Imagine the chance to really get it on with some author you've been reading. You've been reading away, see, reading this author, entering into a kind of dialogue with him, but a relationship that is like a two-way mirror. You get all caught up in this, just the same. Let's imagine. That is, let's imagine that this is the case of that act of reading, as if imagining itself is as clearly defined and distinct as we imagine it to be.
So you are reading, and in the privacy of this complete (sublime?) ideality, this ideal relationship of reader to author, reader to text, reader to written, you are going about your business of hmmming and welling and chin-scratching and what-not, figuratively speaking, of course, because certainly as ideal a reader as you are, you are having responses in your head, you understand figure, you're not too literal minded. Whatever goes on up there in the old noggin. Perhaps you begin to mark off the boundaries, the mutually defining territories by which you and the author situate each other: by which you choose to either recognize your own limits, or merely those of the author (or the author's or merely yours) or both. Here are countless measures: intimidation, conspiracy, condescension, degradation, loftiness, smugness, repugnance, moral outrage, naivete, false naivete, etc.
And getting all cozy as you have in this relation, you are hardly surprised at all when the phone rings and, who should it be, but the author, calling up to ask you what you think about the book. Now let us imagine in this way we have of imagining things, in this particular way of imagining that we are here utilizing, that this author is certainly no friend of yours. By this we mean that this author you've been reading may be a sworn enemy or someone you've never had the pleasure of knowing, let alone hating. Either sense, if senses can be so distinguished. This author is certainly no friend of yours. You wouldn't at all have, would never have, expected him to call you on the telephone. You never even expected to think about expecting or thinking he would call you on the phone. But the phone rings, nonetheless. Sure enough, it's him, the very author you've been reading just now. And he says, hey, he wants you to come over and talk about his book.
Needless to say, you are surprised. And yet, you are not so surprised as you would have thought you would be, and this is surprising. Because sitting there in that book, you had assumed such a cozy relationship with this writer that his ringing you up, just then, seemed perfectly congruous. Utterly ghastly and ghostly, of course, uncanny. But congruous. Well, his call did interrupt your reading, which is sort of annoying, but there you are, this author demands your attention.
Or we don't have to suppose this at all, because it's such a ridiculous thing to suppose. How absurd that some author should feel compelled to suddenly ring you up because he knew the exact person reading his book at the exact instant, and an exact person which is certainly no friend of his, possibly even hostile to his thought. Let us imagine, instead, that we live in a world where authors of books cannot possibly know everyone who reads their books, because we also will imagine that in this world the only authors that really matter, that are really worth imagining, are those authors who write things which are read by far more people than merely are their friends. For the tepid, placating notion that a person, such as an author, could be friends with everyone, we hold up the retort: what sort of friend would that be, who had no time for everyone? Let us imagine that we live in a world where the only authors which matter are those who can suppose that they have a large audience of readers who are certainly no friends of theirs.
So you petition. You write a letter. You win a gameshow prize, or you finagle your way to meeting him at some lecture. Somehow, by whatever weaselly calculation or contrivance, you get the opportunity to meet with your favorite author and discuss his works at length. Let us imagine, here, that we live in a world in which a certain amout of intellectual differentiation is assumed to exist, and let us imagine that we live in a world where this differentiation is thought to be both quantitative and qualitative, but that particularly it is thought to be qualitative, but that qualitative is thought in terms of quantitative.
Now, let us imagine that we live in a world where we can ascertain a crystal clear progression of intellectual capability and that in this progression we can prove outside of all subjectivity that the author we're going to meet is tops. Outside of any special type-casting, this dude is an a-one, first-class mind. A real thinker, demonstrating always greater mental prowess regardless of any deficiencies such as family ties, connections, money or his appalling taste in clothing.
You get to go to his house. This is no autograph signing. You are his reader. You have become intimate with his thoughts and now he gets a chance to find out yours. There you are in his study, perhaps the very room in which he wrote the piece you were reading. The two of you begin to converse without any concern for prejudices, sexual attraction (or prejudice, which may be the same thing), etiquette, or contemporary politics.
You've done it. Had the perfect opportunity to talk back to someone you've been reading.
And then, you realize your sin. Blasphemy, murder (deocide?), sacrifice, intercourse? Kenosis? Did you think you could leave him alone? Did you do him the service of bringing him this author to refute?
A being does not want to be recognized, it wants to be contested: in order to exist it goes toward the other, which contests and at times negates it, so as to start being only in that privation that makes it conscious (here lies the origin of its consciousness) of the impossibility of being itself, of subsisting as its IPSE or, if you will, as itself as a separate individual: this way it will perhaps ex-ist, experiencing itself as an always prior exteriority, or as an existence shattered through and through, composing itself only as it decomposes itself constantly, violently and in silence.
-- Maurice Blanchot