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to the syncopated rhythm of his heart.
God’s death calls upon him to put to death
both life and death in a gaping impossible.
How could this call for death and
immediate rebirth dissolve in the way
one casts the possible beyond its own
reality (for instance to give birth to
Utopian literatures)? Probably because
this experience of dying is never one and
the same thing, whereas the dispersion
in the possible gives, paradoxically, the
illusion of an identical life and self-control.
The same mirage is behind the longing
for freedom. Self-fulfilment in one’s total
artificiality seems to neutralize the anxiety
that we feel. One should also probe the
decisive role of liberalism, under all its
aspects. It has played a determining part
in the development of the will to act and
undertake for the realisation of being, as if
the aim was such.
The emptying of God would not have left
us facing the fear of the fatal attraction of
a void, hence the efforts to fill it or put an
end to that story –– whose outcome is an
infinite proliferation of paddings, clogging,
overloading, and an ultimate drowning
in the maelstroms of phantasmagoria.
In the same way, silence fills the din.
The concrete and mundane experience
of the possible conceals the impossible.
This union, like the union of life and
death, has been forgotten. Technology
will increase this accelerating surfeit.
Globalized literature, because of its
cultural and indecent exposure, partakes
in this unprecedented cloning process of a
society which makes a spectacle of itself,
in a predictable way, up to self-disgust
(boredom).
Still-life paintings executed in the
vanitas style were a highly fashionable
symbolization of dying, using no end of
eye-catchers. A book is often seen near a
mirror, a skull, a candle. Nothing morbid;
on the contrary, metaphors, objects,
fictions refer to the inner energy of the
figures. Van-itas is not life in the negative,
but an approach to the impossible. Yet
art as a whole has never been immune to
aestheticism in that the world is exhibited
and evidenced; in that it poses as sole
and irrefutable truth. Art expresses both
man’s imprisonment and the neutralization
brought about by its technique. It has been
the case ever since the 18th century.
Making showpieces of savages, Indians or
monsters, willy-nilly, is part of the process.
Revolu-tions are forms of aestheticism,
just like extermination techniques. Culture,
as word, is a hold-all which gathers all the
energies at work; it can be regarded as
an extension of aestheticism and of all its
fictional patchwork that invites us to attend
its High Masses. On the other hand, the mass
production of books swallows up the works.
Thoughts rely on a pre-conceptual
movement from which they derive their
orientation. Pathos and enthusiasm open
the way to philosophy. The Pentateuch is
fraught with fear just as the Christian faith
is with love. In either case the origin is a
tension within which unrelieved boredom
reverberates. As fact, its presence does
not demand that man go beyond, but
rather away from himself. The aim is not
a renewed creation of man––we’ve seen
to what extremes it led–––and even less
the promotion of the old order of things.
Displacing man means weighing all
anchors and setting him on a journey, a life,
towards death, without providing the least
of bearings or havens.
Poetry can serve as example for a language
that is being displaced, left as it is to its
stammering on the brink of the abyss, to
its addiction to evanescence, to irreducible
disapproval, to leaving only a wake of its
initials before they evaporate. A poem is
an adieu (another reading of a-theism?).
It is a kind of prayer demanding nothing,
communicating nothing, meaning nothing.
Poetry is no more a part of literature than
epistles and liturgies.
It is not a question of literary genres. The
poet is not to be regarded as denizen
in the world and he is not buried in any
hallucinogenic culture. Poetry is not
another mundane matter; it ties the
possible to its impossibility. Poetry and
the book, are these compatible? The links
between poet-ry and language cropped up
late enough. Homer, for instance, was an
αοιδός, he who sings, propagates sounds.
The modulations of the voice belong to the
field of the spoken, the sung, of laughter
or shouting: so many displacements of
the voice leading to different domains. The
wan-dering poet follows a discontinued
path that cannot lead to where there
remains something yet unsaid. A poem is
an end in itself, meant to undo, and redo in
a different way.
The voice comes to death in it just like
waves on the shore.
Displacing the name of man towards the
mortal who un-names him also amounts
to changing our vision of literature,
bogged down in the spinoffs of culture and
the many processes of euthanasia and
simulation. That is what our flood is made
of. The mortal facing himself makes the
difference. That is when the book is no
longer hostage to literature; the meaning
of literature as a whole remains dependent
upon the sudden coming out of the written
text or of the book that will contribute to its
erasing. We do write too much in and for
literature, not enough out of it.
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