which the relation to him must be thought. The later one, and perhaps Blanchot too (in a different way), will argue that it is in terms of the relation itself that the other must be thought. Levinas will not call it friendship, but Blanchot does (as he always did). Now friendship names that relation in which the other reaches me before I reach myself. He is there, within me. The outside inside. The other in whom the strangeness of everything, the whole world, is given. The strangest one.

Note that friendship is unilateral on this conception. Note too - and this is more difficult, more confusing - that it is drawn to a variety of 'objects'. To the other person, it is true, but also to the oeuvre, and to the animal. How confusing! No question that this muddies the second notion of friendship - that there is a third way in which friendship can be understood. Friendship for the oeuvre, for the animal - but only by way of the second friendship, that is, for the other. Friendship is first of all for the human other. Then the third friendship comes after the second one.

But let us put that thought aside. Note too that though friendship is unilaterial, it can also be returned. That is, I can become other for the friend; each of us can become other in turn; we take turns, or rather, these turns are taken. No reciprocity, note that - nothing is exchanged, or rather, it is the incommensurable that is at issue each time. Burning up exchange, and the general equivalent of exchange, that is, the common - shared interests, shared ideologies - is the doubly unilateral exchange of friendship.

The incommensurable, each time. Reaching me from - where? From the friend. The friend who is the other. And is he aware of it, the friend? Does he know what he has given to me (but the giving is not his)? This is possible. I can know what I mean for the friend. I can let giving occur, and perhaps there is a kind of joy in that. And I can even know this giving is a double of the gift which gives itself through me to the other. Through me? By way of me, and not of what I am - this person, with this attitudes - but of what I am when I am no one in particular.

Blanchot will write of his friendship with Bataille in these terms. The play of thought, he calls it. Thought, each time, is at issue, and thought as friendship. Thought as friendship. But then there are two types of thought, too; the first models what is to be thought in terms of the concept. There must be a grasp, a grasping. The second, in terms of the impossibility of grasping. A gift occurs, a giving, but it cannot be seized. A gift that withdraws itself in its giving. Or a gift that, when giving, does so to the 'no one' who cannot seize it.

Difficult thought! Friendship and thought are the names for a relation. That relation is at the heart of Blanchot's thought. A relation, as he says, that is without relation - which is to say, cannot be understood through the terms it relates. A relation, then, from which terms arise - terms constructed as interdictions (you will step no further) that are to be transgressed (you can step beyond).

Relation without relation. The influence of Heidegger is all too clear, but let me put that aside for the moment. Blanchot read Being and Time alongside Levinas, when both were students at Strasbourg. They immediately knew its importance. There could be no going back to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy. But the difference between being and beings (a difference Heidegger would have been reluctant to call a relation, that fallen, Latinate word) was to be rethought, along with Dasein.

To be rethought: this is what occupied Blanchot and Levinas from the later 1930s onwards. And wasn't this task, this rethinking, at the heart of their friendship? Wasn't it in terms of what Blanchot called friendship that the difference in question would be thought, and as early as Thomas the Obscure? Everything begins in that novel, I know that now. Everything is there that would later open in his thought, and in his friendship for thought. There would be no turn, and no deviation, only the steady unfolding of the consequences of what had been thought through that novel, and through the writing of that novel.

Two kinds of friendship (let us put aside the third, which is parasitical on the second friendship): or should one talk of friendship and its other? For friendship (the first sense) is only a contraction of the second; and the second is only an exposition of the first. Friendship, then, 'contains' its other, if one can speak of containing the outside inside. Contains it - by allowing the inside to turn itself inside out, to exposed, given.

And what of the chance of a redoubled friendship - of a friendship that continually returns you to the 'other' friendship? Such was the relationship Blanchot described with Bataille. Such, no doubt, was also at issue with Levinas. But let us think, too, of that little text 'Encounters', where Blanchot will also write of his encounters with Char, with Antelme, and the other text, 'For Friendship', where he will write of Mascolo. And recall that none of them saw him after his illness in the early 1970s: that he wrote to his friends that he was retiring from the world.

Jabes remembers his entire friendship for Blanchot was epistolatory. Short letters, in a fine hand, letters more like poems, would reach him every now and again. When he asked to meet Blanchot, he was rebuffed, as Blanchot would rebuff so many others. These letters are gradually beginning to be released. In the Kozovoi correspondence, we find a Blanchot of great tenderness. In his letters to Antelme's wife, Monique, we witness the decline of a fine hand with old age. Then, silence for many years. He could no longer write. But he continued to speak on the phone. To Derrida, at least once or twice a year.

I do not recount these facts for the sake of anecdote, but only to meditate, as I write, on the demands of the 'other' friendship, to which Blanchot dedicated his life. The 'other' friendship - or the 'other' relation, or the 'other night', or literature (and perhaps one should write of the 'other' literature): these are names for the same, names for what was discovered from 1936 onwards, when Thomas the Obscure gradually came together.

1936: but one shouldn't pass over in silence what Blanchot also wrote in those years, running up to the war. A political journalism that belonged to the day, he remembers in The Step Not Beyond, just as his fiction belonged to the night. One day that right-wing journalism stopped. And when he again made a political intervention, returning to Paris from his tiny house in the South, it was on the side of the left. The night (the 'other' night) had crossed over into the day: is that what happened?

Certainly it was in the name of friendship (a friendship of refusal) that Blanchot called for action on the part of those protesting against de Gaulle's unconstitutional return to power in 1958. Friendship - the 'other' friendship - which does not hide itself from the public, from the events of the day. His friendship with Jean Paulhan faltered over a disagreement de Gaulle (the events of May 13th, Blanchot will write). Then the 'other' friendship can have a charge that is political, or at least communal, being linked, as Blanchot said in his review of Mascolo's book in 1953, to another communism, to another kind of communism.

Abrupt conclusion: politics and ethics belong to the heart of Blanchot's work and his life. Better: the political, the ethical are names for the stakes of the 'other' relation, of whatever we call it, whether communism or friendship. Second conclusion: none of this matters unless it can be thought in our own terms, and in our own idiom. Thought - and lived (but then the 'other' thought is always lived).

Purgatory

'Tell the story of the day.' - 'I can't.' - 'Tell the story.'

Every night this week, The Drift, at least once. I'm listening to it now. I've just come in from work. I've opened a cheap bottle of Cava. Dull skies; rain. The plants are an island in the flooded yard. Silence. I haven't spoken to anyone today. Someone is pacing upstairs. Soon, no doubt, the thud-thud-thud of the bass through the ceiling. There's only of them up there now. He's light on his feet, but he likes loud music. He has his vinyl, he says, in the room above the one I am in now. I'm ready for it, listening for it behind The Drift.

Where has the other one gone? The other whose parents' own the upstairs flat? Has he finished his exams and left? But there is the matter of the leak from the gutter at the back of the flats. The leak, the flood, in a single sheet, running down the wall from the full gutter. I should have told him while I had time. The other one, the other neighbour, never answers the door. Neither the front door, nor the back door.

'Tell the story of the day.' A second glass of Cava. I've been reliving the death of a friend. Strange comfort. I would like to relive it again now. To bring it back to me. To play fort-da with the memory, like Freud's grandson. Write about it, I tell myself. But I'm written out. There's nothing to write - not about that. Describe your impressions, I tell myself. The view from the windows. The beautiful garden. The pond, the fountain. Write about that. And the hospice. The nurses, and the great calm. To die there would be to die like a child. To relax into death. To fall asleep as though I'd fallen in the snow. To fall all the way to death.

And at work? I won't say anything about that. Or I'll speak very elusively and reserve the other kind of speech for much later. Work: the office, mine, high ceilinged, with big windows that look out over the town. Bookshelves, CD towers: everything is there. And it is orderly. My email box is orderly and the office is orderly. I am prepared, braced. All day, busy. To ready paperwork. To ready documentation, retrieving it from filing cabinets, printing hard copies of old emails. Defensive. Defend yourself. These four walls will not be your enclosed space forever. Soon the wind will blow through here, the office. But that is to the good. No sedentarism. Do not stay put.

'Tell the story of the day'. - 'I've said nothing yet.' - 'Tell the story.' - 'There's nothing to say.' - 'Say it, then, say that nothing.' Say it: eight o'clock and it's not dark. The yard. White light. The island of plants in the flooded concrete. Two wheelie bins. The long scar up the wall where the pipe was pulled out. Need to see to that. Need to fix it.

The Drift. - 'Write about that, write about The Drift.' - 'But The Drift has set itself back into the day, the condition of the day. I can no more write of it than I could write of the day.' - 'Write of The Drift, write of the day.' Foolishly, I've dreamt, these last couple of days, of the narrative I would assemble of those years. A narrative: the blog posts are a start. Narrate them, though, from another perspective. From a 'you' that addresses their protagonist. A 'you' that is spoken by a god, or by several gods. I had that idea in February. I'm coming back to that idea.

I read Spark's Hothouse by the East River. It was like a dull blow to the head. Hit me without knowing where it was from. What was that? I've never read anything like that. What are the rules? Where are the rules? Quick, a context; I need to insert it into a context. I read a critical study - phew. Then another - phew. Now I know. I know what she's up to. I'm less disturbed. But still - the blow. It was heavy, and dull. What kind of book was that? Who could write a book like that?

I drank Lucozade at lunch time. I thought: I'm too tired, I mustn't be this tired. Up at six, just as I was up at six yesterday. Can't sleep until late, but up at six. Working on an essay, so I have to be up at six. It works on me, and calls me me to be up early, when the day is already bright. Six: the day's been around for a while; it is I who am the latecomer. The day says: where were you?; I sit at my worktable to work. But Lucozade: it is in me now, the caffeine, the sugar. Double tiredness tomorrow, and for what? I knew, today, I would have to be braced. Ready. On the defensive. Lucozade was necessary. I read the paper in the sun, and drank Lucozade, half a small bottle of it, but enough. Caffeine, sugar.

'Tell the story of the day.' - 'I can't.' - 'Tell the story.' - 'I can't. I can't raise myself to the day.' - 'All that caffeine and that sugar - and for what?' - 'I ask myself the same question. I ask myself the same.'

You are still dying and I am still living. Somehow, both seem impossible. To die - to live. How is it you are dead, and I am alive? I feel cheated. No: I feel I am the cheat. How is it that day comes after day? How is it day succeeds day? One day after another, I wake up, and think: is this it, another day? One day, another: sometimes, walking from here to there - from my office, say, to the library, I think of the books I should read on the apocalypse. I tell myself that that's what it's all about: the apocalypse. The day unlimits itself. The day unravels in the day, and only I know that. What separates me from that tramp, with his grimy face? What separates me from the binge drinkers who swap a bottle round in the sun?

'Tell the story.' - 'I haven't yet begun. I can't bring myself to the beginning.' - 'Tell the story.' - 'There is no story. Or all stories are distractions on the way to the story.' What else, what else? I saw a magpie on the wall of my yard. I had thought, nothing can live in my yard except slugs. And wasn't there a slug in the washing up bowl this morning? Weren't my bowls slug-touched, sticky, even though I washed them in the hottest water? I threw it out of the window, the drowned slug. I thought I'd found the hole through which they came into the flat; thought I'd blocked it up. But still they come. Still the silver trail across the bowls and the cutlery.

'Tell it.' - 'Nothing to tell. Nothing tells itself.' - 'Tell.' - 'But I'm telling nothing. Only the most inconsequential, you can see that.' This morning, a litre of Plymouth Gin arrives with the rest of my shopping. Gin - and a 2KG bag of ice. Plymouth Gin like a glyph, a ward: that will keep disaster away. Gin - and ice. That will be enough. We went around the Plymouth Gin factory, R.M. and I. We saw how it was made, tasted the botanicals, separately and then as they were mixed into the gin. We held the gin glasses in our hands to warm the gin, and to release its flavours. And now I have a bottle of Plymouth Gin here, in the far North. Perhaps it will watch over me. The Plymouth Gin is watching over me.

'Tell.' - 'I can't tell. I won't tell.' And now it hits me, as I spread the goat's cheese I bought for my friends' visit on ricecakes: I am a character in a novel who realises he's in a novel. But I am not in a novel. And then it hits me again: I am a type, but - what type? Of what am I an example? I'd like to know. I'd like to know where this is all headed. Let's go further: what if I am already dead, and she, my friend, is alive? Then I'm writing in purgatory. I'm writing my way out. To buy the price of a ticket out. But to where. A ticket - to where?