If this world were not endlessly crisscrossed by the convulsive movements of beings in search of each other . . . , it would appear like an object of derision offered to those it gives birth to.
-- Georges Bataille, as quoted by Maurice Blanchot in The Unavowable Community
Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit, being the teacher of the great suspicion that turns every u into an x, a real, genuine x, that is the letter before the penultimate one.* . . . The attraction of everything problematic, the delight in an x, however is so great in such more spiritual, more spiritualized men that this delight flares up again and again like a bright blaze over all the distress of what is problematic, over all the danger of uncertainty, and even over the jealousy of the lover. We know a new happiness.
----
* There is a German expression for deceiving someone that means literally: passing off a u as an x. Originally it referred to the Roman numerals, V and X, and meant passing off a five for a ten. The suspicion of which Nietzche speaks does not inflate conventional values; it insists that they are not really known but rather unknown quantities -- the x of the mathematicians.
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science; § 3 of "Preface for Second Ed.," footnote by Walter Kaufmann [last emphasis added]
To speak to it and thereby -- let us not hesitate to clarify this -- to form or to forge it. And to do so in the language of madness that we must use, forced, all of us, by the most profound and rigorous necessity, to say things as contradictory, insane, absurd, impossible, undecidable as "X without X," "community of those without community," "inoperative community," "unavowable community": these untenable syntagms and arguments -- illegible, of course, and even derisive -- these inconceivable concepts exposed to the disdain of philosophical good conscience, which thinks it possible to hold out in the shade of the Enlightenment; where the light of the Enlightenment is not thought, where a heritage is misappropriated. For us there is no Enlightenment other than the one to be thought.
-- Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship
× 1. The 24th letter of the modern English alphabet. Following a certain formal distinction, the symbol used to represent this letter, since "x" also means any of the speech sounds represented by this letter. From the start, right off -- but then this is before the beginning, latent, in principle, presupposed -- there is duplicity. There is division. As soon as you reduce to a first, there is division, once again. What can be first without an other? The formality, the formalism, the formal level that would be divided from the integrity of things, that brings division, is itself divided. Division is its integrity? Division its nature? The letter is apart from its character. The letter which represents other things is apart from the character which represents it.
× 3. Definition. How to identify the native without alienating? To refer to a letter in this alphabet, the one right here, of this sentence, to refer to the "English" alphabet, is to refer to it as if it were there, over there, other, the same as writing its proper name. In order to define something, one puts it in the position of an object, thus then words, or letters, at once holding the object and being the object so held. Identity is division. The order of the sign already gives you a masturbatory division that never leaves you alone, single. × 5. Begin with a letter? And not the "first" letter? That something precedes representation has always been represented of nature by philosophy, thus always natural, always philosophy, always natural philosophy. There is (to be) such a thing as the thing which is not representation. To the extent that some people have reversed this priority, they have been considered eccentric, bizarre, minority, outrageous: sects. The Kabbalists, for example, derived the inverse notion of derivation: the idea that the word preceded all (other) "things." To begin with the letter, then, is eccentric. And to begin with the letter that is neither first nor last, but is nonetheless the letter that stands for all letters. And to make this letter of letters, more generic and more exemplary, stand for all things. × 8. This "textuality," who counts for this confusion? To ward it off, as if it were to really reduce the world. How could one reduce the world to the text, since the text would itself be the very framing discourse of such a reduction. One would then be reducing to the structure which includes reduction, among other things. Has this textuality ever really been explored, even, as, they say, one explores a body? But then would one ever arrive at, precisely, a text? Who, in fact, is reducing things to the, and what, text? When does one ever arrive at a body, especially if one is to caress it? (Even Aristotle, who may have been logical but he was no dummy, says that "to have" in the sense of a spouse doesn't make sense, but really means "to be married to.") × 9. There is the other pleasure, the pleasure of the perpetuation, of the process, the prolongation, duration, elaboration, which doesn't simply detach a progression by definition from its end or telos, but includes the supposed end also. Perhaps I should say, it doesn't subordinate the process to its objective. × 10. The «first one» (the doubling and doublure of this). The number of the numberless. The ecstatic of the new, the only, the extraordinary. Putting myself in the place of an us, a we related back to myself, an I related to the property or the attribute of a "we." However, to know this inside? The blotting of the I. Acting: so much of our "behavior," of our flirting and our becoming acquainted had to do with the "actual" activity of acting. This knowledge, history, familiarity of, with acting. How to act? Already my own knowledge of a me returned from the new proximity of an intimate: learning that with respect to the social in general, the third person for which the second also stood, I was seen as a kind of negation to be reckoned with. The ceremony of the refusal of ceremony, with one who wanted the acquisition, the occurrence of this ceremony. And then afterwards, already before the others, any others -- but then in relation to certain others -- the opening of the exchange, the exchangeability of the exchange. The light of day -- light to her night, but so much else about daytime, here. You found an ideal and married it. × 12. The pleasure of reading, even of the classical, sometimes -- always somewhat -- naive "love of knowledge" -- information, learning, scholastics or books, documents, texts -- is crossed with eroticism. For myself, even a very specific displacement, a conditioning of texts with erotic activity, having the book before me, the body of work, the work of the body, the corpus. The two-dimensional, the pictorial, the diagrammatic: games, orderings, classification, hierarchy, taxonomies, topographies, maps, dice, figures, counters. And the verging, the desire to . . . on the verge of doing, saying, manipulating, tending, holding, and how it bunches up into the act of reading (any kind of book) so that reading is frequently accompanied by (serves as, stands for, acts as) a kind of erotic anticipatory sensation. While, conversely, an amorous involvement or sexual encounter has the sense of a scheme, plot, an intellectual endeavor, venture, a game and, of course, discourse (intercourse). ←→ the interchange or the stretched medium, overlapped, and overlapsing (see, too, overlipping), a double expansion which cannot locate a point, only a between which erupts from the composure of a neutrality; a medium not remaining medium. The double arrow pre-figures, along at least one axis (×s), the ×? The × as a formal graphic equivalent of this double direction, itself doubled. This double arrow (or crossed swords) also works as two overlaid arrows, the arrows reversed pointing at each other, touching at the tips; also the situation of the greater-than and less-than symbols next to each other, >< This, which can be read "greater than less than," is also a version or an inversion, the implosion, of Lacan's diamond figure, which can be read "less than greater than." A parallax of courses. The arrow disrupts, the diaspora of the arrow. Representing, nevertheless, what is already in direction, the single arrow already rippled, scanned, rifled, rife with this bizarre directional ambivalence, ambiguity, arbitrariness (as Wittgenstein suggests): →
Where?
× 14. The preface, the face itself, doubles up, halves, splits (which way?). The word "preface" seems superconstructed, already so many angles. To say before, to say before saying, to pre-say. How do I say something before I have said it? Its homonymic play -- across languages, across the generations in one language, from one language to another in this case being one language in another -- gives it another kind of redundancy: to pre-face, as if something were to face you before the face itself. Facing, and also doing or making (via facere), thus pre-doing, doing before you do, "face" already being "make," already a matter of making before one makes a face. (The face is first, right off, from the name, what is made.) The face you put on before the face you put on. × 16. Dedication; heritage; legacy -- legend. Everywhere where the sign could have been followed, diagnosed, tracked, according to a pursuit, classic and modern -- these in a complex formula expressed by that double arrow, "greater than" and "less than," a perverse relationship, an obscene relation -- thus historical, of truth, that which will be found as already there, as it is, the sign itself has already been posted. Reference, in another sense, is made to other texts, to texts before, to precedent, as fund, as ancestors, and also thus to other texts as to things. To refer to other texts as truth is to let them lie. On the other hand, to refer to those texts is to open them. To make them speak, to enter into dialogue, exchange (to thus receive fund as much as give it), dispute, to and fro. To refer is to go into the other text and take it in, incorporate, intercourse. To let these (antecedent) texts cast their shadows across this one, as phantoms, light tricks, producing only optical effects, focal effects. Allusion will pass by, for they will disappear the moment the eye fixes upon them. A suggested presence, to play the mystery of those imprints which, like photographs of the missing, the unknown, the dead, the yet to be met, the yet to be encountered, impress themselves with a vacuum effect, a non-positive force which may have otherwise been called "emotional," "psychological" or "spiritual." The names are dropped. Somewhere else, perhaps, in some glossary or bibliography, some list of notes, some register. They are dropped, invoked and stricken, to abstract them and to abstract from them, the way poetry is supposed to do in its calculations, in its logic. × 19. The letter variable (cf. algebraic variable and signature). "X" as the letter standing for unknown letters, thus as the general proxy for all other letters. "X" as the letter letter. × 20. The clandestine exchange. The excursion. The first "other," the other other. A paramour? Nocturnal dialogue, already the excitement of a secret expression, a discourse that could be so open because of its confidentiality. Night to her day. And an excuse. The beginning of alibis and excuses, but also the inversion of the excuse, such that the unarticulated affirmation of the previous experience now comes to be seen as a set of justifications of its own. A kind of clinical, exploratory aspect, perhaps aspired to, but then the direct was itself an aspiration. The directness of the discourse was already a model. And I felt so "at home." Going out of my way to do so. A double life, but already I learned that I had no compunction about this division: already my resolve to argue against the formal propositions that "reacted" in me. The voice of society? And I articulated myself as a recount to the other. A history of my relations with the other: sex. × 22. The erasure mark. Striking through. Sous rature. Crossed out, deleted, exed. More generally perhaps from what is said of obscenity (is it perverse to suggest it this way?). What is marked for deletion. The sign as the trace, what persists, indelibly, even if as tenuously as memory. Locke and Kant are married in this funeral ceremony: erecting the monument of substance to the memory of the departed. After subjecting the thing to the ultimate strip show, stripping it of any possible "quality," they then annihilate it to demonstrate how the fact that it was there -- memory? -- cannot be extinguished. And this they make into impenetrable, imperishable presence. The place of what is not there, the ultimate property. Presence must be made of this very absence. To follow the inversion of the infamous St. Anselm, presence, then, is perfect insofar as it has no need of existence. × 23. Erasure marked. (Second pass?) Negation of negation -- does this risk giving away the stakes, not only showing the cards, but disclosing the stakes and the stratagem? Would this risk Hegel? That there is no such thing as a thing, that there is no thing, and thus, not even nothing. No thing as such means nothing, no thing, as absolute value, no absolute value, and that goes for the absolute value of zero, nothing. Which is why this is not nihilism. That clamorous "nothing" or "nothingness," even as attributed by those saying nay to what they see as nay-saying, is a step (logical?, dialectic?), an effect, of contravention. × 24. The mark "X" inscribed to represent the signature of an illiterate person. The signature. The proxy of the signature, the general mark in place of the idiomatic. A generalizable chiasmatics in its own right: the specificity of any "x," the hand which marks it but, on the other hand, the generic effect of any signature. The same for generic names. Brand X. Type X. Dr. X. × 25. I explain this work -- how to explain? Like dictionary, like algebra, certain values are given, but there is no direct statement of the matter (how to give the matter in such way -- reduce?) except as a figure, a parody, a burlesque, of such reduction, cult, occulting: × is everything. To be played out here as the drama of a religion, a fetish cult, the fetish of all fetishes. One must string together these stitches elsewhere, elsewise, in explication, as "speech," the performance of the dialogue, the internal dialogue, the monotonous exposition to another even in one's self. Also the blindness of explication. No thesis, only reaction, antithesis. Against, after, but by virtue of, thus × Hegel. "Thesis" is not first. Antithesis begins, and thesis is a byproduct of it, the foundation for what comes after, forgetting the before of the previous antithesis. One can only aim -- explain, propound -- with a target. × 26. The spot-marker. The location mark. An object location. As opposed to the dot of "you are here," it is the marker on the treasure map, the treasure buried, as if this were intended, beneath the algebraic variable. × 27. Chiasmus. See proxy, for the way in which the chiasmus is complicated by the level of signification. This is the other axis of the ×, that turns it into a jack, that jacks it up. See xograph and its extrapolation for the interpolation exchange of the other ideal. See also the complication. × 28. General metaphoricity. The complication of the copula, although also to imply that the copula mark, whether the form of the "is" in language or the "=" of logic or mathematics (not to imply the latter is ultimately distinct from language), is riven, crossed, with this very complication, and, at the same time -- operation of the exchange, chiasmatic -- the × adopts the function of the copula. The equal sign is put under erasure, but relieved. But, in another sense, the equal sign is refigured, as if literally the same two lines are used, turned, crossed, to form this ×. All this is to emphasize the inequality of those things so associated, metaphor being, as you, my great friend where there are no friends, have so cleverly pointed out, the making equal of things which are not. And the general exchange, as opposed to the restricted sense of one term merely funding another. In other words, if a man is a bear, then a bear becomes a man by the same exchange. Thus, the form: S × P × 29. Inversion. Following certain propositions a certain other love of mine once made about how my message is received by the other -- well, by you -- but inverted. (I suppose that means this goes for this whole work, right here, that everything you are reading is an inverted form of what I'm writing -- er -- wrote?) Not to mention that inversion is a general condition of everything we see. And of course this proposition: "Love is the inversion of the image by the retina." I won't fool you about who I am quoting there. × 31. General and specific. General and perverse specific. The couplet, general/deviant. × 32. The multiplication symbol. × 33. As in x's and o's, used in conjunction with o's as a dual set of markers for, for example, the two sides in the game of tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses; the offensive and defensive player positions in sports diagrams; symbols for hugs and kisses used in letters. Crosses circled and circles crossed, the target, the mark, the spot. Annular annulment. Counters, tokens, games, giving for, passing, exchange. × 34. Experimental. As in "X-15." (Cf. "Dr. X.") × 35. A symbol for Christ or Christian. (Cf., the Christ Replication Mechanism, or CRM.) × 36. In commerce and finance, ex. Not including, without. Latin ex, "out of, from," as in deus ex machina. × 37. In relationships, "ex," meaning "ex-wife" or "ex-lover." Did you think I was writing about anything but "exes"? Note, also, the plural form of the letter "x", "xes," and what it spells backwards. Also another excess. × 38. A symbol used to indicate a mechanical defect in type. × 39. In proofreading, the symbol, as a mark in the margin, used to indicate broken type. × 40. Extemporaneous. Explosion. Unexpected. The bursting into "passion." You were other again. The way the suggestion came up at the moment. Again the conversation as the overture, but already by now so used to overtures having nothing certain about what they prefaced. And then to face you. Taking and making me the victim of the moment. You turned the seduction deftly around, attributing to me. But in the perfect swoop of the kiss was hidden the stumble, the falter of another step, the next movement, coming off wrong. Deference in the wrong direction. Nervous again, the ladies' man green again, a rookie blunder. The best intention can lead to brawling. How to learn, then, that thinking of the other involves a risk, even in deference: What I thought was being considerate annoyed you. Thus also realizing, again, that you bear the mark of your others: to any one person, you also show a history of relations with others, conditioning. × 41. The Roman numeral for ten. × 42. The 24th in a series, 23rd when "J" is omitted. × 43. Xograph. A three-dimensional printing process. The pre-holographic device which extends the process of parallax. Another name for this. × 44. I will have made an advance on any remark about the "excessive" character of this work. After all, that's at least one of its titles (and that means it has an excessive title, twice over, at least, exponential). The confluence of these: criticism as disparagement and the integrity of the work, being true to itself -- if it is a work's purpose to be excessive, then at the same time that one denigrates it, presuming "excessive" as pejorative, one also expresses redundantly the work's essential quality. (Cf., Nietzsche's aphorism on the man who when accused of something wrong says "yes, that's me.") × 45. Fetish: indexicological. The fetish itself is indexicological, and then there is the fetish of the indexicological. This is already the paradex, parindex, parindox (I can't decide). The reference, the metonym, the sign, the remainder, the token, the emblem, and the thing referred to, the referent. Already, I'm going to utilize the formula of the chiasmus to explain this general explanation of the chiasmus thus utilized in this work. The indexicological problem between specific or contingent and "random" occurrence (exemplarity: the "best" example or simply a sample, itself redivided or subdivided by this same ratio [i.e., is the sample "most" typical, or simply "random"]). But, then also the relationship between the sign and its referent, particularly as much as referents themselves are signs of each other (a shoe for some body, some one, someone) and as signs are referents (best example[?] this very statement, since it is referring to signs, to "signs," with the word "signs"). × 46. The fetish. The fetish of fetish itself. Irreducible fetish. To use the × fetishistically to refer to the general order, operation, procedure and function of the fetish. This × refers to a fetish, but also represents a fetish by being utilized as one. × 47. This work performs its content, or theme. × 48. The formal layer or level becomes celebrated, as in sects, in-sects, formidae, and in "sects," the homophone of the other "theme," but more specifically: Kabbalists, Essenes, gnostics, esoterics, scholastics, all those reputed for their devotion to the referential system "more" so than to the proper referent. (All Catholics would form a set here, as well, according to the "sect" of my youth, due to their devotion to Mary and the priesthood.) Not to mention sublimation, the whole ambiguity of the aesthete, aesthetic. As a kind of formal sex, doing at the level of the sign what the sign is supposed to be representing, and this brings us to an even greater, more dimensional ×, that is drawn, located, between the referential system and the extra-referential, the outside of the reference, the "real." Is the difference between the real and the representational real or representational? ("Is the difference between difference of kind and difference of degree a difference of kind or a difference of degree?") Where does one represent the real, or the difference (the space?) between the representational and the real? This form-ation, this fixion, takes place simultaneously on both levels, but also as what divides each, either level itself, from itself. × 49. Any totality must reach the point where it has to refer to itself, and thus divide itself by virtue of being what includes itself. This forms a very fine line of contradiction, of non-classically-logical division ("differance"), because the thing is then both reference and referent of itself. Its very "unity" becomes a matter of this contradiction, this duplicity. As soon as you are an alibi for yourself, you've crossed yourself, double-crossed. If you think this is just fixion, just formal or rhetorical games, then check the great work of fiction Gödel has made of mathematics or any logical system. × 50. To cross in the snow to your window was not boldness enough to cross the threshold to your lips. You invited me in, saving me from my forestalling. Or perhaps you were falling in store. Precipitous. I took the turn to descend further, to the lips that speak desire not speaking. You exclaimed, a torrid cheer. My own boldness would pay in a dividend of not speaking, the retort of things done. A posthumous birth.
× 51. See, I've already given it away, given you the whole work, the whole thing, before I've given it to you. The × as cancellation, inversion, self-division, replication, multiplication, exponentialization, unit, symbol, etc. The × can be seen as related to ∞, perhaps a cutting from it or into it, and as that which both includes and is included by this other symbol as well as what it stands for. Since × stands for both a singularity and (its) perpetuity or replication. Could I give you any more, any less (since I am giving you everything, literally, which must include nothing, which therefore means I have to give you nothing, which can only be so if it is not included with other things) than infinity? Than another sign, ×, that now, as part of ∞ standing for it, includes it? × 52. What kind of lover would this be? But as soon as you catch yourself asking that question, you catch yourself at the presumption, which nonetheless you would have to be able to pass before yourself, to "try out," to simply "mention" to yourself even as a presumption you do not or would not make. Who knows or who judges in the personal, interior court? Especially if you are also susceptible to a kind of outbidding of yourself, a remnant or secret agency, another moment of yourself lying in wait, spying on what "you" precedes, goes before, proceeds, it/you. × 53. "What kind of lover would this be?" Already a project, already a projection, I trip ahead, jump to a kind of idealization of a status for this person. Can this be strictly avoided? Of course it doesn't have to be the very thing in every case as a maudlin or squeaky idealization, but there is no way to "process" the other, this new person that I meet, without typifying: something which is simultaneously past-bound and futural -- perhaps we should say "virtual," keeping in mind the word's etymology as well. Past-bound because it issues from some previous disposition but also heads towards, makes it bearing; futural, as if to make this sloppy coinage after "historical," because this preconception or image may act as an expectation, if even slightly or obliquely, with respect to the "actuality" of the other. × 54. «"What kind of lover would this be?"» One is not innocent, strictly speaking. There is always some complication, some sophistication, and this is complicated by the fact that it cannot be fixed, inasmuch as it must be fixed (done, constructed, worked, as opposed to predetermined, etc.). In other words, no already easy opposition of values, ratio of equations, for example innocent = pure response, honesty of intention; sophistication = calculation/shrewdness/manipulation. These values can be very quickly transposed. If I, the wolf, the rogue, meet someone who wants to think of me as the ideal companion, a spouse, a "Prince Charming," this plan or projection of me is her calculation with respect to me. If I meet someone who has in mind the idea of me as a wolf, a bad boy, a perfect scoundrel, even a Sade, and I just can't cut it, I disappoint as much an idealism. × 56. Excess. To exceed every thing, and everything, in its own way, and to exceed excess in so doing. × 58. Making passes. Passage, passion, passivity, to pass. Utilizing, after Blanchot, all these terms from passio and pathos, but only after this root had been understood in a kind of reconstructed sense. To pass, neither active nor passive, undecidable subject. No present now. This understood in terms of the supernumerary of appetite, as perhaps designated by Kant (as cited from his correspondence by Jean Francois-Lyotard), that strange surplus-ing and undercutting of itself which was called "agitation." No point of rest (understood absolutely, positively, literally). × 59. Like reading, or indeed, "thought itself." To risk schematism, or the instantiation effect of this very language which we are otherwise describing (differance is what effaces itself), only the tension, pulsion or torsion (no force, but the play of forces) between passes, passages, or what would have been the positive points. This non-point that gives the point effect, this (un)working of the point, must be taken into account with regard to sex, or perhaps only as sex can give it account. Not that this would be entirely novel. Is it possible to mobilize the clitoris in this respect against the penis, the phallus? Would this not turn up intersected limits of all types, such as that between courting and the act, between foreplay and coitus (supposing either conception or coitus itself as telos)? It implies the interval, or rather turns it up as what gives itself up to the point/moment of contact and the act. Did that feel good? Did you get it? Do it again. That? Like that? × 60. You were again another. Making me the object, the sucker, again, of the evasion of culpability. Picking me, calling on me, relaying through a messenger. But making out as clear as the moon. And again, for measure. But after telling me, you let go, and on that again, a go-between. The seer and the seen. An eye for an eye? I was the object, the flash, the impulse, the consumed and discarded. Put me through hoops. The jilter jilted. × 61. Note from above for Luce Irigaray: Yes, but . . . While you can activate, mobilize this labial model against the phallus-clitoris conspiracy (collusion [stutter, here, and you will stroke me just right: collision, oh like the way I hear caress and coerce, forever overlipping -- it touches me well on the lips, of course you guessed it, my labia (don't you dare deny me this envy)]) you provide a distinction between two kinds of partition that draws im-mediate (sic) retort, due to the alleged value that accrues to only one side of the dichotomy. Wait. Just now I am struck by this bipartite bipartition, also. But you must have realized that. You are so much more experienced there than I am. Still, "one" wouldn't deny that, neophyte that I am, I still feel that. Why is it that stroking of the labia by themselves would be "un-mediated," immediate? But touching the hand to the penis (or is it only ever, as phallus, never-a-penis?), as indeed touching the hand then again to the clitoris, a mediation? Or touching anything else, for that matter, and how will anyone track down the displacement of erogenous zones once and for all? Could I not be masturbating by clapping my hands (let's say at the latest censorship legislation) and compounding my thrill/sin by fetishizing myself to (the) boot?. For the sake of a dummy proposition of a different metonymic sexuality, must it be necessary to show that one always makes of another the negation of the value or status of the one? Something which tempts us to follow this demonstration as much as retort it (something already not excluded from the term "follow"). Here we have another demonstration of, as, the double exemplary (how many does that make?). And another reason to partake, pleasurably, of the classic doubt, reinscribed here: does she really mean it, or is that what she says/does (pre-tends) just to get herself off? × 62. To relinquish. To achieve. Everything you say in your Post Card, particularly on Freud where it has to do with the primary process, binding, sublimation, relever, etc. The point to this other positing, posting, of opposites, is not instantiation, for the problem of the doubling that occurs to complicate numbers, and essential sets, is the next movement to which the binary figure must give itself. The problem of what is something's opposite (this too will have to be generalized, form the basis for going over the most diverse texts, for this assumption). How then is night the opposite of day when the day also has for its opposite another day. Even to then add, "specifically and generally," or "literally or figuratively," is to have (these) confounded (these). Blanchot's sense of this "day" should be cited here, a scansion, a diagonal across his texts. × 63. Mathematics. That numbers in their progression also number ones. Counting must account for the progression of a string of ones, single units, etc. Something which might seem to grant a sense of unity, but that would require stopping the almost immediate slippage of this. Pardon this bad pun: mathexis. All of this, too, for ×. As along the lines of Irigaray, again, when she singles out the positivistic problematic of counting, as this is understood as granting, "ones." But this same numerological accumulation, appropriation, investment, taking stock, must not be reducible, must not provide another strict reduction. Nor some other of a critique that would grant it the very power it hopes to check. Where is the sense of number? That one is both one, unique, but always also one of . . . Imagine also this proliferation of ×s. A string of designatories of single units, designating also undetermined values. Don't stop there. Because you won't be allowed not to splotch, to avoid the confusion of the algebraic × with the tally mark, nor with the × that means "times," multiplication. × 64. Note: computer indexing, "SEARCH" function. × 65. How many times should this work be written, read? × times, of course. ×, times. × 66. A community of lovers. An orgy? At least a perverse wedding band. A ring. The roundtable. The card game. And a particular "reading" that went only roughly like this: Wagner's Ring, before seeing it on stage, a recorded Metropolitan Opera production broadcast on PBS; Nietzsche's The Case of Wagner, with a complicated series of footnotes and citations including Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Goethe, Spinoza, B. Constant (mediated by Kaufmann); the SF Opera production of the Ring; Derrida's Nietzsche's Styles; on PBS again, coincidentally, an archive recording of Oscar Wilde reading "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and the line quoted by Kaufmann in his translation of Nietzsche; the Wilde show immediately followed by "The Naked Civil Servant," a film, with introductory remarks by Quentin Crisp himself, especially on the idea of having himself portrayed by an actor; then John Hurt "playing" Crisp delivering the "lines" about loving the type of person that would by definition find him despicable, a virile dark man who would detest effeminate homosexual males; and, just to add by its suggestion and suggestiveness, Groucho Marx, who said, "I wouldn't join a club that would have me as a member." I × I. I ×. (Read also: I, ×.) × 68. A zoological offshoot: variant: from mimicry, that topic and topos. A whole nest of issues. One could make this problem, supposedly literal and practical, a model (or mimic, to demonstrate the sliding into each other of these terms) for everything that has been said of mimesis in the philosophical environment. According to the Batesian hypothesis of mimicry -- that even via natural selective, aleatory channels of causation, there would be a purpose or practical reason or cause for mimicry -- there follow certain aporia, which perhaps can be subsumed under this formula: that the more efficient and prodigious the mimic, the more the purpose of the mimicry is defeated. Predators must encounter the undesirable model and be able to "remark" this in some sensory way, then that incident must be carried forth, remarked or recalled by the mimics. But, thus, the mimic presupposes further incidents of predation, in which case it also provides for the incident of a non-undesirable predation which can be re-marked sensorially by the same traits. It depends on which one is encountered first. For any and all predators to simply "know," instinctively, gnosologically, that a particular mark meant bad, there would be no need for the mark, certainly none as what can be counterfeited, no need for drag. The structure of the sign is this of event, incident, dis-ordering, encounter, thus of being confused or lifted. × 69. Time to think jealousy. Or time to think jealously. The span of time, and the node, as such a subject requires. At what moment(s) is this thought, and for what span of time, within the breach of which this subject will have demanded attention? Isn't jealousy that which wrests away, which calls upon a subject as a tyrannical condition: what tyrannizes and what makes what thinks it tyrannical? No, not for certain. Too many other slots, slits, slats figure this, as if by figure we were to mean what suspends a fragmentation, what explodes, distributes (madly), and what collects and constellates these shards by so doing. Motion and instance: motion pictures and picture motion. "[T]he passion of jealousy 'subordinates and at the same time unites' all other passions." -- Simone de Beauvoir quoting Sade. × 70. You caught me up, right away. Just one meeting and you weren't going to fall for my trap. Perhaps you were the wisest of them all, never to fall for me, never to fall for all this deceit. Never to fall for this ruse of mine of not falling. They told you about me and you told me what they said about me. Behind their backs you told me what they said behind my back. "He loves them and leaves them." So you left me. Would I only be gloating to see the paradox in that? As if I could have smiled smugly to you and said, "Don't we all. Don't we all." × 71. Here jealousy will be designated as if it watched over the discourse at the very moment that a theory, a theoretical act (to view), would survey, and surmise, it. The third party of analysis would participate in this radical overlap, only apparent reciprocity, the predicating backlash (this phrase enacts a vindictive scene by stealing away the positivity and activity a little too easily; we will re-mark this), precisely as it suggested its purely observational position. The prereflective, or unreflected, experience (but isn't this what holders of experience would have it mean), something like the pure jealous gaze, would only come to be justified by a certain reflection. Reflection in the sense of a view of itself adequate to it. A critical sense then, will never divide this space, or double it, cross a border, if it only hopes to determine, discern, the properties of a factual matrix. But this metaphysical question cannot be simply avoided: "What is jealousy?" will be let loose with the stress of citation, put into drag and making drag (for) some other. × 72. Jealousy demands (an) ethics. This to be understood with all the force of a historical error, the cadence of deviant manifestation. (The reversibility of the demand: where the "deviant" behavior asks the normal behavior why it is as it is: cf., note on Blanchot and Sade, and the sticker "What Causes Heterosexuality?") Does ethics demand (a) jealousy? This not only will be scandalizing to ethics, but to any conscientious objection to the sedate and indignant mastery of the ethical. Jealousy seems at once to demand an ethic claiming or suppressing the other, and claiming or suppressing the self. To lift it up in this way risks a constative act: this must be followed (with the dual sense of this). × 73. Let us also speak of vindication and recrimination, as if the two were necessarily confused. Vengeance. For it perhaps, after it. What punishment would have in mind. The double bind of punishment is doing what would "show" the other. That other is who is set off, not inimical, but what would have been a loved one. This vengeance is an act which has the problem of the oath, of even the vow of loyalty or marriage: can I pronounce, demonstrate, perform or "do" a truth with a form that is not idiomatic, but on the other hand, can there be anything that is absolutely idiomatic? Is this truth which I would swear or perform generic or specific, "objective" or "subjective"? (The notorious instruction to juries to "be objective.") Which is worse: to give them what they ask for, or what they "ask for"? And which then is more literal, providing that something like a vulgar hermeneutics is at work, interpreting the conduct of the other? The lesson of the Christian ethic, of Christ-like conduct, appends itself to precisely what it opposes; it opposes, also in the sense of facing. The very scripture that admonishes to turn the other cheek sets this off against a former law which was something like payment in kind ("an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth"). In mind here is something like the complication, the winding and pleating of the example, such that it will have always been tropical as well as topical. × 75. The cause of jealousy. The (un)working of the ethic. Ethics works in two ways: a concern for the other and a concern for the self. And is thus already squared. But each of these can be construed in what are apparent cross purposes. The double bind: I have no right to disallow, but I have no right to allow. And yet this is not the same as the free individuality, the free agency of each. Like the problem of dedicating oneself to this principle of mutuality, of "freedom," and finding the spell of the other clinging like a residue. The link of the self to the other, to any other, leaves neither individuality nor community, but gives or allows the effect of either or both. × 76. Is there a subject for jealousy to happen to? What event? What experience? To express it another way, is there a subject before jealousy? That would mean both before it as opposing it, opposable to it, facing it as a separable thing, but also before jealousy in the chrono-logic of the event. As if there were a stable entity, a stability or stasis, of a subject to which jealousy happened, occurred, a subject for which jealousy happens as accident, or infection. Isn't jealousy radical subjectification? And as such, division. But as such division, the forcible unity of incongruous parts, drawn and stitched together. Being riven. × 77. (This to designate, to tab, what follows for the "×s" file as well, or in addition to, exponentialization from. But, now, also, a remark, a supernumerary runaway inserted at this merely marginal note: this × serves a function which returns its own implications over the entire body it would have served. Here × functions as a link, the indexical sign proper to the work so titled, yet, already having been derived from the general function of the × as the sign in place of the sign, the absent sign. But it is also the cross, the intersection, the inversion, the sign of a double inclusion, such as the hymenic or involuted bracket that I have "invented" for my long-hand notes.) I cannot bear . . . What I cannot bear is that I can bear anything. The expression "I cannot bear (it [something, anything])" will maintain the genealogy of its strict deferral to a state, a stratum, of what nevertheless then becomes a kind of odd expression: I can bear. This is not the opposite, or rather, literalizing the prospect of seeking the opposite expression we are brought to a form which does not have the same conventionalization. In other words, here an ex-pression loops itself in its relief, in its referential ground-reaching. "I can't bear (being without you)" as a deposition, in all the false construances of this word, as well. To the same point, if also otherwise, "I cannot bear" does not simply say that otherwise there might be a situation in which I would be able to bear, but that in general, I cannot bear ("I can not-bear"?). It defers -- perhaps infers, at least refers -- to a normalization which is not there to begin with. This is relation. × 78. Not knowing, then, jealousy reasons. And here to propose what we might otherwise have started with: that reason is jealous(y) or vice versa. What else do we have as a model for this? The paradigm par excellence, according to at least one lineage. The subject par excellence, the one god. Here we also follow a formulation of Levinas to another commandment. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me" means not merely that one should not, but that one will be unable to. This takes up all the other aporia of this prohibition / natural law. But it allows or provides for the instances of what it seemingly prohibits. In which case the subject could speculate endlessly, without there being any speculation, in the sense of risk. Hegel himself does God better. × 79. I want to think jealous, jealousy, jealously. I want to do it justice. I must do it justice in order to bring it to justice. And why not throw justice in for the bargain? Jealousy might just as well win. For it, unlike justice, will stop at nothing, not being fair-minded. Except, of course, for the jealousy of the law, the imperative to jealously defend. (A timely note, as quoted by Max Cady (Robert DeNiro), in the 1991 version of "Cape Fear.") So many reversals result from this pairing (they are overwhelming, running away, tributaries, capillaries, blood). Their confusion comes also from their supposed greatest opposition. And God, their perfect union. Ultimately justice and jealousy the same. When love is the ultimate reason, the ulterior, the ultimatum, how will we be able to adjudicate what is proper justification? Where will we stand (or on what bench sit) far enough from any interest? × 80. You were the weight of slighting, the glancing, the innocuous that still took its toll. Passing one part for another, shying from the conspicuous. As if not being held to the bosom could be landing in the lap. Mischievous enough perhaps for fun, passing off perhaps the grudge that would not be borne. And when you lighted again, another intersection, you became the imago, the curious object of a jealous inversion of identification. The worth of hauling.
× 82. Vainly spy death pane. (And × as anagrammatics, generally.) × 83. What would it mean then to give an account of jealousy? A so-called objective account. Is this not the project that would rather be the disturbance of any such project? (And should we be alarmed at hearing with that "rather" the subjective voice, a predilection rather than the technical replacement or alternation effected by a neutral "rather"? Jealousy then as prosopopoeia, in fact, monstrously so, in that like a god, the God, especially as understood jealously, it would be the ultimate identity, all self-assertion and arbitrarily sufficient, the power of its own word. Here, a postulate, formulizeable, that personification would be a project even of persons for themselves, the alleged subject of language, via this jealousy.) For to speak of jealousy, to essay it, phenomenalize it, explicate its workings, would require the paradox of administering objectively what stands for the greatest, blindest subjectivity. Allegedly, since this description as well is caught up in the paradox. And to ask jealousy to give an account of itself. As futile as to be able to give an account of jealousy without referring to some subjectivity, subjective moment or substitution. × 84. No inside or outside, and one does not come from only the demand to ward it off in order to say this. Jealousy has by turns and at once stood for both absolute right and absolute wrong. Witness the testimonial of one who makes a demand and yet doesn't want to be, to appear to be, to be thought of as, to think him/herself, jealous. Jealousy is a bad thing, I acknowledge, thus my justification for feeling that my current claim or demand is not undue. × 85. Here is a problem, a puzzle, as if mathematical or logical: There is a person, P, who has come to want a person, I, in such a way that she will let nothing deny her this I. What this means is that she will not accept anything as a denial, or rather what would stand for a denial she will turn into the reinforcement of her desire. She has utilized a method worthy of the masochism explained by Gilles Deleuze. The obstacle itself becomes a source of pleasure, since it has entered itself into the same chain, but this is not merely savoring the obstacle, the impediment, in its own right, it is refusing to accept its terms, seeking to outbid it, subvert it. P then has accustomed herself (although this is not such a good word, since "accustomed" sounds too sedate for the precarious balance of impulses that must make up the economy of this desire) to I's being with other people, even to wanting to imagine it and be subjected to elaborate accounts of it, since, if I can still desire her and think of her when with others, then not even the most conventionally accepted obstacle, another love, can usurp that desire for her. Then, along comes an other, S, who demands that I love only her, in the more customary sense of this. She is jealous, and expects that I pay her all possible attention and devotion, in desire, but then in all types of acquaintance, even unrealistically so. Now, one possible extent of P's line of desire would have it that I would be held from her indefinitely, thus S's demand upon I would satisfy that by perpetuating the suspension of I from P. P is also compelled by the idea of her own obliteration, a kind of perverse unrequited desire. Thus, the more I falls for or consents to S's demand, the more I realizes an extent of P's demand. S would think such a thing perverse, ludicrous, and certainly would not believe that I could love her thinking of someone else, or that such love could be even technically related to anyone else. Her demand is a complete, ideal fidelity. Now if I can think of both P and S by thinking of how S obliterates, precludes, surpasses P, then would this not also satisfy what S's ideal fidelity demands, at least since in its supremacy it presupposes others, even those to triumph over? Would this not meet the demands of both P and S, at least formally? Who then, would have I? And how will anyone ever know whom I really loves? And, who loves I more? × 86. To begin with to begin with. From the very start the problem of a start will introduce itself and even continue to carry itself forward. Which, of course, will have meant also that in the meantime, something will nevertheless have passed. Why is there an aggravating sense to this, an agitation like the pejorative sense of auto-affection? That the beginning itself could generate endless meandering, as if it were to never get anywhere. This goes right along with the seemingly opposite incessant demand for something else, the constant "there" that overruns and pushes contentment to always outstrip itself. To wait, already to be unable to wait. What waits which cannot wait. What cannot wait is left waiting. (I think of you with the madness of the day.) × 87. The exogamous, the exogenic. This already seems superfluous, but it remains as if it were a reminder, and its value brings it again (or is brought to it again) before further endogamizing claims that would most significantly refute this as such a superfluous pointer. That the very kernel of the blood relation is a dispossession of each of the parties as well as the very totality or continuity that either constitutes them or that they would supposedly constitute. The mixture of genetic material in the offspring would be the cementing synthesis of the conjugal relation, but the husband and wife do not then ever themselves achieve this union, except as it is supposed, through this consummation. (Remember that Hegel knew this, that Hegel himself said it, that Hegel does not have to be reminded of this. Remember then, that even in the Hegelian discourse, with all it's funding of the family, this is not exotic or external, it is not separate argument. Remember, then, also, how this argument is then used in service of the philosophical institution of the family.) This calls for an examination of how a metaphysical sense would have predisposed the scientific explanation of this biological relation, and how the strictly technical, empirical, material, biological explication would have transferred this essentializing function back to whatever sphere is assigned the de jure status (and the secularized moral authority continues to carry out this exchange as institutionalized forms of knowledge at the disposal of the broad notion of sociocultural imperative); how their separation is as duplicitous as would be their subordination one to the other in some proper hierarchy. (How is something like this significant for even a work such as Horkheimer's "The Future of Marriage"?) In this regard, a dialectics would have come along to consummate a precritical sacralization of the conjugal relation. Philosophy itself would have been presented with the curious predicament of requiring this schema, whether it assigned itself the task of explicating this beforehand, or whether it would have ignored this as some most obvious facticity (even as it would do such a thing). What has intersected and funded this phrase: to give life. Such a tangle of lines running through almost every conceivable discourse, philosophically from Plato through Heidegger (and beyond), and in all other extra-philosophical discourses. The process itself of tracking down the diversity of such possible or actual, historical metaphors, either as a study or a game, could require volumes. Species perpetuation, and the loop of means and ends of life, such as Valéry called upon in certain passages, will always be assimilable, rigged to the inceptive formulation of the birth metaphor. This can be distilled to the most perverse redundancy, a kind of tautology just to the side of the definitive pure moment or presence tautology of the "is." The sense of birth requiring another sense of birth because of the way this other sense would require the first sense of birth. (× as ∞ again, but the latter in a [mad] operational sense, like an electric toy race car track.) Or something like that. We could write it out numerous ways (it is even tempting): to scandalize pure inception and its natural base notion, an errant repetition that would dump the principle of conception into a loop, a game of the stroking process of sexual activity, which the principle of conception otherwise attempts to manage and control for its purpose(s), or telos. To conceive is to conceive is to conceive . . . Dissemination. To conceive is to conceive conception. The wedding ring in a vicious sense. Another "o" to place beside an ×. Here too is where the individual and propriety are indelibly conscribed with community in a way that requires locating in an archic sense, and lining out, like a parental claim on the offspring, the return of the offspring. × 88. Facing: what could contain and confront a Hegelian analysis and the problem of analogy. Perverse seriations, cross-pollinations, here. Strains. What makes strain(s of) these very discourses each with respect to the others, among the others. Confrontation, contestation, in the Hegelian sense, and also that of all his commentators, would not be alien to this. That I can never face myself (let at least one common connotation of this phrase weave in, here, popular psychology). As I come to fill in, either experientially or linguistically (and as the two cross [out] each other), what was previously given to me as other, I disappropriate myself from the form of what guaranteed or expressed this occurrence, even as I appeal to this appropriation. The mimic function/displacement. And facing the other, I both present before the perceptualizing agency, the pure gaze that only spectates and speculates, and at the same time offers an other to the form of a dialogue: the self wanting to know itself in the way it has seen any two others. What can never be strictly internal nor external to the dialogue. Here is offered a confusion of two poles, one pole of which is made up of another confusion of the narcissistic and auto-affection (once this has also been separated/confused among other further confusions). Like the mirror, in the sense of Lacan, Blanchot or Derrida: a squaring (at least) that is the double split of each side of the reflection (or in Blanchot's passage, the failure of Narcissus to see himself is a kind of determinant, neutralizing, in Blanchot's sense, the positivity of this, indeed any, determination). All this to be entered here as the value, the performative, of this, an other, ×: a chiasmatics prior to any first relation, even to itself as a first relation, or to any determinate crisis or chorismos. × 89. Narcissism and auto-affection. What could have made the example of Narcissus? Something which gave of this character a fate to which he would have already been predisposed. And this links up the whole deus ex machina scheme, the circularity of omnipotence and fate. Reminiscent of the phrase taken from an old paperback edition of Venus in Furs: "the man who bequeathed his name to masochism." The confusion of all ends of a supposed development. The problem also of the law and the law: what is not possible, and what is forbidden because/thus it is possible. The double sense of fate, and then here, identity. As both cause, conditioning factor, and telos or outcome, that comes to mark. These two onanistic values then will have circulated a historical, and historiographic function. And why was Narcissus sentenced as he was? Because he could not see (or hear) himself. You shall see yourself forever because it is forbidden/impossible. Now then, what is most proper to this auto-affection would be always, at least for the time being, what makes it pass before a whole socio-affective designation of this classic ordeal. We regret that having to refine this point here makes us lose track of some rather attractive others. Auto-affection would supply narcissism, understood in the rather pervasive symptomatic sense, with a detour, almost in the way sex can divert from its traditionally understood natural objective. The value of an intercourse would here take place in the relation of an auto-affection with itself, of one type of auto-affection with another, of one degree of auto-affection with another, etc.; and the value of an onanistic, soliloquized relation would pass into the supposed interpersonal relationship. × 90. Leap of faith. The most direct proposition. To imagine no boundary is to have the boundary. Then, when it's not there, discover this gap is the field of desire, imagination. You told of others, but also of the monotony of this impetuousness, giving in, just doing. Dislocated. A whole relation in one night.
× 91. On narcissism and autoerotism, cf. Jean Laplanche's Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. This entire work should be cited for its own chiasmatic project, one also of "derivation," tracing in a self-professed structuralist way, the "ambiguities" of Freudian terminology which cannot, after all, be held to mere semantic level. It would take much commentary here to follow Laplanche: to analogize his movement, so that following his example one explicates him carefully in order to also measure out a certain departure from him, just as he has done with Freud. (And Lacan?) Particularly, however, we would use this study's excogitation of the circularity within psycho-genetic, or perhaps metapsychological, articulation of narcissism and autoerotism. As Laplanche himself suggests in general for all the work of Freud, we would have to transpose the value of something like a broad movement, a crisscrossing, derivational scansion, rather than discern the resolution Freud may finally have chosen, or simply inherit the riddle in order to make good with the answer. This means paying attention to the specific problem of narcissism, but figuring it also, even within the territory of a Laplanche study, with the general ambiguity of the discourse on sexuality. (If all paths lead to Freud, or to some psychoanalytic exigency conducted by him, in his name, then one would at the same time say, all paths lead out, or away from, Freud. This is not a simple refutation. Especially when one can operate such "formalist" tricks by watch-dogging Freud, as Derrida does in "To Speculate -- On Freud," with any vantage point from an extra-"textual" position: when all paths lead to Freud, then they all lead back to, for instance, Hegel.) As if a kind of spasm operated the entire psychoanalytic enterprise, as if it were performing what it were to only have explicated, one can transpose this issue of derivation so that it operates between the level of discourse of the thing and another level which would have "derived" from a circumlocution of this model-effect. Psychoanalysis must simultaneously strive for an originary proposition and enter into the spaces, the non-positive or non-positional, of such a discourse, itself or other. Whose discourse is it? Who is left to speak it? Follow again Laplanche's commentary of the problem of a primary narcissism and a prerequisite ("prereflexive, preverbal") autoerotism. × 92. Note on dissim(i/u)lation: these "two" words. To dissimilate is to make things dissimilar. To dissimulate is to hide an intention. Linguistics reportedly uses dissimilate to refer to changes in words in the form of a (sometimes) uniform displacement of one unit by another, such as one letter when French marbre goes to English marble. These two different words will participate then in a marvelous economy, as one definition of one of them will contain an explanation of what happens between the two in order to allow me the confusion of their senses. I hope something of the same to be understood in the use of the word "collusion" (as for something like confusion in the technical sense, or simply, as if simply, "conflation"). I hope also each of the terms thus paired will have participated in a dissimilation and a dissimulation of each other, in line with something like a general metaphoricity, so that one is not understood to understand or underwrite the other, except as one incident in the ongoing and incessant process of other such depositions. Here, also with respect to the ×: to understand the use of this letter in these terms as well. As if it were being appealed to as the general dissimilator, its own value thus then dissimilated and dissimulated perpetually away from its own retrieval or restitution. The × exes (itself). × 93. What will never bring us the distance. The (×)space and the (×)time of this. To have traversed a distance will also have meant to give it away to some other time, when that ruse of assimilating time to a path will give the dream of having attained both. To go to a "there" means to have left behind a place past, passed, which then, of course, will already be passing (the idea of the identified past, as if even this notion of "passing" would not have also its sense of over-running). Unison, the dream or desire to meet, touch, be present submersed or saturated together in an identical instant of concept, thought, psyche, is dis(-)appointed. Neither active nor passive, both. The distance will have to have been pre-achieved in order for it to be offered as the "as such" of the claim and the subsequent attainment. A gestural bracketing, like the trick of holding up finger and thumb as if to pick up some great object in the distance by sighting (siting, "citing") it, will have "presented" the distance, so easily it seems, as "there" ("present," as if ignoring the escape or perpetual remainder "caught" by this word), and as if traversing it will ever have been to contain, ingest, conceptualize (or complete the conceptualization of), that distance. To track it will be to give it off again at every step behind the advance. The temporal complications of this will not stand (still for) the practical assimilation of this entire "problem" (as if it merely came to define distance itself, readjusting itself to the bracketing, the way physics so readily seems to allow the speaker or thinker to have "mastered" the f[a/u]rthest reaches) to historical or memorial, comparative accounts of things like transportation and telecommunications. Which will bring these in here as if by some strange detour or intersection. × 94. Desire (love) as contradiction. From the rivalry of those desiring, to the minutiae of the way cherishing can tyrannize, not as a matter of volition, but technically. To cherish someone's body is to irresponsibly think there is any right to it. Wanting to touch at any second, when the other is carried by their own concerns, for subsistence or whatever, by circumstance, away. But this impulse, the impression/expression, the ×-pression, this overlapping of skins, of tissues of boundaries, is the very rending of pulsion that is this privation, the urge towards, the want, that never leaves us, properly speaking, proper (cf. Levinas on experience of the other as want, desire, not need). × 95. De(-)position. Deposition. The litany, as if all these sub-definitions directed themselves to a certain address, deposited their different senses of this word in the same account, knew their destination (the way a letter does[?]). From an English dictionary: 1: an act of removing from a position of authority 2a: a testifying esp. before a court b: declaration; specif: testimony taken down in writing under oath 3: an act or process of depositing 4: something deposited: DEPOSIT1 vt 1: to place esp. for safekeeping as a pledge; esp.: to put in a bank 2a: to lay down; place b: to let fall (as sediment) DEPOSIT2 n 1: the state of being deposited 2: something placed for safekeeping as a: money deposited in a bank b: money given as a pledge or down payment 3a: place of deposit: depository 4: an act of depositing 5a: something laid down; esp.:matter deposited by a natural process b: a natural accumulation (as of iron ore, coal, or gas). cf. also DEPOSE. From a Latin dictionary, depono (deponere): to lay down; to lay down as a wager, stake; laid on the ground, dying despaired of, dead; to lay down (in a place or with a person, esp. for safety), to deposit, commit to the care of, entrust; to lay down, lay aside, get rid of. × 96. General note on the dead space, the space of the dead: that backing into the (w)hole of explanation, the problem of the origin, a default configuration might leave the failure to explicate perfectly causally as such: it might as well be "natural." Which would mean something like an inference with respect to a pure position. However, this makes of the "natural" something which cannot be grasped by such a word, not even as a nothingness. This will be the problem of formality: that the formal is never then strictly formal. The risk of course is that this indeterminateness can always be ascribed to any sort of transcendental signified. × 97. The tyranny of honesty: the form of this. The problem of the oath. Extend the value of the "proton pseudos," a kind of "originary" indeterminateness, or deceit. × 98. This other model of the ×. De Man's caution against a chiasmatics ("the easy play of chiasmic reversals," although this is a specific delimitation having to do with De Man's project of Allegories of Reading, it nevertheless serves as a more general problematic). Reductionism is complicated by the fact that it must reduce to two. The form of this two will always have looming over it a vague third, yet another complication. But this two can play itself out on its subsumption of the grounds within its configuration (what would perhaps be the third): rather than any two entities singled out among a field of or various others, the field itself would be directly appended to one of the two terms. The most far-reaching example, perhaps the most classic, would be of the positive-negative totalization: the is and the is-not, all and nothing, all-tending and the contra-indicated. This hopes to be a reduction to a monad, but not even monist arguments can be quite comfortable with tautological formulations (not to mention the obvious problem of the split that occurs in the tautological). As academic as any of this may sound, there occurs nevertheless a finer problem of the extension of this at more intricate levels of discourse. Nor can this be an admonishment against a logical aberration that once, now, recognized, can be pruned from the great tree. This is precisely the formula of opposition which must be "deconstructed" (following as in a general way De Man's specifications of the use of the term in the aforementioned work). And it is this "easy chiasmic reversal" which is to be avoided, even with the operation of this perhaps profuse chiasmatic figure. The × here partakes of precisely the perturbing of a pure inversion which gives off this pure inversion as an exhaust, an aftereffect (an inversion or invagination of the law of inversion). How a mirror-effect is (un)worked as the model of something like a modernist pure reflection (and whether this would be Freudian or extra-Freudian, Lacanian or extra-Lacanian, Hegelian or extra-Hegelian, x or extra-x, etc.). Cf. Nietzsche. × 99. Seeming. × 100. Veer. How far we go for spontaneity. You went through another, and I across a state. And to close the gap so quickly was to see how we veered again. Coming together, the caress, ends up being a carom.
× 101. "Sex" (or even "love") as an "object," as the object of a sentence. And "you." That one can abstract the singularity of any "you" even to speak about sex or love in general, as if one were getting a portion of something, as with the French constructions, "boire de cafe," etc., "drink some coffee," have some cheese, water, etc. × 102. Encounter with the other: with the animal (as putatively distinguished). The hyenas and the lions. The entire division of the supposed "consciousness." What it means to project back and forth, to alibi, the sense of a behavior, of a sexuality, etc. In particular, the hyenas, where both male and female have a penis-like organ, the female genitalia referred to as a pseudo-penis. But what does this do to phallus? To the penis itself? Which is pseudo when both male and female organs form similarly? (Do for this similar to what Blanchot says in brief parenthetical about homosexuality in "Community of Lovers" part of The Unavowable Community.) × 103. Time(s). The x as the incident and the multiplication and division of the incident, any time being other times, bearing the trace, the reference, the distinction. × 104. The aporia of a life "spent" in idleness, or life "spent" in activity. Being caught up and being fascinated. × 105. The difference of the races. From specific to general. From abstract to historical. The difference of different differences. The ratio of ratios. The difference between the difference of races and the difference of (for instance) height, eye color, gender, elective community, sects, etc. × 106. To produce, to "make" love -- this proposition, that associated with socially constrained ideal of being productive, one has to justify one's sexual activity, either as symptom or as production, although these may amount to the same. The appropriative idea of sex, of sexual activity, of prodigy, prodigiousness, proclivity, effect, etc. The value (fixed sense) of an activity. × 107. x (as apples) and x (as oranges) = the expression that's supposed to say the futility of comparison, nonetheless has produced one, for the very sake of countering it. The paradox here of "comparison," selecting any two things to pronounce that they otherwise do not compare. Bush's (Sr.) famous proclamation about the Persian Gulf war: that there is no comparison to Vietnam. The laws and ordinances which define the "sexual" parts of the female body, dividing it into zones (erogenous -- would this be the word rather than say "political" or "economic"), articulating it to determine what is prostitution, what is to be considered "sexual." The sexual is then determined by the very prohibitory apparatus that is supposedly opposed to it: the law. And the very joy or pleasure of such a comparison. I could go on forever with this comparison of apples and oranges. Their incommensurability is what allows the most vicious comparison, drives it. But there is also nothing more naturally "incommensurable" about apples and oranges than about any two other things. For example, any two apples. Wouldn't there also be a general rule of individuality to apply to such a case that would allow us to say, "That's like comparing one apple with another"? Or one lover with another. Say, a male one with a female one. × 108. Crossing. Traversing. Distance, displacement, the in-between, even when the form of that is a no-thing, a lack. × 109. Perception and motion/stasis. X as the mark of relation that is effaced in this matter. Has there ever been stasis? Does it ever occur, does it ever happen, and for that matter, isn't it a matter of happening? The thing, the x, implies another horizon than the simple presence it refers to. The relation between the subject and the object is a matter of the motion involved in perception itself: the interval of the material, the temporal condition of perceiving. The moment of a statement ("there is a tree," "that is a tree," "that rock is not moving") involves the interval, the difference, of the object and its perceiver. And with respect to the static object, there is always the movement of that perceiver, implied by the report, the statement of the thing's persistence, its stasis. This movement as the relation to the static object: that thing is there, it remains there -- look again, it is there -- go away, it remains. It doesn't make any sense that something "is," "there," persisting and not moving except in relation to some movement, some transience, and to the transience in the general perceptual apparatus, even the conceptual apparatus, the "stream" of "consciousness." "Peut-être l’immobilité des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposée par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilité de notre pensée en face d’elles." [Perhaps the immobility of things around us is imposed by our certainty that it is them and not something else, by the immobility of our thought with regard to them.] Proust, Du côté de chez Swann. × 110. We fall into rapport, as the etymology suggests, to bring, to carry: brought, carried. Neither one nor the other, but it brings, the relation brings us. So to you, fond and deft, like old movies. But the fall is just as liable to cross lines, to bring others, and then, in the more precise etymology, the irony of bringing back. Suspended. Across the water. And to tell you was to be pitted in the fault, the trap of being culpable, offering what you could not bear. One must always put the wrong foot forward. The timing is always wrong. × 111. Le parti pris de la chose. × 112. The sign of prohibition is the sign of temptation. × 113. The scar/tissue. (See "stitch." See also 136, 206, 391, 399, 411, 413, 418, 490.) × 114. The stitch. (See "scar." See also 15, 25, 76, 115, 158, 251, 399, 433, 473.) × 115. Multiplication. Times, operation, proliferation. Iteration. I and we. Part of common material is also what is set off. I/we belong to material. And the times of time. × 116. Number. The numeral, the numbered, the numerator. The fraction of ×. Multiplication is division, the crossing of these divisions, slashes, numbered relations and relations of number. Always divide again by the other in me, and dividing adding to the other. × 117. The «counter» (double sense). The proxy, or piece, that stands for, as in a game. And the retort or response, the generalized oppositional comment, gesture, strategy, action, etc. Standing for and standing against. × 118. Time. Time in general, the temporal axis, and "time" as a unit or event. A "time." The "times," and the way they multiply (see multiplication). × 119. Exponentialization. Also of the act, of "reality" itself. A mathematical naivete and a non-mathematical naivete curiously share this sense of a distinction between the two (like Marx's uncritical idealism and uncritical materialism). Just as the most complex of mathematical operations are built on the most banal, and progressively more complex mathematics and theories and methods and forms of expression, the most uncanny and "complex" and phantomal "aspects" are also, "in," the most banal. (Belief in the supernatural presupposes belief in the natural, that there is a natural, fixed.) × 120.
(For you, the cross and the fault, the way and the ridge, I leave here your blank.) × 121. Crossed borders. Mutual invasion. The contest as the basis for claim, right, property, etc. × 123. The pass. Passing. Conception, gratification, climax, arrival, fruition, consummation -- none of these can stop the flow of the river. All these must give over again to the transient in order to be born(e out). Everything is making passes. Even getting there must give way again. × 124. Envy and jealousy. Crossing. Cross-purposes. Nietzsche proposes a history of, among other things, envy (The Gay Science, § 7). But what about the implications of this (same?) envy for Nietzsche's propositions, his aphorisms, about "instinct," about the "eternal feminine," about what makes a man a man, and what thus also makes him not a man, even when he is otherwise a man (see The Gay Science, § 363, "How each sex has its own prejudice about love")? Cf. statements of the type, "You're wearing a woman's shirt" when said to a man. The contra-indication, the wrong sign presuming the "proper" identity nonetheless -- if not all the better. Baudrillard on drag. × 125. To propose, then, an anatomy of this cross-purpose effect, affectivity. And first, to propose a more general term, or at least category, without necessarily fixing such a thing as definitive, since above all, what is "essential" -- inasmuch as that would still have any sense -- is the slipping involved, the passing of terms into each other. This is, also, in many respects, the absence of an essence, of an essential property, the wanting of such property, attribute, etc. The wanting of essence. This is the very operation of envy or jealousy, by virtue of which these become exemplary, we could even say of "being," of any "state," of psychology or phenomenology, though at the same time such exemplarity also suspends these terms (these terms of "essence" or "state"), turn these facts into "fixions." The structural difference, the differential structure, involved, emphasizes the making of, the fait, the process of fixing or fixation, that, while it grants effects in the belated representation of "consciousness," does not stop, is not utterly grounded, determined, fixed. This non-state status, this process of fixing, is what produces even the fixity, the unchangeable, repetitive, compulsive, addictive aspect of behavior, everything otherwise referred to as a "nature." And this process or operation, the repetition principle, is what also produces the need to emphasize this again, over and over. Nothing but times. × 126. That things stay the same thus becomes a relativized proposition, in its own right. How else would it have sense if there were not temporal difference, return, recourse? This is no less true for empirical "things," for matter, as for psychology. In this respect, the puzzling aspect of Freud's "repetition compulsion" is mitigated by its generality: there is no "thing," no-thing, nothing, without repetition. × 127. Fixion, like «acting». A suspension. To "believe" in the object, in the represented, is to believe in the subordination of the representation to it. In Nietzschean terms, it's to believe in the something rather than in one's wanting to believe, to believe in something to be certain of, rather than in one's own need for certainty. × 128. There is no such thing as sex. There is no sex. If this marks the overlap, the gap, there where we are stitched, joined, but by tissue that holds us apart from resolution, if we cannot belong to a consummating propriety because of the viscous and vicious relation that would not leave us alone in the first place, then there is neither gender nor sexuality. Gender would be precisely this cross-axial division, the impregnation of the one with the other, the enfolding of the monolithic, erect, singular, prominent, protuberant, the erection of the division, difference, convolution, complication (lack, gulf, etc.?). It would be not only the differential membrane, the relation, the intercourse, the matrix, of the sexes, but it would also be that of the internal/external division, where these two cross each other and thus are hinged, jointed, confounded. The supposed distinction of the external, the other-than-me, other-than-my-sex (classically, no less than actually here, the other-than-male). × 129. The trick of the other-than: isn't it then true that another of my sex is also other than me? This is of course phenomenologically generalizable, not to mention psychologically and socially. The × also stands for the angles of reflection/refraction that have to be negotiated for "self-knowledge," for identity. We have to learn what we are considered to be, via (the) other(s). That is why, glancing a certain discourse on sexuality armed only with certain presumptions, too hasty a judgment can be made about identification with the sexual object. Desire for another male by a male entails desire also for that as other, and the projection of empathetic ease or identification can be too hastily made by all sides in this matter. (Apples and apples.) × 130. A beck, a call, sometimes the more with nothing being said. Then a warning on the lips, but lips again in exchange, taking, giving, circumventing. How did you come about and where did you go? The memorable instant may leave nothing else to memory.
× 132. Hide and seek. Concealing and revealing. The mark, the clue, too easy to be found, too easy to be lost. Topophilia, the vertiginous allure of space, of the spatial, of the specular aspect, the phantomal. Coming and going, distance, presence and absence, memory and perception. × 133. Acting: already contains the paradox by itself of acting/doing. Acting/acting, acting over acting, as if like this: acting An aporia analogous to that of "belief." When I respond to others, I find myself leaning, tilting, contriving on their behalf. A social politeness, but also something I can respond to in myself as "phony," equivocating (in the pejorative sense), wavering, not being frank. The question then is, when I have the self-check -- not liking it that I behaved that way -- which is "natural" about my behavior? I do this with other people as compelled, whether as social stricture or actively or genetically or whatever, thus I'm acting out naturally, I'm naturally dissembling. Contrary to the sense of the afterthought, I would have to contrive not to do this, not to act towards the other, or defer with my behavior, in order to be more "proper" to myself, or frank. Even that frankness is as much a matter of after as prior, a reaction. (See 499.) × 134. We meet in a crowd. Supernumerary. Star-crossed lovers: that seems an old temptation, a very old fad, to think somehow of being above, above fad and number and above all, above all. What would be our chance, our encounter, our crossing, without this universe of stars in which we are also lost? After all, I want this to be our drama, surreptitious, one on one, private, not famous. Privately famous. I want to be anonymous to the others. I want us to see each other, look at each other with our own secret meaning. And there's that love of the insignificant, the random. Is there ever really a crowd experience, that is, an experience as a crowd? × 136. Jealousy, as if following a formula for "time," is what it is not and is not what it is. Not only a complication of a sort of emotional molecularism, a tendency to think of emotions as discrete, as things, as even genes especially these days. The × is a symbol for this self-dispossession, the invagination of distinction. With one eye, or perhaps ear, on the familiar drama and its significations, we must also sense something else, something(s) other. We can see in that symbol the mark of jealousy as a scar, as the bereft, but also as the claim. At the same time (the symbol marking this, an intersection) as my desire for one is piqued, my proprietary sense of it, and I become "certain" of it in this way, the stake of my desire, and in this sense my desire itself, is never more uncertain. Felt, then, all the more. Poignant. Effect/affect. × 137. The spot. (Marks the spot.) Indirection. Night vision. Scansion. Typing by not thinking about it. Writing by not thinking of writing as such. Making passes. The spot is made by the "x." × 139. Sex as a subset of something more general. And then (or different), x as unknown of conquest. You don't know where the lines are going. × 140. I find myself, the diversion. Before I had time to think of your prospect, your eyes through me on another, you invited me. Bought me a drink and invited for more. Mocked guardians. You reversed all the roles, unfolding like a fantasy before I could even have it. You made your selfish demands, threw down your plans -- whatever use would I be. And I lapped it up, thrilled to be such an object, to be taken by such an object, even for the taking of my only giving. You jumped with joy in the morning, relation was fling and flight, a tangent, you angle.
× 142. The formal. Interposition, interposing. The "lifting up" of the face of things, rising off the surface, the textual. This phenomenon of the textual is, of course, a thing itself, a "real" thing. Not to be confused with Plato's forms, or with the medieval notion of form, although the confusion would be understandable because of this. We would never be finished with the "form" of things: not as the idealization (Plato, although this is what makes Platonic form possible), nor as a strict level of representation or even presentation (i.e., distinct from content or the "thing" beyond all qualities). But form as the intervening -- the intervening in general. Like and via Blanchot's general resemblance. This gives another dimension to the ×. To the presenting and barring, to the zeroing in or "aiming" (active sense) of the lines of vision, to the crossing of borders -- that is, to the perpendicular disruption of the borderline -- there can be added this extension of the intersection of subject and object in what has hitherto been conceived as form. × 143. Materiality. Layers. As clothing to denuding. The co-implication of them. Not the opposition of pure fields, like a cosmogonic toggle: evil is to good as clothed is to nude. It is the experience of the border, one has nothing but borders, perpetual brushing, rubbing. Articulating sex through clothing. Then, through the meeting of each other as layers. Layers crossed. Folds, pleats, convolutions. × 144. Ideality, distinctly with respect to the materiality above. More ideal than the ideal, more material than the material. × 145. There is no sex. Only ×s (or xes or exes). People refer to, still, "my sexuality." An only apparently inverted Victorianism, as Foucault was astute to describe it. This proprietary expression of "sexuality" is anomalous for at least the fact that the same professed sexuality presumes relation. I have sex with you and then refer to it as something that belongs to me, that's a matter for me, between me and myself. Like football people and their abstraction of the contest in psychologistic manner. Internalizing, essentializing, which also amounts to reification. The complication of this provides burlesque: "my" sexuality could be expressed as more properly masturbation, and in that direction, "my sexuality" could make masturbatory the whole concern: again, a matter between me and myself. Of course things are not more simple to come to. The very experience with the other is what produces the distinction of "my sexuality." × 146. Advice to lovers: If you want to "keep" someone, you should think about what you offer, not what you demand. × 147. Infatuation and memory. Time itself makes us all indulgent actors, so taken with the momentousness of what we're doing, only to have it stack up as another ordinary record. Layers of sand over the most significant, moving events. Some will never be forgettable -- terrifying, legendary -- but they too will have the remoteness of generic stories told to the inexperienced. × 148. Demeanor, bearing, mien, carriage. × 149. The aging of the record. × 150. Nothing half-baked, I didn't even know it was baking. You came right out and delivered it like an ultimatum, a play on my deference and willingness to be overtaken, as much as on a pass or proposition. Without knowing? Or a well-placed guess?
× 151. I am writing. (I am not a writer, I am writing.) × 152. Who counts? × 154. Of course, "actually" the sufferer of jealousy or this violation does not necessarily undergo the voiding of her own love as she feels it. The plea, the complaint, the very nomination or sense of the act as violation or infidelity presupposes the passion of the sufferer. × 155. There are other fish in the sea. Dead fish. Fish which float on the top and fish which sink to the bottom. Fish which have not evolved. Fish which have not crawled out of the sea, which have not developed lungs, have not developed grasp, have not developed vocal chords and the faculty of speech. Fish which, most of all, have not developed spirit, esprit, witz. Perhaps it is that they deserve our pity, or our compassion. Perhaps we simply grant them this from our abundance. But I'd just like to take this moment to consider how truly sad it is for all those other lovers of us that they don't have what we do. Of course, they can go on their own way, slinking in their niches, thinking we are the worse for it. × 156. Exchange. Traits, qualities are no more things than things would be. That's why there is always reification, always this sense. My features or traits are also so dependent on, or so much a matter of, the relation to others. Why I am or become overbearing to one person, shy to another, sharp to another, clumsy to yet another. Mood, light, angle, all these "things," aspects of another. Aspect. The way the thing turns (× is the shorthand for this diagram). How could there be a man without qualities? How could there be a thing without qualities? What could a thing be but qualities? × 157. Self-crossing, internal division, self-difference, self-cancellation. To what extent is beauty the cost of something else before it is no longer beautiful? Beauty can be ugly. Inversion. The ×, crossing out. × 159. To live is to lose. × 160. Share and share alike. I got a tell-off letter. It was very silly, very predictable. You only betrayed by it that you entertained an ideal of me that was not shared. Which is sad. But you were nasty. Grudgeful. You gave what might be the most spiteful and vengeful of curses. One day, you said to me, you'll be all alone. (Which, like the well calculated predictions of psychics, has a generic necessity.) And what I wanted to reply was, Then I won't be bothered by you. Of course I didn't reply. You can't answer spite with spite. Meaning that's all you'd be doing. But even in the face of solitude, of loneliness and that insufferable hell sort of peace and quiet, is it worth tying yourself to love as a kind of blackmail? (On the other hand, via Levinas, the other holds me hostage. But, another turn, if there is no choice, to blackmail, then is there blackmail?)
× 161. Don't marry anyone you haven't spent your whole life with. × 163. Nothing but styles × stylus, and the entanglement of opposition, of striking off. There is no proper style or way, no Way, but the fashioning of a style by virtue of a reaction to another. Example: Virginia Woolf vis à vis James Joyce. Is Joyce a tremendous condensation of culture? Or a show-off boy, a peacock of literariness, of virtuoso hijinx? (Cf. Nabokov on Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake -- he would say, "Both.") × 164. Also then, no ground zero of bias. All is this slant, inclination as ×. That the world exceeds us is what gives it the "sense" of objectivity. Its indifference. (Thought in relation with psychological investment of things -- atavism, religion, horoscope -- landscapes always a matter of my disposition and vice versa. Thought of relation to bodies, sense of liberation, indifference of relation relative to a universal burden, cause or plan.) × 165. Point of meeting, point of contact. Like a dance, like a flirtation, like a "meet cute" -- and because it can be as overwrought, as trumped up, as it could be anything else -- what "we" are comes down to these passings, these encounters, the moments of inspiration, epiphany. For the sake of -- merit, esteem? -- could it ever amount to anything more? But at the same time, not having a taste for how this happens, for chance and for a certain nothing, for expanse and opening, assent, makes for stinginess, miserliness with respect to time, with respect to respect. × 166. Burst of thought, epiphany, collision. Fireworks. (The definition behavior of this work.) × 168. Startling past, bursts on the scene (seeing someone you haven't in a long time). This is because, paradoxically, it is not gone or distinct. × 169. A ground? It trembles. A beyond? A vacuum, a lack of condition for existence. × 170. You are the shadow reflection, the steward of the gaps and falls, the refuge of other relations, a refraction of communication. You have been the most active of passive, and let me play out this relay fetish. You wanted to be not just the other of others, but there our wayward and remote bearing became too close to bear. We skip as stones on water over the years, every falter and stumble leading to another step. The relation, the drive, of misapprehension, striving to express every other way, leaves us only to the fall: more than perfect, the imperfect beauty of this sublime descent. Taking in always makes rise over, always set up to burst through the rest. × 171. All the pious, essentialist statements presume what they wish to negate. There is no order, not even chaos. × 172. Powers. Each of my selves holds the others. A pantheon, but in the Hindu manner, where a god surpasses another, a god to a god. Ad infinitum. × 173. Memory supplement, internal and external memory. Pense bête. × 174. The point of reference. The time of reference. × 175. Relation. (Say "relation is everything"?) × 176. Even genius has its squalor. × 177. Appendix, hinge. × 178. Cross-step. The material of time. Not knowing something until you have risked making a mistake. Whichever foot forward makes you regret the other, and for which reasons. × 179. Difference of perspective is not merely vision. It's not only angle, light, etc., but weight, pressure. × 180. From a bookstore, you strode right up. Taking me, again, another taking me with my propensity for being taken. A long stroke, eyes denuded, caresses, pronounced thanksgiving.
× 181. Correction, gap, miscount, skip, lapse, recalibration, space, placeholder. Renumber, supernumerary. Is one's number ever proper?
× 183. The image. ("The image" as if it were a special category, as if it were a thing.) Does an image remain? Isn't remaining itself movement, even a future? Persistence. Stasis as movement. The pathos of the image is also the incommensurability of it, what is not graspable. Vision, relation to the image, is this relation of never having it, thus the desperation of possession. × 185. Complication. Identity is this relation, the complication of essence, of being, by perception, but perception as the complication of perception. Existence is what presents us with too much to contain, too much to number, the necessity to try to with number, the slippery slope of number. God is the simplification of unencompassable universe. × 186. On teleology (× as the spot, the mark, the target, but also the cross-hair) Sartre said (quoted in Le Monde) "Il n'est q'un objet fantastique: l'homme." "Man," then, even humanity, would be an aim, in this sense. What one is aiming for is also the end aspired, not achieved, also unaccomplished, yet to be, the possible rather than the actual. But as possible to actual, so impossible to possible. Yet these "aims" "exist." Even impossible ones. The possible, as possibility, is actual. The impossible, as impossibility, is actual. Metaphor, comparison, contrast. Relations of things not related, as Nietzsche says, making equal what is not. × 188. Snotty strings. Metaphor as adhesion. × 189. Time is as imaginary as the future, as indelible as the past. × 190. The birthplace of the twins of hunting and desire. Two people who didn't want to be singles in a bar backed right into picking each other up. You politely received my deferential treatment. But still aimless, this expression drifted from any other. Who ever knows how much the mark is missed all the better by making it. × 191. The inability to hold number. Why not the jealousy of number? × 192. The oldest trick is the book. × 193. The mark of fetish and the fetish of the mark. × 194. Exes. Too early and too late. Extemporaneous. Who was it who wondered if we would ever "love" if we didn't first read about it in stories? The beginning of so many relationships is discussion about the ones past. The advent of the new interest is so much a reaction to the former, like a billiards of love: the lessons "learned," counter-proposals and countermeasures, what we don't want to happen again and what we want as result of what happened before, or what didn't, what was lacking. Like Walter Benjamin's angel of history, we're flung backwards into the future, seeing only the wreckage of the past. Inception is always this overlapping, a renewal upon expiration, a posthumous birth. × 195. It's hard to tell someone that their love is suffocating. Hardest of all when that someone is yourself. × 197. Nature is contradiction. Go ahead. Contradict that. × 198. Fetish / nonequivalence / brainstorming. × 199. Sacred and profane, the accursed share, the cross and the deletion, the mark for exception or being cut out, of selection, discrimination. To make or hold something sacred is always at once, implicitly if not emphatically, to make other things, the rest, profane. See the etymology of the word: outside the temple. But to scatter the seed of this operation everywhere, to see it's inordinate, ineluctable multiplication, replication, to see everything, times, repeat, perform and resist this operation -- the mad proliferation of the fetish principle to exceed itself, the swarm of its own offspring to cover everything with this representation. Exponential. Fractal. ×. (See the Christ Replication Mechanism.) × 200. You rescued, patronized, tended and tolerated. No one would ever have understood this provision, all the signs inverted, being kept in defiance of the logic of love. But symbiotic distance: this sacrificial bearing for the weight of gratitude as advantage. Despite dedications, the length of relation may be inversely proportionate to the depth it can bear. One night for 17 years. × 201. Where do we begin? Logical disorder, over-order. What is the beginning of things? Make a mark and work from. Time, space, metaphor. How can time be expressed without being spatial? For example, in what direction is time going, proceeding? "In what direction is time going?" This question comments on the problem of time thought of as space, but is, at the same time, subject to that problem. Passages of time as movement, line, etc. But the issue then moves from space, or some species of metaphor, to metphor itself. × 202. Jealousy. Perhaps I am too much a coward to fight for love, and you'll only suspect all this about the courage to attack one's self, jealousy in the self, as a strategic ruse. But in that case, and nonetheless, no matter what, there is something that no one, no matter how "bold," fierce, overbearing, or clever, will get around. What there is to lose is the desire of the other, and this is something no amount of force or stealth can undo. In a more classic formulation, it would be a matter of my loved one's intent, volition, desire, as consent. Already, the problem is insurmountable, and jealousy is too late, is a reaction to that loss even when it is a grotesque anticipation. × 203. Chromosome, off-spring, trade-off. The exchange of rearing: material means and "spiritual" concern. How some people which don't seem fit to provide children with extra spiritual fortitude, with greater critical faculty, are nonetheless better suited to provide good material resources, or even a kind of emotional resource. × 204. Possessive, as in desire and love, also as apprehensive. (Cf. etym.: grasping.) But this is not a matter of being on or another thing or quality. Desire itself an apprehension, thus the problem, the matter of presumptuousness. × 205. Face before the face. See narcissism, double paradox. The ideal I see in the face, what facing is. Is the look made up? Exude? Ex-face? × 206. Passion -- the mark of suffering, the scars, catastrophe. Love as the condition of this, love conditioned by this. × 207. Blanchot's passage from "Literature and the Right to Death," about "This woman" -- life and death. X as this depiction, presentation and obliteration. (Theses on reading after Blanchot. How to read this work? How to read without it? Hermeneutic operations -- when Blanchot speaks of "Revolution," or some other abstraction, there are others, opposites, qualifications, etc. Is there really this significance? How does this really become "generally" true? How can this really be related to me? But, then, like Blanchot, after Blanchot, we would ask, what is the hypothesis that this is not related? The universal or general value of this non-relation.) × 208. Elation of distance -- freedom of unrelatedness in relation, as opposed to religious responsibility. × 209. Facing. You are my face. Identity cannot get away from this, from encounter. Encounter as not just special form of incorporation, but as something else that qualifies incorporation. Grasp of things -- has as much to do with encounter as the encounter does with the thing, as encounter has been reduced to form of grasp of the thing, subject-object. Here is the pertinence of Lacan, for example, and of Hegel. "Recognition." Encounter has consequences for "recognition" or telos, for example, what Blanchot says of Narcissus and narcissism. × 210. So we go down. The tunnel of love. It plays us out, the history of our imagination. Carted along, we watch as we are tracked out in a series of little prosceniums, display chambers, dioramas, each a theatrical tableau, a staging of us in a scene. There are the props and scenery and effects, which at first seem dwarfed and waxen, and then the life-like figures of us which are at first too dull, awkward casts and poses of us, stance askew as if about to fall, apparently to suggest movement. But as we approach, the figures move, just as the distance of the representation. What is this cart? A hearse?
× 211. Drive -- drives (instincts) as distribution -- as sine qua non, of course -- but in the sense of generalized compulsion that will have to have an object -- such expression of this already posing it teleologically. (Melanie Klein, object relations.) The "imago" of object relations. Encounter, face, Echo and Narcissus. Absolute gaze, Sartre's gaze. × 212. Who does my face belong to? Affectation of reflection -- the look at one's self. How can the look at oneself belong to the order of looking? How can the look at oneself not belong to the order of looking? Imago, object relations, vanity, narcissism, incommensurability, etc. The trick at looking at oneself with a video camera. The split of myself as subject and object, the disunity of me as "living" subject, grasping myself only in representation (but also "living" representation). My vanity. My affectation. A personal "me" ideal, projected outside or apart from the "me" everyone else knows. The trait -- like language, traits are those which make me communal and singular at once. The aging or change of me, instituting marks a matter of social property as well as most individual. Fondness and imprint, infatuation of mark as history v. idealization of features (include Nietzsche's notion of aesthetics as decrepitude, and Kant). × 213. The triangulation of attraction (quadrille, also, see Francois Roustang) -- a third party cannot understand the attraction of first for the second. Different weight of thing from the perspective of A, B or C. × 215. Face as text -- also means text as face (general metaphoricity). The text faces me, confronts me, even as it is my thoughts. The rivalry with the text. × 216. Which way does desire issue? What is active and what is passive, with desire? Subject and object, as if taken through a whole other course with all that is famous, well known, about desire: the pitfalls, the frustration, the elation of the chance of reciprocation. The inversion of the image, the incommensurability of even mutual desire. Impression: Does the desired make this mark on the desiring, or vice versa? × 217. Lost in identity. × 218. Character, composition, plus and minus. Addition and subtraction. (See Descartes, Kant, Locke on subtraction of qualities to leave essence or presence of thing, and see Schopenhauer for the comment on this prejudice of the thing.) I can't be reduced to any quality or aspect of me, but I can't be anything without these. (Borges on Buddhism.) The mark, the clue, unable to avoid leaving trace. Plus and minus of features. I'm not just my looks, nor within looks am I just this or that feature. But sometimes I am this or that feature, as predominately, by the function of metonymy with traits. I'm not just my personality, just my actions, just the context, just the chance of associations in circumstance, etc., but I am nothing without these. × 219. There are certain men . . . conniving, petulant, territorial like old women, preening and self-absorbed like the worst princesses, lacking the courage and sophistication of certain women, who supposedly have a physical lack or inferiority but have grace. Is this just certain men, or is it men writ large -- wars and politics? Have men ever been men? × 220. Why wait for seduction? Why not get right to pushing and pulling, taking out and taking in, even jumping in the middle, intercepting, diverting from others? Why talk when you can purse the thrust? Ah, but then comes the catch of this emancipation, the manipulation of this "direct" action. Your masochist control scheme of projecting the command on the other, of making out your own compulsion as being compelled -- betrayed when the other does take the reins. You take offense. And the other only apparent paradox, you the exemplar: the promiscuous/ideal complement, erotomania, needy for absolute attention everywhere. × 221. To see a face is to make something of it. To face is to make up. Face already make-up. Not even action. Attribution by chance of impression. × 222. Disposition -- time, space, strike-off. Let's say you suddenly want to fuck in a dingy public bathroom but the other person is repulsed. Or wanting a hamburger and the other is sick of the very idea. One's lack of desire can also be a strength. No zero degree of affectation. Like the additional bid to not seem to be attracted to someone, either to have control, or all the better to draw them. × 223. Men's infatuation with big breasts is a maternal thing. A proposition made by a female. Supposition of unconscious motivation as opposed to -- what? Desire otherwise "conscious"? If it is unconscious, does that relegate it? Why, then, not like breasts, or why like thighs or butt? Why does a woman like a penis? Or, why does a man like a penis or a woman like breasts? Supposing there is some knowledge of an unconscious fact -- isn't that a contradiction? -- which is resisted by the one affected? Why, then, this particular resistance? Why resist that something I like, is unconscious? This is not to discount the hypothesis. In fact, this route brings us to another proposition that is interesting, even if not actual. The resistance to motivations, rather than, say, trauma. See. × 224. Evocation, exchange, translation. What can I evoke of a face? How is it possible? How can I avoid this evocation? In a foreign country, across a boundary, across the supposed distinction of a culture, a language, a genre -- a class, a gender -- how can I ever negotiate the difference between what a face says to me and the singular, proper idiom of that face, between impression and expression? Example: to see a face on something in a foreign city and suddenly get a sense from it, the parallax of faraway, remote, mysterious, foreign idiom, and what the "familiar" expression has in this. The trick is, this doesn't work just between foreigners, and to think so is already to be betrayed in that tacit sense of distinction, the alibi of presuming there is anything in common with your "own," type, class, that would allow you to know them more assuredly. (Cf. Levinas on the face and knowledge.) × 225. What right? Passing. The redress, the claim. A claim on the other which really comes from the experience of my desire as the other's claim on me. The infinite relation, the infinite deferment to the other, is what comes to cause me to close it off. There will always be a parting, a departure, as relationship, and this is what also makes me related. But what will be made of this -- or, that is, fixed, since there is as much forgetting, forgetting of whatever could be fixed or definitive. × 226. Report -- what I tell myself, this constant lesson of thoughts, the train of things returning to me endlessly as instruction, meaning, hope, wish. × 227. Expression -- generation. Child as expression of parent v. Plato. General v. Romantic. × 228. Encounter. What other form of experience? If I make a statement, such as "all experience takes the form of encounter," you, some presumed you of this address, may want to contradict this with some notion -- hypothesis -- that there is a definitive solitude or meditation. But in that case, you have already presumed the encounter with the statement. (See.) × 229. Indirection, exception, night vision, "is not what it is." × 230. As if a contrast to the last (an interposition, while at the same time similar as a class in the series by exception to the rest), you were the production of passivity. Falling in, going along with, saying yes, playing out whatever I proposed. Plush and ample an offer even for a place, a refuge when my foundation was rattled. Until dwelling showed the emptiness, how impassive. Too conforming to one's wishes, too passive in comfort: perhaps some prefer a bean bag.
× 231. The order of orderlessness. The day imposes upon us this forgetting. Relationship of forgetting and remembering -- "persistence of vision." Return this phrase with other consequences. The day seems present. Things are "presented" to me, and there is no matter of distance. Then how does the deferral come about, where I forget such and such person after four years? Memory crosses memory, layers, and is riven with spaces, interstices, itself the impetus of forgetting. × 232. When does naturalization occur? That is, when is it finished? "Instinct" not so objectionable as this simplistic idea of "expression" by which nothing really happens, but is only the manifestation of a code, of something all set down, fixed. As in Hegel's comments about husband and wife, where the union is only realized by a third who is neither, to say "my wife" or "my son" is indefinite even in its perfection. I can always assume this propriety, no matter how strange, and this propriety will always be a claim upon this strangeness, against it, but by virtue of it. Reflex v. instinct (125, 131). × 233. The Kantian/Lockean prejudice of presence -- betrayed in all sorts of remarks, such as, "the miracle of life." As if one were alive outside it to contemplate it as an alternative. The envy of the inert, a twist of Caillois's temptation of space? × 234. "Human nature" -- what is "human" about it? Why "human" nature? Why this distinction in something otherwise so definitive? × 235. What is the volume of this work? Of one's life? Is there not enough circumstance, are there not enough things to encounter, that it would be a matter of measuring something else? (As when someone makes distinction between emotional and intellectual.) × 236. Acceptance of dialogue -- propositions which allow or presuppose others. Of course, all do, but there is the attempt to make propositions dismissive, absolute, exclusive. × 237. Is there a point? In several senses, but in this sense: a point, absolute, of view? The omniscient is the same pretense as omnipresent. An "eye" that would not have a direction, the ball of an eye or lens seeing in all directions at once. × 238. Irresponsibility of telling. Conveying and withholding. × 239. Being inside each other. Male and female. I'm in the other, the other is in me. × 240. You came to me and asked. I came, more than willing for one willing to ask. Willing to open your mouth, to invite, to divert, another end for an end. But in the end, that deferred end had to be the end. × 241. My own social will is then again a puppet of this obstinate calculation for a self lying in wait, which becomes just as alien to me, an agent of subterfuge. "I" am reduced to the exhaust left over by this exchange, a passive spectorial variable, without resistance to the contradictory values that take "me," thin as a membrane, if that much. × 242. Partition, subtraction, division -- multiplication, if even of zero:
The same striptease as Kant and Locke? × 244. Nonequivalence of exchange, cost asymmetrical. Cost, but not equal. Equivalent to. What is the cost of any "thing," of anything? And what is the price something brings? Supply and demand, for example, with anonymity, death, lack of desire. The basis for exchange -- time, temporality in exchange. × 245. Rhetorical force. Is there any force other than rhetorical force? Is that a rhetorical question? Representation. × 246. The paradox of instinct -- to begin to say volition, not to mention imperative. The moment "instinct" is spoken, invoked, called upon, it is contradicted. × 247. Everything is repulsive in its own way. For at least the arrogance of being. × 248. Death. Mortal absence. Removal, presence, revenance, haunting. Variations -- the cross -- mourning and melancholy. Symbolic ingestion. If my friend disappears, worse, is no longer animated, it can render the significance of everything contingent. What point life's lessons, admonitions, profundity, if death pays off all promises? × 249. The power of like. Can it be put any better than "like," with genetics, for example? × 250. Under the bridge. We were at a Thai restaurant in Chicago, which was near, almost under, the elevated train. We sat in a booth between two other booths. In the booth behind me, I could hear the couple talking about the various neighborhoods of Chicago, telling about themselves, discussing in that way of getting to know each other. But then behind you, another couple became more conspicuous, as they became agitated. They were talking about raising children. Very quickly an argument developed over religion, whether the children were to be raised Jewish or Catholic. On one end, the new couple, getting acquainted, learning about where they grew up, the places they knew in common, the differences, but eager, friendly, diplomatic. On the other end, the couple well along, the plan laid for marriage, but in a bitter dispute about the difference of backgrounds, and each intransigent. And in the middle, the couple that does not speak, but only listens, stunned, to these two ends of the progression, on the bridge, under the bridge: us -- you and me.
× 251. The proposition of an act of sacrifice, of substitution -- and how it feels to make this proposition to an accomplice. The lucid of losing, loosing. Is this seeing, or sacrificing eyes to scandal? To suffer, again, as a displaced affect in turn displacing typical passionate results. Obliteration -- to play out my own displacement, stitched in so many other currents, topics, lines and economies. So many other axes. Figures. The entire junior affair was called upon and supplied in this x-change, the necessary sense of privation to bring about the proper uncanny effect. How many ways did this say ×? As a "gift," it was thought as the limit effect of production affect. Yet, once again, this could not be strictly a gift, as my own part, desire, etc., was being called upon here. Let's say scheme with A, outsider, third party, to take C, the object, the second, already a lunar hunting party. But unwittingly, C has already been posed as the object of this scheme, by A and another. And C, the direct object made indirect, tells this! Double-crossed, second-hand. But thus played outside the scheme, falling into it all the better. The absolute gift, the gift without thought of return, is theft. This anticipation becomes also the uncanny play of a previous removal. Later, hugging C in the sunlight ("I like your face in the sun"), overwhelmed by this sense of vacancy, doubling, haunting. Like the holder of a secret, the prophet of a crime, the perpetrator and the victim. And like another time, in the room of this same while she was gone, feeling that all the effects are real and I am the phantom.
× 252. Fixion. Fiction, fixing, fixation, fission, poesis, Prometheus, Icarus. × 253. That there is imaginary variation, that the future redresses the past, that forgetting masquerades as memory, man imagines he can take on the gods even before it occurs to him god is imagined. Subjected to his own imagination, as in a dream which invents from him in spite of him, man is caught in the same loop when he imagines himself as god -- as authority, as author, as initiator of this imagination. So much for higher powers. × 254. Clue, mark, imposture, counterfeit, obscuration, occultation. Never visible enough, never invisible enough. You can't escape trace itself, but even so, by virtue of that, you can get away, and you can get irretrievably, fatally lost. The inside-out of person, private/public lip, edge, border, two sides without reconciliation, as if I am the fault of a terrible overlap, is that relay from will to will, the transfer of disposition that makes me subject, as a hostage to all claims on (perceptions of) me, but makes all claims bereft. A claim as fickle as the next. Walking in a net, blackmail, precariousness, the weight of signification as the weight of life itself. But this is not a downer -- it's a refinement, a privilege, something one develops or cultivates, to be more sensitive. × 255. Vulgar concept of time -- the line. The reduction to a reduction of space. Measure can only be a matter of a co-extension, of things plural. What existence does linearity have? Where? What would absolute direction be, in space or time? The dependency of time on the spatial representation cannot obscure that time is not reducible to it. This is also metaphor in general -- ×.
× 256. The double sacrifice. From Bataille, but generalized, another form of general metaphoricity, of relation prior to relation, the social or politics, especially via Levinas. As if to propose the foundation of a politics, a notion or regulating ideal, that one were to have not the credit of a claim to propriety, but only the debit of one's self by virtue of the other. From restricted to general economy. This is, nonetheless, already the exchange, the encounter, the mutual incorporation, sacrificing one's autonomy at first sight (cf. Hegel, Lacan, recognition), but to see this not only as subjugation, but as the very exuberance, exorbitance of relation, thus of identity, self or integrity by relation. An eccentric example? Supposing if you were to ask me to believe, you offer in return to change, to lay down, your own belief. × 257. They speak as if it made no difference who "he" was, this "man in my life," an impersonal ideal, with no respect to anyone in particular. But they are ready to defend this whoever with proprietary passion, and become familiar even prejudicially with this person. × 258. Relation/exception, axis, accretion. × 259. Logic of logic -- ×. The character and the symbol which stands for it. (See 1, 2, 293.) Immanent notion of logic (logos), as something which exists, which is, elsewhere. Deferral, ulteriorization. But as relation. Causal correlation and empiricism -- do we find out what is? Consciousness is delayed, causality (as Nietzsche suggests) is (a matter of) conditioned by this divergence. Logic is then, not positive, but inferential, "negative," in a sense. But that any creature has perception, and that it responds to things is also positive, in another sense. Always for a third, in the practical sense. Two things related for a third "reason" or "purpose" which really means, in light of, towards that end. × 260. You -- voice, clutch. How can they even begin to think what is "to share" when they don't think sharing is what is already before them? And what exceeds them? What exceeds any right to anything. The name of the game is "Operation," by the way, as it is with us. Like I said about the way you operate the machinery. We poets like to wrest things away, put them together with other things, miscegenate, fornicate, mix. You share with me even past lovers. You take from him this term, like the poet-thief that you are. We pillage from everything, we poet-thieves. We share everything, mingle everything, confound everything, we always say a thing is something else. Will it be your fate that we, too, will part? And part over -- as certainly all do -- the problem of sharing, the problem of parting? No, we will not last forever, our desire will not last, be continuous, because instead, I want it that our desire will happen again and again. Fort/da. That way, all the intervals will be ours, too. There will not be an interval which will undo us, as intervals will only allow us again, to come together again and again. Not so much to say, this time, as to want. Wanting to express you and feeling exhausted by the task, the words exhausted, as you exceed them. This saying that we do, this writing, is also born of this wanting, reaching, being unable to grasp. Trying, starting again. Missing. The motion of description is this making passes. The way you take over my sensation, all over, that warm and tingly thing like someone reading to me or drawing for me when I was a kid. You disarm me and arm me, at once. Lapping. The days lap, the waves lap, my desire laps. Then, I will lap you. I'm so restless I can't even write. It all mounts up, all the sudden everything, all we have to talk about, great chunks of time when everything is at play and we don't really do anything, that wonderful sliding away with each other that amounts to nothing, the spending of our time together, even that pathos of our passing together, in leisure. All the important points we must get down, all the urgent things we must say. And then all those miniscule nags, like what to pack. And through it all this immense expanse, this great opening, of wanting you, all the rest of it lost in that, like so much detritus in an ocean. Traverse me. Travel like that mythical arrow which knows its destination. What difference would it make if you were nothing else, if you "produced" nothing else? What difference would it make if I were nothing else, produced nothing else? We would still have this that we produce together, this that we are together, addressed to each other, just this way we are to each other, for each other. If someone were to ask me, "What does she do," this would always be the part I would be thinking to myself, the part that renders all the other answers significant, but also useless. And I guess I could answer -- and it wouldn't be just a crude joke, though they'd only see it that way: She does me.
× 261. "Values" -- fixed and variable. Presupposition involved in the moral sense of "value." The deference (implication) of some other value. Value as a relation, and a value among others. × 262. Chance and amour. Love and desire, seeds blowing in the wind, singularity and number. Depending on the context, the view of anything can seem generic or singular. This is perhaps more so for humans because of self-consciousness in the mirror: not that humans are the privileged perceiver, but that they are, even so, the privileged of their own perception. A person can be singular or, from a certain distance, strikingly generic, and from this distance, how this person can be singled out as an object, how they come to match up with another, can be mysterious. Our propensity to stray across this resource of possible encounters and our propensity to make whatever we set our eye on "worthy" of us, proprietary, gives us to ignore or deny the chance of any "selection" (not to mention fate). × 263. Violation -- looking at a body / possessing it / incorporated / the inversion of possession / Caillois / strings, laces, epiphany. × 264. A part related, part related, apart related. × 265. Live in the sum of possibility -- anticipation. The sum? The what? The lack of sum? What is a tally? When does it take place? When does number occur? Counting? × 267. Waste -- What is life, a life, a full life? Nothing for something and finally something for nothing. Aimless, wasted days, which is what we make something from. Art is this other life we would have. The uselessness of things, beautiful things. × 268. The sensation of space. After Caillois for the temptation to merge, is this tension perhaps what renders the distinction, the sensation of the distinction between the perceiver and environment, and at the same time, the precarious snag in it? To look down from high up on buildings, vertigo, and similar sensations, but that is also like desire, or compulsion, the compulsion to grasp. Felt as a vague nausea feeling in the temples around the eyes. × 269. Convictions, renunciations. Could it be that all meaning is association as temptation? The inclination towards things. The temptation to association, as if the attraction of bodies were the metaphorical process, meaning in general, and that were always an approach, an ascent, an induction, an inclination, precisely without anything further. Meaning never anything but the play of meaning: suggestion, enthusiasm, bias, jealousy. × 270. I wanted to remind you of your terror of maps, that looking at maps gives you something like vertigo. A conceptual vertigo? A vertigo of conceptualization, of the conceptualization of space, belonging to space (as in a thematic sense) and in space. You are overwhelmed by the uncanny sensation of mentally containing the expanse which contains you. No matter that anyone would say to you, "well, it's just a map, it's just a representation." That's part of the vertigo -- the vertigo of this space itself is the double sense of it, the doubling of sense: that something represents a totality of which it is a part (as maps of the world are things in that world they represent). I tried to make you feel better by telling you that there should be nothing odd about this vertigo, nothing abnormal. I tried to comfort you by telling you this vertigo cannot be resolved, dispelled. I tried to reassure you that this vertigo was even a sign that you were not falling -- falling to some ground, falling for the ground, falling prey, that is, to the easy assurance of some solid ground. That because of this vertigo, you are not one of those who so naively think they can remind us of the distinction between representation and "real life." But for giving a hand, and a mouth, you were willing, perhaps preferred, to take them as other than such assurances. × 271. The gambit of saying, communication. × as chance and mark, the chance of the mark. Not the fullness of expression, or at least qualifying that sense. If I think that things lie without need of saying, there is the risk of not being on record. If I speak or communicate, there is the gamble of redundancy against the other problem of usurping, stipulating something other than the presumed state. A game of cards in thought "itself" could never be obvious, transparent, as if perfectly present. Language, representation is possible because of folds, blinds, etc. × 272. Value and sentiment. For example, movies. (Cf. Kant.) A suspicion or caution about the propensity to be affected or swayed is not necessarily, or merely, some prim renunciation or favoring of some lofty notion. We can discover that this is as much a propensity in us as a matter of a work, that even bad things can refer to what really affects us, that our being impressionable can make us respond in ways we will regret later, due to change in circumstances or further discovery. × 273. The look inside yourself, the look in front of things -- when you are concentrating on something, where do your eyes fall? × 274. (Fragment about jealousy?) A concession. It presupposes that the perpetrator has not got what he wants. × 275. Eye like a marble (blue), except that the marble would have to be as incredible as the eye. Metaphor and jealousy. × 276. Is a look made up? The various impressions of a "beautiful" woman -- artificial or real. × 277. Hospitality and greater reasons. Ulterior. The gift. Religion and merchants. Helping and saving. To tell all this, to know it. The record of it and the knowledge of it, carrying, like a traveler. Lawrence of Arabia. To write and communicate. To tell all, to produce an expression, to express in a way that makes a product. X -- as writing or exchange. There is an opposition, but then they are implicated. Like theater, as with theater. The rebus. Care about me, hospitality, conquest.
× 278. Writing as fetish -- × -- the mark as the fetish itself. Writing cannot take the place of the elation felt in some other event, but there is no way to convey the elation without it (writing, more generally, the system of communication). Writing cannot take the place, but it does. The account is not the same, but the elation of account itself can stand for. It's the mark as tribute. But the double law of artifice: the story is neither entirely true nor entirely false. It represents something, always necessarily refers to, but it is never adequate to anything it refers to. Usurpation. It is not the object and there is no object without it.
× 279. The beauty function. Beauty caught. Snapshots, images, examples. Beauty is always caught in media res, on the way, in passing, and thus beauty is never finally caught. The appeal of beauty is in this ungraspability, that there is no grasp of it, no hold, no way to "have" it. As a look, even a caress, "beauty" is the quality as thing, and no sort of law, exchange, possession, state, is equivalent to it. It is surfeit, the source of desperation and respect. The more beauty is "caught," as this habit of catching in passing, the more beauty submits to a regulation, a plain-ness, a conspicuousness, that is counter to it. Yet to elude perpetually is never to be "caught" at all, and not "recognized." Or forgotten.
× 280. Numismatic entomology. Talking on the phone in the bath, or so you said, a game of relation. Facing and not facing, you returned this self-consciousness at the same time as the seduction, and no less passion in the act. Obverse. × 281. The will is crossed. A target or aim produces effects in reduction. Context, compromising conditions, twisted frame. Enjoying predicament. Greener grass.
× 282. The belief in genes. Everywhere there persists, and even grows, this belief in genes. The belief in genes really amounts to a belief in intelligence, in a consciousness, intelligence as an immanent design, purpose, aim, which is, tantamount to religion, to God. But it always ends up the grossest tautology.
× 284. Vector. Nietzsche wrote because he did not have a mate. That such a psychologistic explanation, as a conditional proposition, works or has any pertinence does not require that anything beyond its scope be true. In other words, someone may have a drive, a sexual drive, a drive to achieve or even dominate, even a drive for something like procreation, but that in no way presumes the accomplishment. Thus, a surrogate project is no less a "failure" than the presumed object of the drive, in several instances, or at several levels: (1) sexual conquest does not (pre)suppose getting along with someone, compatibility, companionship (the all-too frequent error of equating natural selection and consortium); (2) companionship as aim is never a fixed achievement; (3) ultimately, achievement of a sexual sort is the conundrum of domination and sacrifice, the individual as means to its own end -- in the sense of negation rather than achievement.
× 285. Project, projection. Can't help but idealize the other, what complicates the reproach of "objectification."
× 286. Swear. The paradox of cursing, "swearing," and perversion of the oath, as with forms of blessing, "bless you" upon sneezing. The "acquired" impulse to ejaculate surprise, disgust, anger, frustration, etc. Without subscribing to any object of the reference. Marches and ideals.
× 287. There is no comparison, thus comparison. There is no comparison, thus there is nothing but comparison. Incommensurability and identity. Iron curtain. You can't get there from here. A member of one class who says to a member of another that they cannot, by virtue of being other, understand. This is impossible, but it is also the very condition of "understanding." The obvious (?) paradox is that one is immediately contradicting the basis upon which such a statement itself could be made or heard, understood. How can one understand, then, this statement that one cannot understand? This is, in fact, a real, practical problem, as all of us know who have tried to tell someone they don't understand. But it also allows the despotism of the one who makes this remark: you cannot understand, the credit of which will always accrue to me, you will always owe me this debt, I will always be at the advantage (example: that type of chauvinist of language who thinks that no matter how well a foreigner speaks his language, the foreigner cannot speak it well enough). This is generalizable, though, with great consequences (as if it didn't "precede," but only occurred as a cause subsequently). Without this common language, without mediation, without the ineluctable but ungraspable relation of incommensurability, one has no basis for comparison, but beyond that, or even by way of that, one has no basis for identity, no way to even see the gap of difference or distinction. (Cf. identification, how it makes you different from your own class, as one member of it, as much as different from another class.) To deprive a thing of the basis of comparison would be to deprive it of any condition whatsoever, thus to even deprive it, itself, the condition of it. It would have to be a thing of which there were no consciousness whatsoever, already contradicted by the statement that would negate it. To cancel is to identify for prohibition. But this paradox is precisely the route, the process of "identification." × -- as the report against deprivation, the report out of, on the basis of absence. x = "I am mortal."
× 288. Climax. Complex. Cathexis. Mixed emotions. Particular and general. Emotions are not singular, simple, pure, and certainly drama is not of singular emotion -- the emotion of the experience of it. (The Theater and Its Double.) Dramatic moment is the mark, conjunction, intersection, of more than one realization, of the realization of relations, the convergence of "things," the course of relations. In a sense, then, every dramatic moment is ironic, counter-effect, because it is sense of one thing with at least its opposite, but many other senses. This "dramatic" moment is not merely that of drama, of theater or art or artifice, as if a realm other than that of our existence, something other than "real life." It's the moment that occurs in "real life" both as the moment of reaction, emotion, to actual events, and as the real reaction we have to plays, art, artifice, which two senses doubtless must affect each other, else what "representation," what would there be to present in art?
× 289. Envy, entitlement, covetousness, appropriation.
× 290. You were performance in an actress, for which you gave a hand. Conducting to a climactic pinnacle, over Hollywood, you nonetheless tied the knot of your own conviction. Epilogue? You deserve absolute attention and care. The utmost. More than anyone else. The problem is so does everyone else. (If you want to see how vicious narcissism can be, threaten the privilege of suffering.)
× 291. How to use this -- whatever it is, book, machine. A glossary of xs (of many occurrences of the character "×" and of excess). Reading, passing, multiplying, intersecting, interchanging, intercourse. To explain this work. This is an accumulation of material, out of order, in no particular order (ultimately), orderless, not order-able, because it works like those hypothetical "things" which are supposed to have order and which order follows to produce itself: scattered, simultaneous, arrayed, disarrayed, incomprehensible -- that is, incapable of being encompassed, grasped as achieved, fixed. This is a list, neither wholly ordered nor without order, as always there are certain determinations, but always various ones, incalculable.
× 292. Recognition -- What can you do? What did you do? Accomplishment is nothing without account, report, measure. So, is there really accomplishment? What can be "natural" about it? As if running a race could be reduced to biological activity, something essential. The absurd extent of the drive to accomplishment as seen in Guinness world records, to devise any unique accomplishment for the sake of being recognized, has an implication for a sort of overdetermination of the terms of the accomplishment, for the formalism of accomplishment. Not to mention the scene, the burlesque or parody, of men, athletes, taking so seriously their achievement -- their whole language that internalizes, psychologizes, characterizes (meaning makes a matter of "character") activity and the terms and results of a contest and the relation of the other in such, what amounts to their cult or their religion.
× 293. Proxy. The stand-in in general. Procuring. Writing used to establish or decree this. The material of relation and the relation of material. Rather than two entities between which a relation occurs, for which relation is a passive expression of some state, already more subordinate again than attribute or quality are to substance, like the name of the set × is the point of attribution, and thus the "essential." This is a confounding of nominal, ideal, real, their own proxy or relay. Sex, already the contamination of desire and purpose, the drift of their distinction, again offers this lifting/confounding with respect to any other relation. What is proper? Which relation is most essential, when desire, sentiment, affect, are always bearing and erring, drifting towards or away, staking and breaking claims? Desire shows that there is no proper, no substance of relation, but that one is always the experience of the agency of the other. Just as "writing" or signification is always also made up of material "in" the world (ink, paper, vocal chords, breath, air, interval -- and here, parenthesis within parenthesis, a Zeno abyss to open within, this suggestion, the space of time), the difference between the "real" and the level of signification, is also that between two other agents or proxies of the "real," and vice versa. One only has claim to proper by making a relation to a substitute, a surrogate, by procuring.
× 294. Desire of passing. Is it possible to conceive this? Is this conceptual? By convention? By disposition? By the convention of disposition? Would we ever say that we desire passing? But what desire comes from but passing?
× 295. Environment -- domain. The sense of the proper. Retrieving possession. Alienated to the extent I must make the claim. But to "be" in an environment is to have no such distinction for it on which to base a claim for property, ownership, even belonging. "Belonging" in this sense is not a matter of volition.
× 296. Pure. The x-ing of pure. Sheer. Shearing. (Sheering.) When you say "pure joy," there is a sense of separation from other things, a subtraction as distinction involved. This sense is not itself distinct from others such as homogeneous, unadulterated, etc. But there's a ring to it, an operation, a technical sense, of sifting, extraction, designation by contract and exclusion, that is as much to say that something is not essentially or causally linked to some other. "Pure," then, as the inverted designation, like "bad" meaning "good." But even as a matter of "purity," as positive, this process of referral of the term also demonstrates something else, chronological as well. The "pure" does not begin, it comes after. Purety always obtained by subtraction. That's even the sense of "man-made." Extraction, distillation, the elimination of mixed state. "Everything pure is pathological."
× 297. Exhilaration, exception, extant -- the "relative" disconnectedness.
× 298. Factor: trait, quality, feature (thing), addition, subtraction. Does one have qualities? Is one bold or does one lack self-consciousness? Is one hesitant, or does one lack courage?
× 299. Equivocation. (See 21, 133, 439, 452, 454.)
× 300. The richness of skin and a sense of resemblance confounding even racial lines, notions. Well, or maybe not, from an even broader genealogical view. I showed you what you hadn't found in your own home, customs, exchange, crossing of native and transplant. And that cross that again ends up being one to bear: taken by that ingenuousness that could not bear all this confounding. × 301. Warning: I like you, stay away from me. (Prohibition/attraction.)
× 302. Identity (is) a matter of other, of alter-ation. That something is singular, integral, must be expressed, thus the "formal," thus otherness. Example: days (of the week), or dates, time.
× 303. Sex is stupid. In several senses. You can have this response to it, to the persistence of the impulse, to the overinvestment of it and the exploitation of this, etc. But also, sex is stupid in the sense that it does not have a purpose, an "intelligence" or intent, even for its supposed natural effect. Cause and effect are almost absurdly reversed, with desire this byproduct of a rampant, perpetual causality. The urge to be consumed or to consume is the inverse of the effect of the experience, which is the parting and resumption in another, the offspring if not just the partner of the act. The larger context, the erotic sense which gives onto even more general phenomena of interrelation is the field for curiosity, interest, signification, speculation, where the purposeless purposefulness of the "drive" becomes the agent or alibi of psychological or metaphysical justification, but where the rending cycle not only carries on its agitation, its repetitive irresolution, but spreads it like an infection of implication to every ideological project. "Sex" -- if it can be so separated, but when is it ever a separate "entity," a thing other than this process of separation -- inseminates with dissemination. It is the conception of dissolution.
× 304. If then identity is always a matter of the/an other of relation (not vice versa), then "life" would only be identifiable by some other. Meaning that "life" is a conundrum as a discrete reference. "The meaning of life." What other of it? When construed so broadly? Is there a meaning outside of life? Whose life? What life?
× 305. Out of time -- posthumous, ideal, make believe, past as forgotten marker.
× 306. The tangle with the process of idol.
× 307. Object, transference, division. x --> x --> x. Representation as replication. (Shearing? Intercessor of identity? Floater?) What is my compulsion towards the other, the external? Of the other?
× 308. Direction of desire: what is subject, what object? Like "suckling." My desire becomes other than me.
× 309. The sky of relations -- heavens. As an imminent human face instead of the absence of humans. Sky over this window the "same" as the sky over another, another set of associations, any more pompous, aesthetic, formal, ceremonious. Or the backdrop of all? Vacancy, emptiness, outskirts.
× 310. You talked me up and into your clutches, a mad proliferation of this homing project. The guise you assumed, this auditory drag, telepersona, caught me in its sticky folds, like taffy. But this was a dissociative order, the same coin: passing the mother as the whore. Perversion of the right or good, not from outside them, from them. You made me a puppet for your manipulation, but all the better to be thwarted by this errant compulsion. × 311. Product -- waste -- cancellation. Issue, partition, separation. The notion of production as affected by writing. Not just a formal consideration. Literally, practically, writing produces this notion of production, of issue, in ways that would not be produced otherwise, for at least the simple sense of record, and that impression of permanence. The difference between accomplishing something and "just existing"? One gives off without intending to, has effect. Conversely, one's accomplishments then come to "just exist" (cf. etymology of "ex-sist," to come forth, manifest, stand out), to lie, apart or off, as perishable as memory. To produce something is always also to waste (material, time) for something else, not to mention that such production is itself mortal, its mortality is immediately set off, it is born in that sense.
× 312. As continuity by time. What is temporal juxtaposition? What is association by meaning? What sort of affiliation or contiguity do we have with signifiers, or themes, etc?
× 313. Commit? To love? I can't. Not because of some deficiency, some accident. But because it must remain possible. The question must remain. Will you love? This is the commission of love.
× 314. Number, sample, demos, social body, representation, reputation, third person. What I am to others is open to the chance of that perception. A throw of the dice. Always a set taken for the whole, the necessary error involved in this, the slippage in the statement of it.
× 315. Desire -- for? A thing? In general? Desire continues? How to account for these differences in taste -- these of this axis -- between those who desire some object a long time and those who get tired of an object by virtue of desire moving on. To see many in the one or the one in many.
× 316. Temptation of "things." The call of these associations, but what is that particular complex of sensations for the anticipation toward things? Does this "mass" make me desire? Or does my desire take the form of this mass?
× 317. Every exchange (interaction, intercourse) is a catastrophe (cf. etym.). Incommensurable, an inversion.
× 318. Target (love is a threat). Object. Aim. Not just in an initial way can one be undesirably objectified by another who desires, and not just in a simplistic, effectively moral scheme of objectivizing v. "humanizing" of some such, but even in the extent of "love." One can be alienated by the idealization. Any profession as presumption of morality, humanity, care, profundity, genuine-ness, etc., cannot mitigate this, but must even be this objectivizing.
× 319. The conception of conception. × -- Which way does it go?
× 320. A phone call, you came to the door, and I made you play another phone and door, through a peep hole. Is a relation of pure exchange an exchange of pure relation? × 321. In other words. Re-xpression -- pleasure in own head. Giving head.
× 322. The spectacle of (sex, affection, what is the more general word and how this produces the matter of perspective involved). Public display of affection, specular aspects of sex or exploitation, the narcissistic spectacle, the imaginary content of sex, the "spectacular" aspect of sex and how this is unspectacular (in several ways) -- linked to vision. The unspectacular spectacular.
× 323. Passing. Passing off. Lapping. Making passes. Passing off the particular for the general and vice versa. The alibi. The dual problem of "pragmatism" and idealism, of materialism and idealism. (Cf. Marx, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism.) If the sign is already this function, if the sign presents this in and of itself, as itself, itself (its "self" -- if this is what "self" amounts to), how would matter or ideal -- in short, the referent -- ever be able to get out of this?
× 324. Desire, covetousness, envy, vector, mark, aim. Out of reach.
× 325. "Am I your first love?"
"Who's counting?"
× 326. Nature's way of defying nature.
× 327. Image. Appearance. Death and tableau. Living on. Exemplar. Banner. A fold in life. Utterly mundane. The disposability of this image, this appearance, now. Everything "begins" with a formal distinction. Everything is put into play with a formal distinction. Certainly by those who make this distinction from the formal, that there is something which precedes, a thing-in-itself. But this distinction is of the formal itself.
× 328. The gap is never closed. We are crossed. We are the measure of a distance and the distance is the measure of us. Love and fate -- love as fate, the way perspective of our "lights," everything these two lines do to each other, their divergence and convergence constantly celebrated, remarked, scrutinized, hoped, feared, regretted, mourned.
× 329. Computer space ("cyber"); psychological topos. Calculus as opposed to physics. Pure differential. E.g., the ego and the superego. Not a topos, not a fixed position (what is?), as some geography, but the "pure" function or operation of this orientation. So that a "subject" and "object" are stipulated just by this psychological drama. (What does it mean to have an internal drama, by the way?) There is no "thing" ego -- just as there is no "thing" information, data, etc.
× 330. Rush job. Gratification is the end of desire, not only as goal or result, not only as termination, but also as interruption.
× 331. Subject/object transcendence, transposition. The floating of context, of the entirety, of precise or actual. Why am I this "me"? This person, identity, view? This a very symptom or effect of the "real" matter (problem) of localization, generalization. Identity floats, not only as a special case of some disorder or some induced state, but as the problem of its own disjunction, the inability of the perceiver to hold itself in view, as an object, of the abstraction of the identifying processes themselves, and of the exchange, the relay with others, the general agency of identity. "Several times already I've tried to figure out where all these differences come from. What makes me a titular councillor, and why on earth am I a titular councillor?" -- Gogol, "The Diary of a Madman."
× 332. Dwelling. Fetish, elaboration, a devotion or fidelity as in an economic sense, a "phase." A habit or even a fad. And by the × (general metaphoricity), vice versa, those things as. One's traits, "properties," identity is so much a matter of what one does, where one walks and for how long, how frequently, familiarity as this extent of dwelling, but also in the market of exchange with those who do not do as you, who dwell elsewhere.
× 333. Ideal of the other. Escrow (cf. etym.).
× 334. What is number? When we say there are "two" things, what are we saying? Number defies unity, which it also allows. Number cannot be a property of a thing because it qualifies more than one thing. It makes things properties of each other.
× 335. The question of being is on the way to non-being (if something can be so named). To stop and ask "what is this phenomenon," even as it sets up the sense of presence, of an object presented to a subject, is already to "participate," is already a matter of delay, anticipation, interval, difference, the metaphorical encounter (×), the association that can only take place as difference -- crosses, notches, traces.
× 336. The paradox of nothing. (Cf. instinct.) To refer to it is to "nullify" it. Related idea, but also distinct: Void and myth. (Myth and the Void?) Related to problem of origin and duality, this structural necessity for never-present absence. To make absence present. Nothing as a pure differential could not be a "proper" object, not even a predicate. Nothing is, not even "nothing." There is no "nothing."
× 337. Hypertext -- already in philosophy, problem of absolute index.
× 338. Generic form of ×s definition: word as link, heading, fragment definition. Elaboration.
× 339. Exponential, fractal. Difference from self as a formal difference (no less integral, as the integral itself). As integrity. What else to be integral to, or how else than matter of conformity of, in or with self? (Note with respect to unity presumed by Kant.) This character standing for governs everything in this text. Everything "in" this text. Attraction/repulsion. Pulsion. The pulsion of pulsion. (Concept of concept.) Which leads back to above and exponentialization.
× 340. You showed, you posed, you changed the angle. Theater as proximity and vice versa. Always a gap, no matter how small. × 341. And yet, curious, mysterious thing, this tautology and contradiction are possible, themselves, "in" life, as we say, a figure of speech. Life itself a figure of speech, this regress, this abyss, this fold upon itself. The "natural" is this exceeding, this deception, this onion skin dance of veils, this snake skin overtaking of itself, natural always superseding, the natural always a super-natural. And if life "itself" were nothing but the ghostliness of passing, this inhabitance by beings never present, but always past and future, then it is all too natural to be a phantom. What, a natural that is supernatural, and a supernatural that is natural?
× 342. Past comfort. Psych. associations. Future of past.
× 343. Tele (cf. etymology), passion, idol, remote, sacrifice, beloved (cf. alibi). Worshipping, the personal relationship of the "impersonal." What does to Platonic sense of usurpation by writing. Benjamin's "aura" -- presence experienced by this representation. All the better for form/ideal distinction (Plato or Kant).
× 344. At this rate, passing, everything is a milestone, one little marker among others privileged only by the whim of memory. Milestones, like titles or slogans, a snatch referring to the rest you don't recall. Monuments, mementos, monumental, momentary -- all flickers by. A grand canyon, a slight gesture, bonfires or some little light that gave one night a different glimmer -- which was it?
× 345. Face, facing. Superficial (cf. etymology of these). See character. Never get past the face, or the matter or effect of it. One quality always posed before another, always this difference of qualities. This is depth. Surface/depth axis. Superficiality of depth, depth of surface. Expanse. Approach -- (accession) -- flirting -- the relation one has with this face v. the necessities of prolonged relation. A distinction of adequation, desire, exchange. Even when it all lines up or adds up. No end to discrimination.
× 346. Inversion, reflexion, marker returned. The other as my ideal, ideal reflection of myself, the other as reflection of myself I don't like.
× 347. Exposition. The mythical narrative. The story doesn't happen. The illusion or custom of representation. Like demonstrations of pictorial representation of perspective, in which people shown a drawing of a cube and asked to reconstruct it lay sticks flat on the ground to recreate the drawing. The dimension of representation. Complicates the form/content distinction -- but makes it possible -- and impossible. Impossible to resolve, also.
× 348. Zero sum of selfishness. Aggrandizement of desire with spirit, fate, love, imperative. Desire, not as corporeal or sensual (remainder, modicum) of love, but as the factor of one's intent relative to another. Nothing contradicts my desire, except the same fact in the other. Nothing guarantees fulfillment of that desire, nothing is laid out to respond to my claim that I am owed.
× 349. Thesis, story (what) of desire. Why of desire? Extended sense, it is the mark, aspiration, will (to whatever). The petitio principii, the object, the fetish.
× 350. You stood for the other. The same as the other. You stood up and I put my money where my mouth is. On my knees for this dissembled inversion. I flattered myself with flattering you, stroking you up after the fact. × 351. Material v. the Theme. Complicated relationship, which, as all these matters of the ×, is apparently an opposition, contradictory, but is complicitous, an exchange, a substitution and relay, transference (black market, illicit trade), chiasmus. There is a certain naivete of idealism that considers other things to be pre-ideal and naive. High symbolic reference presumed for the "importance" of any art or representation, and this makes art propaganda of the "highest" kind, even and particularly when it is renouncing "politics." From this vantage, the lofty, airy, transcendent abstract, anything which lacks this idealism, but more particularly whatever version of this ideal is so held (cf. Joyce's aporia on patriotism), is degraded. Thus a certain disdain for "form," the matter of representation, consonance, metaphor as a mere instrument, a supposed easy analogy or attribution. For example, when someone makes music to "sound like" something else, or, perhaps the most common example, puns. Ideological principles thought to be served by color, icons, music: the same aporia of the march, generalizable, generic, and also the relationship of the rousing not dependent upon the partisan ideal. The further complication, the next twist, is that this "materialism" cannot be strictly opposed to this idealism without then falling into the same scheme, not only precisely the idealist scheme of the distinction, but by then repeating the same operation, becoming the ideal or theme which is proper to representation (chiasmus). (Keeping in mind, also, the more general matter of idealism and materialism, and the ghost of the sign.) (This may be the most general formulation of ×s -- this relation between matter and ideal, general metaphoricity.)
× 352. The living dead, memorial, song, majesty, music and movement, eternal and passing, rush of wind or waves, floating. Mixed together are the sense of familiarity and abstraction, the claim to something and its distance in forgetting, strangeness, loss. (Nearness of the distance.)
× 353. Other as limit, extension. Medium, relay, substitute. The romantic complex of this: (1) (first pass) An "other" as an aspiration, with the ideal of carrying me beyond myself in a direction I have nonetheless, if illicitly or inadvertently, chosen; (2) (second pass) the "other" as what prevents this extension by either limitation, lack, or by active difference, volition for something else. § "My" complication of narcissism -- the double helix paradox (vicious spiral?): the toy paradox -- too much control or too little control, an other to control but who must exceed control to be another, the recognition that I demand but the other is required to give it independently.
× 354. Memory or representation are also "life," or "time," as an expenditure of other things. Memory could not be absolute because of the time it would take. To "remember" every instant would be to take the same amount of time as the progression of what is remembered. But this conundrum also shows the complication of subject and object, because memory, "consciousness," representation, are both the object and the subject. (Krapp's Last Tape.) To remember remembering. The abyss is there, too. This risks even an unnecessary complication, since memory is not the object that it remembers, thus the temporal difference.
× 355. I had to cultivate seduction, strive for the most excellent indefinite, in order to seduce -- myself. To gain nothing, no advantage. Achievement is -- the end. Why go against this pure expenditure? No choice in that -- "I" am abandon, loss, expiration. Precisely how to thrive. The desire of this loss.
× 356. Forbearance, repression, memory, shame.
× 357. I am the vampire. How has this existed in the legend all along? That one will turn into the undead -- the ghastliness of the undead (a fascination as with Daedelus, Caillois?). But what is the pathos of this, the empathy, and what is pathetic (a la Herzog's "Nosferatu")? The inflection of the forms -- "I am the villain," "I am the monster." That one has an appetite for the living -- to what extent then is the parasite, the para-situs, posthumous, outside of life, other than living? I am "living on" others. But this, too, is a general condition, a condition of living. The revolt against this, the realization/revolt.
× 358. Pretense, dialect, exchange. A figure is offered, "x," to use. Every conviction, every figure, every word, is a vanity, even an arrogance, as much as it serves any purpose. In fact, this arrogance is as technical as the practicality is arrogant. To make something of "it," the world, things, is as unavoidable as leaving a trace, but that is also the unavoidable possibility of making a mistake. What but mistake could anything be? Taking anything for? Catachresis, then, as general as metaphor. Contention, affectation (what contention can be without it). "Everything I did was wrong . . . Perfectly, exquisitely wrong." -- Dying Acts.
× 359. Consumption, membrane. Desire as incorporation, absorption, to do and to be. To want to take over the other and to be lost in the other are two aspects of one, or perhaps a broader, sense of compulsion or impulse. The tissue of the separation, which is also distance, makes this desire to merge or incorporate (be incorporated). It is the tension of being separate, and the generality, vagueness, indistinctness of the self, the subject, the perceiving, not of the other. No desire to merge without this tension, let alone distance. The tension that is result of this parallax, chiasmus, of subject-object, the sensation of the other as an image of the self, as a remote self, a terminal or extension, and the complex of empathy in this. The other's astonishing agency creates the division in my oceanic, unreflected self -- it is this reflection -- a triangulation of my own reaction to my exception to my, via the agency of the, self.
× 360. We exchanged each other as compromises. You switched your number.
× 361. Vices, confessions, strokes -- the violence of impulse, rather the irresponsibility or defiance. The desire of abandon / abandon of desire? For it to not break or overturn order, but have nothing to do with that order, be outside it to begin with. (Let's not forget the paradox: this is ordinary, occurring regularly, everywhere, this desire as such.) The impulse of waste in this productive attempt. Of laying waste.
× 362. Contention. Inclination, bias, but as contention. No love without discrimination. Not merely a ridge, a divide, but more complicated, the various affectations that develop, and how one also reacts to self, to one's own affectations.
× 363. The first. Expression. What does it mean to know this as the first? Coming out, appearing, this appearing as intimacy, it's an intimacy as a publication, a making public. Confidence -- what you no longer keep confident with yourself. The exuberance of this, naive or "innocent" -- it's innocent only in not knowing how many others, how many other third-person couples and exchanges and how many other second persons, how many other exchanges for you: for one, for me. (Cf. the always at least third person.) All the others will repeat this "first" time, wanting to repeat that exuberance, that exchange (cf. hospitality, the meeting, the visit), and all the others will have this first time. Which also in another sense makes none of them first, even in a way, the first. What does the first mean outside of a series? But what does a series mean outside of this singularity, this "each"? And in this way, the first is not a first. Perhaps an inception, a beginning, an assent or taking off.
× 364. The human face in things, reflection of ourselves, seeing intelligence in nature. Once it might have been unavoidable to ascribe as "spirit" an intelligence to natural forces, a time when even the animus of humans was not distinct. The sky -- why attribute as something human-like, life-like, why not rather think it exceeds such, something far too great? Is there a comfort against this very unencompassable aspect of things in making it personified?
× 365. The items which describe the items, items, such as this one, which tell how they themselves are to be a work. ×s -- not just a figure, not just a book, not just to be read. ×s -- to be used. How will one use a(n) ×, any of these ×s? Who knows -- how they will count, what mark they will make? But to bet on zero? As if nothing were done with thought, as if sense had nothing to do with things.
× 366. These words are dry and crackling. They don't renew themselves, but persist, accumulate, accrete: leavings. Leaves.
× 367. The myth of math. To think mathematics -- to what extent is that precisely the opposite of what it purports, what is reputed or presumed of it? To think of it as the most sober, the most objective, is to participate in the effect, the affect, the illusion of it -- even as its illumination, even as its view -- as if under the influence or by putting on special goggles, altering the condition of vision. Math would be, most generally, subject to the same "law" of the constative in general: that its full scope, its compass, in order to be "truthful," must be subject to condition (measure outside measure, cf. Gödel). There can be no "Science" as such. Science "itself" would be these instances, these situations, operations, these strokes, of checking. The reduction to a 1:1 ratio, correspondence, correlation, the notion of truth as adequatio, is betrayed by its own expression, the tautology, which must express the singular in a composite which divides it (corollary: how is the singular possible without reflection). But also, paradoxically, and with consequences as much for any "anti"-math stance, one must operate the metaphorical system of mathematics, at least in any "applied" or practical way, by accepting the illusion, so to speak, that is, heuristically. This, however, does not leave mathematics, or formal logic, outside, especially distinct, for language in general, from signs, from "meaning."
× 368. The look. Whether it is "erotic" -- the question of genus and species (patronage? -- patrimony?), of metonymy, of part and whole, of inclusion or exclusion: is the look a special case of the erotic, or vice versa? With everything else we can say about "the look," the suspension of active and passive, the intercourse of active and passive, of the disruption or displacement of the schema of active and passive, where the actor and the recipient of the reaction seem to be displaced as soon as one is determined, again, as soon as we think of this as a special case of the erotic, as something more generally erotic in nature, isn't it rather that there is the more general phenomenon or possibility, capacity, faculty of this which makes the erotic possible? The fascination that is "pre-erotic" (in any sort of developmental sense in psychology) that occurs before any explicit or conscientious erotic intent?
× 369. What relationship do I bear to memory? (The question itself is borne by the matter of memory, the presumption of memory as a discrete unit, a thing.) The vagueness of memory seems a divestment which comes back to determine me. I'm at the mercy of whatever calculus has determined the array of fleeting, impulsive sensations of a something before. They come back to determine me as a throw of the dice.
× 371. Always duplicity with acting. To "do" has never been without the qualification of portraying, betraying. There would otherwise not be the dream of "just" doing.
× 372. As if we could cite a blank. Skip in count. Space in step. Interval, interstice, between. Does this belong to a series, a set? × 373. Monster. Project. (Rolo-)Index. Fractal poetico heuristic essay . . .
× 374. Thought, language, action -- the manipulation, mani-festing (caught in the act) urge. As if we need to make happening happen. The stillness in which action seems to have been collected, as if the instants themselves were rustling in their secret work of accumulating, or in bed resting from hard work, as if it were quiet enough to hear the clockwork, to hear time passing.
× 375. Immutable laws? If we could only learn them? Cf. Einstein's quote about himself, "that Einstein suits his convenience," etc. The formalistic, an increasing move towards formalism, which is also to say, of representation of phenomena, between or among themselves. Margin of error, etc.
× 376. Exception. The operation of "truth" is this stair-step (Derrida) process. The exception that causes the shift. The series of provisional positions. Adequatio becomes then a necessary, heuristic device, an operating principle, but entailing, quite literally and specifically always, at every turn, the perceptual, conceptual risk: the remainder.
× 377. Doing nothing, the feeling or sensation that one is actively not doing anything in particular, actively suspending. Like a cupped or poised hand, a coiled snake, praying mantis. Resistance, the pleasure of this tension -- verging. (This work like an occult dictionary in the strange or wild algebra of its definitions.)
× 378. What direction does it go? As if to map desire or relation, produce a scheme. As if it were not scheming in general, the impetus of a scheme, but only a particular, a species of a scheme. To think that the «consummation» of desire is the essence, the definition, the telos (in that sense), the goal or but, would be analogous to that thinking, the superstition which the Enlightenment took over from religion, metaphysics, that the light is a greater force than darkness, a heliocentrism already in place for and a corollary of geocentrism (but also usurping God -- that heliotrope, that always turning toward the sun, the god, the sun god). As if the sun were not one star among countless, encompassed by the emptiness of space. Is it such a leap to see in this "universe" -- everything? -- a figure for the seed cast?
× 379. The act of love -- love as an act, but an act which transcends show. The art and the craft. Does one act from conviction or does conviction come from acting?
× 380. The burst of imagination. A bloom, fireworks (like the Japanese word hanabi). Day trip to night. The enthusiasm of imagination, and humor, were the seduction, opened onto the impulse. That this confluence was irresistible, that there's no way we could have passed it up, was no less the anguish of another, no less the case for being so. You shared fantasies, fancies, images, other pursuits. And just as easily, dispersed. × 381. Supereffect (sureffectif) -- That inflationary aspect of meaning or association, of "effect" in general, which is also the matter of "sign" and "thing," the whole phenomenon of logic, metaphysics, philosophy, linguistics, etc. Cf. mimicry. As Heidegger said, error is in "things" themselves, nature, not simply the beholder, and even so. The problem of teleology in this, a cosmos with an "aim." This prompted by thoughts on the "automatic," involuntary or unavoidable (unconscious) associations that, for example, remain from childhood, combined with the belated astonishment we have of meaning. This astonishment is on the way to the sense of super-effect. Our de-naturation -- cf. Benjamin's angel of history, blown backwards and seeing the conflagration.
× 382. Example -- ex ampere. To cut out. The act of sex as lifted out of experience, rapturous, ecstatic (cf. etym. "ecstasy"), epiphenomenal, as if the passage of death. Abandon, romantic ecstasy, desperate, as if consummation would be passage or transformation, a catastrophe or cataclysm. This would perhaps resolve desire, as much as to say do away with it. And so the act does, for the moment. But the very starting again empties that fullness, produces the extra suspect of it, the snowball effect: the desire for desire.
× 383. «Want» -- strength and weakness.
× 384. Convenience -- what else would a relationship be? Cf. the etymology. The selfish battle for self-lessness. Mutual masturbation. Marking -- blood, territory, love, claim. Back to the "principle" of survival, or procreation or reproduction. As if a "principle" were being reproduced. As if a purpose preceded life -- but more to the point reproduction. Better for life to be an accident. Innocent in that respect.
× 385. "Behold" -- seeing as holding, the tension of seeing and touching, the suspension of the two.
× 386. The possession of beauty. Possessed is active and passive, one wants to possess because one is possessed by. Like suckling. Which way does it work. One is powerless before beauty, beauty has no "real" or underlying relation of power, and thus everywhere power around beauty. One is taken by beauty, and thus one wants to take it. To seize, to fix it. But thus to ruin. Untouched beauty. To behold -- to be held, to be held off, to be suspended. Having, being, controlling.
On peut faire se succéder indéfiniment dans une description les objets qui figuraient dans le lieu décrit, la vérité ne commencera qu'au moment où l'écrivain prendra deux objets différents, posera leur rapport analogue dans le monde de l'art à celui qu'est le rapport unique de la loi causale dans le monde de la science, et les enfermera dans les anneaux nécessaires d'un beau style.
[In describing objects one can make those which figure in a particular place succeed each other indefinitely; the truth will only begin to emerge from the moment that the writer takes two different objects, posits their relationship, the analogue in the world of art to the only relationship of causal law in the world of science, and encloses it within the circle of fine style.]
-- Proust, Le Temps retrouvé [trans. Stephen Hudson]
────
actingThere is no whole self. Grimm, in an excellent presentation of Buddhism (Die Lehre des Buddha, Munich, 1917), describes the process of elimination whereby the Indians arrived at this certainty. Here is their millennially effective precept: "Those things of which I can perceive the beginning and the end are not my self." This rule is correct and needs only to be exemplified in order to persuade us of its virtue. I, for example, am not the visual reality that my eyes encompass, for if I were, darkness would kill me and nothing would remain in me to desire the spectacle of the world, or even to forget it. Nor am I the audible world that I hear, for in that case silence would erase me and I would pass from sound to sound without memory of the previous one. Subsequent identical lines of argument can be directed toward the senses of smell, taste, and touch, proving not only that I am not the world of appearances -- a thing generally known and undisputed -- but that the apperceptions that indicate that world are not my self either. That is, I am not only my own activity of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. Nor am I my body, which is a phenomenon among others. Up to this point the argument is banal; its distinction lies in its application to spiritual matters. Are desire, thought, happiness, and distress my true self? The answer, in accordance with the precept, is clearly in the negative, since those conditions expire without annulling me with them. Consciousness -- the final hideout where we might track down the self -- also proves unqualified. Once the emotions, the extraneous perceptions, and even ever-shifting thought are dismissed, consciousness is a barren thing, without any appearance reflected in it to make it exist.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "The Nothingness of Personality"
It is as though the space between us were time: an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.
-- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
For the believer, things are the fulfillment of God's word -- in the beginning Light was named, and then it illuminated the world; for the positivist they are the fated accidents of interlocking events. Metaphor, linking distant things, fractures that double rigidity.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "After Images"
×
| I | U | |
| × | ||
| i | u |
To converse, commune, console, communicate, to appeal in general, one discovers in certain circumstances the difference between the other and my idealization, my imago of the other. This is perhaps most acute in "love" -- or perhaps this is what "love" describes. When the other's difference(s) congeal(s) into the tension of the irreconcilable, the incommensurate that must be at the base of any relation, an-affinity, I wonder which has parted, which has died, and which really betrayed which: the other other or my imago.
× 388. Truth as metaphor rather than adequation -- making equal. Giving over, giving way to, "giving" as this also. If as desire, also, and even in the sense of drive, impulse, instinct, there must be conversely this sense of any movement as desire, there is movement, drive, pulsion, the event, the action, whatever for or what analysis produces, whatever analysis must be exceeded, will be exceeded, and more or less explicitly presupposes this excess, an overcoming, a giving way to. This can be a specular phenomenon, as a kind of de minimis. The target, the object of desire, is such because of a certain distance -- layout, blocking, staging, position, array, circumstance -- and to close this distance by getting to (achieving, making) the object, by changing the situation in a practical, spatial, specular sense, the point of view, one also changes the terms of the speculation, aspect, the object "itself." (Not to mention the complication of the subject/object inversion, expressed by way of the imago matter among others, the reversal of the gaze, etc. The involution of subject/object. Caillois.) This has consequences not merely etymologically for "theory."
× 389. Motion as a state or station -- special case, as if subordinate, contingent. (Cf. Heidegger.) This is where the problem of time comes in as subject to a mechanical, spatial sense without deference, without the x-sistance, the e-motion, the un-stance, the duration of being. Is it possible for this im-motion as case of station?
× 390. Moonlighting in the day, you reciprocated in the exchange of same for other. A second coming. Your name could bear this cross.
× 391. As the «mark» of this reverberation, the scar of time (to put it perhaps pathetically), and the axis of transfer for deferral. The mark's presence is the referent's absence, as if dramatized by the mark's movement on an axis of depth perpendicular to the plane of the "page." The trace or graphic of "movement," in the planar spatial sense, is effaced by the "act" itself, by the transferent (so to speak). History is covered up. Movement in tacit sense, transition, change.
× 392. Exceptional -- giving over, exceeding the aim. For example, the desire to have all "life," all experience become art, an aesthetic utopia, is conditioned by the banality which that would become. In order for the exceptional, as model or summit or supreme value, to be, it must also be the exceptional as temporal or practical variant, interruption, hiatus. That "anyone" has such ideals, dreams, fancies, impulses, that such ideals can be so abstract, that the impulse itself can be such, "pure," mere, a reflex, and thus abstract, without particular content, qualifies in all directions (cuts both ways, or heads off from the intersection in all directions -- ×). Those who think that a utopia rises above others would be qualified inasmuch as this is thought by others, and even turns out to be perhaps the most common of thoughts, something elementary, abstraction itself. As such, this may be a naivete, the pleasure principle as innocent, but also an uncritical faculty, a faculty for the uncritical, which can then produce effects which, if not otherwise considered or qualified or checked or reacted to, can become monolithic or even bad. Supremacism as a sort of structural tendency. But what is this, then, how to account for it otherwise than by a self-justifying (divine) explanation or by a kind of broad and empty de facto statement? The opposite risk would be anthropologism, psychologism or too causal a scheme. But to venture it: projection, and more particularly of desire and even more particularly of an ecstatic experience. This would have historicist and individual developmental axis. Wish fulfillment, of course, but as suggested by Lacan after Freud, by virtue of, by way of, deprivation, by mediation, and not as some sort of inherent or immanent principle or trait. Motion towards, inclination, created by the space leaned into -- impetus rather than instinct.
× 393. I sign anonymous, more or less. Proxy. I make the mark for marks, the mark for any other. Steal, give, make, cast. My hand a cast into oblivion. The hand stolen, the name. The hand it steals, the name it takes, it gives the same ("hand" for handwriting, signature and the art of writing as this cast). Covers, hides, erases, scratches.
× 394. This machine of thought.
× 395. Declamation v. figure -- poetry and dictionary confounded.
× 396. Flicker, reverberation, alternating current. Reaction/reflexes can "contain" each other. Substitute or piggyback each other, such that an "impulse," or impression, a sense (a "look," in doubled sense) of something as good can lead to a bad effect and the reflex then triggers both the "good" impulse and the "bad" reflex. This can go on and on, in turns, reversing, ad infinitum, so that the two trade each other as if with principle of electromagnetic propulsion. This alternation could be so rapid as to be indistinguishable, if distinguishable, that is, if not simultaneous. In fact, no sense would be uniform to begin with, but such a complex. As Lacan suggests, to be born is to begin this division of sense, what makes things distinguishable.
× 397. Identity does not "precede" the matter of number, nor recognition. The desire of form -- desire for a particular form -- is the form of desire. When one encounters what one desires, e.g. the particular shape of the object of sexual desire, a woman's or man's form, does the identification precede the "fall" into categorization, comparison, classification? (Consequences of also for things like genetics of homosexuality.)
× 398. Pretense (pre-tending). Is there ever an act without pretense? An un-mediated, an immediate act? Is there ever just doing it? To appear to the other, whether even this is passive, which may itself amount to nothing but relative interest or involvement, the qualified objectivity of a third party. This is not only "human." Always a pretense. Measure outside of measure. The cycle of relay of being measurable and measuring or holding to measure, which is also the cycle or relay of "absolute" measure, of god, of subject and object, is "evidence" not only of objectivity, by which here is meant the fact of being objectifiable, being held as object of the ability to hold as object -- what, however, restricts precisely "objectivity" in the ideal sense -- by virtue of the fact or sense of being measured, but it is also "proof," evidence, the matter of this existence. (Another way of saying, god is a sign, of man.) This existence, here, is always a matter of a figurative, representative cycle of the projection of its possibility. As if to say "Does this exist" is the measure itself of that existence. (A strange echo of Descartes, an echo coming back as a strange sound.)
× 399. Epiphany. Making a point, taking aim, but not as a thesis, as a crossing. A relation. A relation of lines, a stitching, a lacing, a suture, a rupture, a scarring, a caress. General metaphoricity. To make an × like this is to cross also exposition with depiction, declamation with obliqueness, deference and fascination with flourish and bravado: philosophy with poetry, science with literature, observation with drama, reverence with parody. Just as philosophy needs not to simply show up figure -- poetry, literature, drama -- but show it how it already does and thus can think, so these arts can show philosophy how it already does and thus can act, and thus learn to act better.
× 400. Furtive exchanges, lost in the crevices of cities and nights. You produced, repaid, returned the profit of desperation.
× 401. The formality (formalism) of institution. (Aporia?) That something becomes instituted is the redundancy of its consummation, at once its still birth and its living death. The raison d'être is its contention with something else (thus always also the exterior of its principle, the presumption of exchange, the dialogic or complementary aspect), and to some extent, always more or less, de facto, but always to some degree de jure, to be founded or to institute is to outlive this protestant state, in a sense to go from performative to (as if) constative. This is most pertinent for any institution which outlives the circumstances of its founding contention, that is its historical and practical purpose. But this is also a matter of dissemination, of degradation, of living (and petrifying) memory, whereby the practical aspect of its original contention gives way to a ceremonious memorial function, and to a kind of signet function of allegiance, membership, even a sheer performative of identity. The constative claim becomes, if paradoxically, the sheer performative, or, in other words, the tautology of membership: We are the ones who say we are the ones who. That there is any other "practical," "natural" trait, that there is any relation other than elective, does not mean this does not also apply. In fact even any natural -- let's be to the point, familial -- relation must be subjected to this operation in order to make any such claim to an otherwise underlying relation.
× 402. What does desire want? The double of affirmation. The formal lifting or floating. Extension, prolongation, formalization, exponentialization, extrapolation. Pictures of desire. The photo process, snapshots, life itself must be made into, is always, this gesture referring to it. Always parting this whole, always these parts exceeded, giving over to more ungraspable, and any part referred among and referring to these others, and always feeling a part of this exceeding partiality.
× 403. Excess itself. "Excess itself." Is this an abstraction? Is this possible? Can there be a literality to an expression such as this? A nominalism, on the other hand? Which would be -- what -- a literality to the letter?
× 404. Aim and aimless. Target and drift. The extraneous. As Aristotle says, if "man" in general may have no point, may be without any particular purpose, any particular person is absorbed in a particular purpose, occupation. What imposition is it of purpose on this as a matter, a question? Would there not be a sort of necessary structural "argos" in order for there to be any particular "ergon"? Lined up with an objective, with extraneous lines running together at the vanishing point, logic itself is self-fulfilling prophecy: one imposes order, and this can be as dire or as frivolous as one likes or as much as one needs. But in fact, it's precisely such an excess principle this must give way to, an always other objective (ulteriorization), another line or another place to which the lines lead. How else to know whether this objective has any value outside its own order? Leisure, dispatch, responsibility, foresight, hindsight, etc.
× 405. (Pre)Tending. Seeing as anticipation/memory of other senses. The sense of touching, grasping, colliding, encompassing, tasting, smelling, hearing, etc. -- taking in.
× 406. The chiasmus of affect/effect, of purpose for that of leisure, art. We make of arguments themselves more general purposes when they are part of some other whole we do not like, another we do not like. Purposelessness, and trading the conceit -- pointless purpose. Instrumentalism v. immanentism? The aporia is that a particular purpose reaches the same sort of abstraction through the child's "why," the infinite regress of causality itself, while conversely some high-minded notion of general betterment will be reduced again to an instrumentalism once it clears the field of others.
× 407. Where do I write? Where do I write to? (Letter to No-one and cf. Kafka.)
× 408. Life is not living. Reaching, aspiring, after-the-fact and projection. The death of the other: even the loneliness or contention of others is what I address, what I am addressed to, and the loss of the other, the mortal absence which will not go away, changes the sense of what it is to be alone, singular, myself.
× 409. The flatness of depth. The expanse of surface. (To put it like a maxim.) There is a proportionate shallowness to the notion of "depth," such that the more profundity or grandeur is ascribed to something at the expense of others, the more reductive it is. The contrast would not be simply in ascribing proper depth to anything else, but being keen to what has been overlooked. In this light, "consciousness" historically has been, as a notion, a contradiction in terms. The "ideal" has tended to obscure what is, so to speak, in front of the face.
× 410. You stood, if that, for pure petulant demand.
× 411. Target, struck. The trajectory of pertinence. From the marked variable of the desired object, the facial qualities that hold the deep reserve of all chance, all aspiration, all the exceeding of qualities, thus the quality of exceeding, to the hard impression, the deep tracks, of experience, cycles, feints and starts. The face itself becomes more shallow with time, as the roundelay of exchange fades into the sheer cross, the scars, of checks and short circuits: the impasse of communication, incompatibility, incommensurability, the impropriety of the address. Hit or miss, the arrow never gets there.
× 412. Text "like" a topos. What is the place of the text? Text, map, topology, place. "Place" is already the locus of this matter. The text is a thing and is like a thing and is not the thing because referring to another thing.
× 413. Scar, tissue, material, furrow, subtraction, graph, gravure, engraving, grave, mortality, absence, integration, implication, marked, surrounded, impressed, imbricated, that made distinct is also another factor of the environment, a fold, wrinkle, kink, incorporation already re-incorporation.
× 414. Destination, address, context, arena, person(a)(s) (number, first, second, third, generalized), private, public, interlocution, interloper, elope (cf. Dutch "loper" runner, "lopen" to run). The lines of our most intimate crossing are a scandal for the others: brazen, spectacle, obscene. What others? The other others? The public always already having read us will pay us back this tribute, this vengence, of our discrimination, of our wanting to have their view at our convenience. Weddings or porno, the grown-up child's imago revenge with the community: vicariousness, proxy, projection, sublimation, fetishization. What we say to each other across these lines, via these crossed lines, will always suffer bearing this face, will always suffer this supernumerary refraction. And even this address to you, this missive, this sign, will suffer the gliding into the sense of (some) (an)other, the generic ring of an "x" from another sphere, other, another, too many, or even the pat and smug quasi-universality of this utopia, this a-society, the tautology of a vaporized good. One will never communicate, no one to communicate, without crossed lines.
× 416. Hide and seek. Lost and found. Fort/da. Significance [is] this intermittence, flickering, interval, coming and going, dis/appearance. Miraculous × coincidence. Even the cult of the present -- a cult of presence, any cult of presence, a cult, a presence, any cult or presence -- presupposes this. An idol, a monolith of meaning, could only require maintaining, maintenance, persistence, ritual, fidelity, devotion, repetition, discipline, or even despotism or terror, if there is not only the risk, the potential, the possibility, but the fact, the actuality, of absence. The very sense, then, of "fact" (done,
past participle, fait accompli), because the sense of "then," this intermittence as temporality. Gods, then, the immortal, are only all too mortal, absent -- dependent upon this mortal absence.
× 417. Train, grain, bent -- the word for the curve in fabric, curtain, hair, etc. This to express the matter of the distribution of faculties, to gloss all the complex of those things otherwise inexpressible of a person: personality, spirit, mien, manner, disposition, taste -- each of these terms failing in some way, if by overdetermination. The matter of "taste" in particular: one axis is the, as it were, formal level of the term, the social index, the sociology, of this social indexing or sociology. There is the aporia of how this figure can be redcuced to a pat, facile value, a currency, to precisely a sense of fixed value. But, another axis, that which the figure refers to, the aporia of one's subject defined, "expressed," by object: I'm "into," etc. The point of identity thus a vector, a line, a trajectory, an equation, a plotting, a relation. That this is also between will and impulse, subtending voluntary and involuntary, not reducible to decision, to a determination of the conscious mastery of act, action, that this is the irreducible of reflex, already along the axis of the instinct/conditioning aporia, but also between that and the mirror incision of self-deference, self-increment or number, is the irreducible of relation itself, of something like difference to the patness of coordination.
× 418. Because it happens, it doesn't happen. Happening is not done. But this series of finishes are, too, the fleeting of it. Never definitively achieved. The × that marks the time, the act, the accomplishment also marks over it, is a tribute to its absence as well as its occurrence. The scar of some matter is also the lines that run off, elsewhere, the trailing off of memory, anticpation, accession, decline. This climax mark[ed], the cut fold loop that would subsume even itself, cannot also withstand the opening up of its own relation, versing, beyond any proper perversion.
× 419. Ecstasy, ex-stasis, deracinated (cf. "ex-sist," motion-stasis, etc.). Etym., ecstasy: Middle English extasie, from Old French, from Late Latin extasis, terror, from Greek ekstasis, astonishment, distraction, from existanai, to displace, derange : ek-, out of; see ecto– + histanai, to place; see Indo-European root st-a-. Note the general sense for that reconstructed root of "stand," to stand, stasis and statio(n), stationary, the "problem" of whether station derives from motion, station as act, etc. For the "interpersonal," for intercourse in general, as a form or mode, there is not, then, a basic state, or, in other words, no state, inasmuch as no singular, absolutely reduced, uncomplicated or un-complex, un-mediated state. This would become the genus by which to articulate or schematize other ex-stases, ecstasies, other ecstatics, ecstatic forms, circumstances, instances. The ex-static is the basis of state. Drawn out, find a cast (image, and the complex that entails) of self in the exchange of the other, what even the foreign, the alien is as this relation in me (thus externalized as the other), an outside myself as the myself of my sensation within me.
× 420. Making me stand, the way you like, manipulation and presentation. Producing me. One just as easily disappears in one's consumption. Perhaps the world is not for ghosts, but for creatures.
× 421. Finding fault -- discovering, revealing, assigning, attributing, impugning, betraying. There is not only the measure of satisfaction to be had in the pettiness of seeking advantage over the other, but also over one's self. The fault of the other may free me from the fault of my own that takes advantage of the other. One doesn't suffer only the loss of gods, but one's propensity for them.
× 422. The sense of form is grasp. Grasp is led, eluded, allusive, presupposes privation, the sense of sense: reaching for holding, touching, in-taking, sucking. This is conjecture. This, too, is conjecture. What gives is scale. Frame of frame of frame.
× 423. Addressed -- a kind of inversion of "expression," the fixation of the other, the impulse for audience. Instead of some core of meaning in a soul that needs to be expressed, then is this reflex because any meaning that would be expressed (including that one about the soul) is a matter of this language, the process that one has answered as a call, to mimic before even understanding the necessity to articulate. The prayer, the dream of an ideal companion, this, too, is a byproduct of this reflex of the call.
× 424. The first look -- in step, stroke. Fate of the first look. The face always as risk, doublure, not just showing but concealing.
× 425. The way things fall. × 426. The destiny of the past -- signs.
× 427. "Space" -- continuity (presence) -- discontinues continuity -- infinite extension. We are necessarily ground, grounded, which means this sense of space. (Thought of time of ascent of aircraft, extra dimension of space.)
× 428. Too subtle for love, but my love is this subtlety.
× 429. "State" -- motion/stasis -- topos, problem of. Waiting. Inside/out -- are we inside the world or outside it? How can there be a world, another one? Via Caillois and the problem of perception (vision), of resolving distinction from surroundings, this is a spatial or material basis for the supposedly otherwise psychological, existential, metaphysical problem of identity, or perhaps what it amounts to, location. Tran-sistence. Transi(s)t, transists. Etym. = transfer + resistor! Transfer and resist! Like the inertia principle. The tension of differentiation/identity. But to hear as "tran-sist," as if built off of "exist," ex + sistere "to set, place, stop, stand." The mechanical falls back on a principle of representation, but this in turn on difference, the principle of difference, or perhaps more precisely, if such a thing would still be possible in precisely this matter, the difference of principle. For Caillois, along those lines, rather than a reduction to the temptation of space -- right or wrong -- would there not be, beyond psychological, physical or even metaphysical, a kind of transistence, a kind of inertia principle, in which nothing subsists -- or, well, nothing -sists -- nothing has a property, properly speaking, but rather gives to a general transference, is only property as such in transference, a pure operation, only a matter of the property of some other (no force, only the play of forces). This is elsewhere referred to as the trace. The trait "itself." All state, then, is this kind of motion, the porosity or valence, this transit of properties or traits into each other.
× 430. A broad invitation in an aftermath, communicating across languages, borders. Attempt a risorgimento. Seeking, spurring, then a shower of feeling. Turns, positions, stances, tracks. But while your touch was imposing sensually, the intimacy made you impose. You took hold with your mouth another way, asserting me. Back to the distance, to international lines, where the difference of times made room to play, this Nachträglichkeit became a Traumdeutung. So much for "reality," where now you leaned too hard even standing apart. Your silence was imposing.
× 431. Gods and birthdays. That the "universe," itself a pretense, a presumption, that all things together, the everything, is a scheme of investment with me -- this is ego, the ego, presupposing in a desperate way, however, that I'm not already matter, a matter of this. This fact it takes as frightening, impersonal: the lack of identity, the a-massing, the excess of this all which I cannot encompass. But to me -- and is this my paradox, the paradox of this me -- this impersonality (of "nature," of the all or the is) has always been preferable to the interest of gods, to personal interest however abstracted, just as there is comfort in the fact that strangers would help me in a place called a "hospital."
× 432. The "thing." "Presence" and "absence" are also attributes of the thing. Extrapolation -- the thing is an attribute of the thing. Thingness is, just as also things are attributes of thingness. Separable essence, divisible or hierarchical essence, would already not be essential! The keys in my pocket: always this "presence" and "absence" are matters of not simply "Perception," as if itself an essence, but a perception, an act, thus also an instance of perceiving, a passing (an action that is a passing). "Presence" is thus also a matter of forgetting. This us is not then an "act" in the classical sense, and what produces another sense of act.
× 433. Impossible to communicate to you, to "you," to the second person. The message is inverted (love is the inversion of the image by the retina; Lacan; greater than less than), the matter of conveying to a recipient is complicated by the overlapping, the imbrication, the incorporation of and with that supposed recipient. Everything else this "communication" does, all the modes that are confounded: gesture, caress, scrutiny, idiom, care, sympathy, envy, empathy. The necessary, even commendable, desirable, ethical, confounding of persons: first, second, third. You may need to hear something most as a third person, "objectively," but it's precisely because of that very intimacy of you that you can't, and that you thus need to. Another vicious circle for the ×. More agency, more alibi, more sacrifice, more crossing, more tangles of barring and stitching. Communication would thus be impossible. There would be no proper mode, say address, public address, "expression," or whatever else, if this were the case, but also this case of the impossibility of "direct" communication to a second person, to "you," would make such other communication a mode of it, have the same consequences. Writing -- the case of that: here meant not in distinction, but precisely as a form of public address -- would require something more precise, and would also give "direct" address its form. But also writing already is this situation, what gives us to see this situation. The fetish of the other.
× 434. Future, intention. The future is illusion. The operation of illusion. The incorporation, institution, the integration (cf., sense of "untouched," "intact," not "tag" as not touched or corrupted). Because there is future (but see how this syntax already acts as if it were dis-integrated, dissociated), there is intent, deferral, will. The temporal axis -- is there any way to say it but "future", and at once, any way to ruin the spatial representation, the representation as line? -- is what makes -- it, all, itself -- riven. Plied, crossed, folded upon itself. Crossing (itself) (out). Covering (itself). Writing (itself). Time is riven, time is this general riven of "things" (the things which are not). Time and times. The fabric of pure fabrication. Target, aim, lifting up, carrying over, floating, bleeding -- metaphorization. The future is an expression of intent; intent is an expression of this opening. But this opening, this intent, is also a (belated) reflection, its blindness (the angel of history blown forward facing backwards), and its insight, what it sees as always standing for what it does not. Yet.
× 435. "Coming together" -- × as the pass.
× 436. The trace of the other -- the (at least) third, the (witness). In the manner of the adulterous clue -- lipstick on the collar, the hair on the coat, the scent. But there is also the way the oather as a second modifies one's responsiveness. The trace of the "other" that behavior bears. (As when I asked her, "Have you been with someone else? You kiss differently.") The way we discover as empathetic responses to former ones when it is observed by new ones. (My tendency to "wait," to be attentive, deferential, brought as to cautions by another.)
× 437. Encrypting -- secrets told dissimulated by openness. Tabulating and calculating. A game of clues.
× 438. Pointing to the point -- the place of the point, the absent point. The would-be point. The point (the pointing) then would be the point.
× 439. Sign (symbol?) and function. Sign of function, function of sign. Where a matter of (where not) sublimation and desire. Intent (purpose), desire cannot be equal to end where end cannot be a matter of an equal, cannot be flush, cannot be reduced. Accomplishment, purpose (doubled sense). For this matter, "purpose" already serves the equivocation, the ambiguity, the ambivalence, perhaps even better than "intent" or "aim." At least as far as that other major line, major thread, that "theme," we have an eye on: the inherent or immanent purpose or design apart from the will of a subject, what inevitably sets (hu)man and nature in a complementary opposition. How, precisely, does desire, as a function, effect, purpose, escape the sign, the expression, precisely of this function, effect, purpose? One is caught in the symbolic process, in the process proper to the fetish, in "recognizing" for this act an other effect or purpose.
× 440. As if coming round again to the first time, a private sitting room theatre, you unwittingly playing the part of another age. You were well mannered in respecting pace and distance, and this made a nice progression, intended or not. Perhaps you were only wary, but then there was plenty to let out. You made me stand out, took effect, something for you. But other stories crossed, and quickly the path of sublimated suffering became express and all rationalization. What happens to care when the other's suffering is a demand? Even desire?
× 441. The thing is suspended, qualified, reaches a limit, by the perception of a subject, as if this "thing" that is human (stipulated as consciousness by at least one tradition) were a category other, beyond, outside, or as an exception to, thing or ipseity posited as inertness, object. The category of perception is further supplemented by idealization, conceptualization, more particularly "consciousness" as a mental faculty, or fa(oc)cultization (if this will be permitted). Possibly a matter of reference, relation, symbolization, association, supplements this mental facultization, something more general then the categories of subject and object, at least in one scheme. But precisely what ups the ante is scheme, schematization. The category of "thing," in turn, comes again to supplement at each stage, as each scheme or level of this categorization not only submits to its place within reference in general but the very inertness of object supplements the exclusion from the field of objects. Exponentialization. Subsetization. Still there is no end to the succession, for such a "vacuum," such a perfectly contained or continuous field, would either be impenetrable inertness (what nevertheless is imagined as inertness per se, and there immediately is the paradox of mediation), or a pure gaze with no object, which would amount to another sort of indifferentiation, thus inertness. "Thing" supplements reference in an "internal" or intrinsic way, what makes it all the more uncanny a supplement, for it is the principle of reference or the referential or a referential system that it refers to something else. (On this matter, cf. the matter of Kant.) Also the sense of "raw" -- perhaps this term can serve with the problems of "natural." Unretouched, uncooked, found.
× 442. Part and whole (read Totality and Infinity by Levinas) -- that we are "able" to imagine "else." What "else" is (cf. etym. and associated terms, "other," "ethics," etc.). "Something else," other. Scope, parameter (cf.), asymptote. That any moment of life, any situation is a situation of perspective which gives an objectivity. At once sufficient, indeterminant, and bound. The absolute qualified. The supplementary condition of the unconditional. The condition of the absolute, the absolute of the absolute. As with passing -- abstraction as this "event" of eventfulness, the carrying over (metaphor), the memory. Passing again outside passing. The "world historical," the universal significance, the lifting up, carrying over, persistence, of any representation, but the drama, the tragedy, of any representation. At once (×) the drama of the banal and the minuscule, granular, technical, pure operation of this drama, this epic gesture or cast, this grandeur.
× 443. Ob-livion, ob-literation. Cf. etym., note sense of to write over. I am now, but all these I-am-now points before -- I was there, where are they? What are these? I am also the obliteration of me. Forgetting is also other memory.
To write over, to overwrite. The logic of the storage medium before the fact (like "cyberspace" again, already this "space" that is not space, this ideal space or place where the image, representation, the ideal occur). I overwrite myself. ×
× 444. Mimicry -- The problem, among "naturalists," of what mimicry is. One naturalist states that a naturalist is more capable of determining the mimesis than a predator! And that deception is essential to life. Another makes somewhat more technical the problems of mimicry as an operation, that is, a process, not a fixed value. One offers the distinction of mimicry and mimesis, camouflage being a more specific form of that. The distinction between predator/prey, model and mimic, must also include active/passive, as well as subject/object, where the observer becomes another function in the relation. Cf. the formula used to express the relationship of model, mimic and a third party, the predator or agency for which the mimesis -- most general -- must function. Already the "observer" function. Here the naturalist encounters the problem of the ostensibly formal distinction in handling the matter. Resemblance -- subject/object (Goedel, re-inscription; Caillois, the projection of this problem along different axis; resemblance in general, Blanchot) -- mimesis as more general than the mimicry/mimesis distinction above.
× 445.
Not just a tragic or noble thing. And perhaps we are not egoiste enough. Not just what does it matter to you if I love you, but why not, if I have a fancy for you, what business is it of yours?
× 446. Possession, dispossession -- depossession? Privation? Because the "issue" of psychology or "language," of representation, is that I only come to find out later that I was already a matter of (the) other(s). "X" is extrusion, expression, dispossession, floating out, projection, of the incorporation, the relay of "subject," the interstitial arc or exchange of "intersubjectivity."
× 447. Station -- motion and stasis. (Cf. etym. "station"). To "stand." Stands still. Perhaps better, remains, persists. Look at this moving still:
×
× 448. Manipulation of medium. The dream of operation. The dream of pure operation is the dream of all material, media, etc., of convenience, the escape from or subjugation to any condition of (my) existence (the ego, the Ego, the Subject, the subject). But "freedom" from any condition would also be the absence of existence, pure abstracted existence -- death, or perhaps un-life or un-living. The desire to overcome any condition, the very thought of condition qua obstacle, but just as much going the other direction, obstacle hinderance to condition, perhaps more generally still, for all object, presupposes the suffering, the experience of obstacle, limit, deprivation, hindrance, bad, misfortune, the event as negative. Thus, passion.
× 449. Powers of you. To you, all of you, which of you, which you, of you, for you, about you, from you . . . Can we count all the ways of you, the times, the numbers, the power? The instances, or as might be said in another jargon, the persons? We couldn't say "individuals," could we, without provoking an incompatibility, the sound of a disaccord, a ring of incongruity? What is there of you? Each of you succeeded, each you that was all the rest, that consummated, that was exemplary, each time that you topped all the others.
× 450. In your eyes shimmered Donner Lake, the Pacific Ocean, Lake Michigan, Lake Ontario, the sky over Nevada. Through your hair whispered the moss and ferns of the Redwood forest. The streets of New York, Chicago, Toronto, Paris from the air veined your body. The reds and pinks and sulphurs and slates of Arches paletted you, your cheekbones, your shoulders, your stomach and hips, your legs, your hands. Running all around and over you, you were the Rockies, and you towered over me like the giants of Humboldt. Next to you, the air of those moist and crisp and mulching glades was between us, the full and pressing air of the desert, the steely cold of the north, the chill of the ocean fog. Through all those places, there was one to float, to be drawn to, to rise and fall, to swell and give and disperse, to flutter and shudder, to rest and repose, to light and to be: your lips. You, brightness and the sea to embark on, expanse. After all the passes, all the equivocations, qualifications, adjustments, redresses, checks, double sacrifices, there came all that was given to imagine, incarnate, you the form.
× 450/fracture. I thought of all the partings from the first time to Paris. I thought of my own transport from trying to be strong and nonchalant to useless malaise. I thought of all the senses of drift from one airport to another: adventure, abandon, gratuitousness, disjunction, floating, sinking. So many segments of transport as if now cut up and strewn, all their horizons lost, absorbed, obscured by this one. I thought of Heathrow, interminable terminal, now a scrap like an old ticket. I thought of age. I thought of all this as if there were a destination, as if there were a place all these lines would end up, be gathered, a place where we would be finally gathered and always looking back, as if these routes, lines, vectors only converged. As if we only gathered and were not spent. As if I could fly from dispersal.
× 451. Time with you. Suffering, insufferable. The advent, the time of approach, the reprieve, to draw a circle, to circumscribe, to embrace, you, the there with you, this here with you. To get a reprieve against time, the pathos of this moment is to stave off that coming of the never again to come, that passing of the moment of passing, the passing of you to the you only past. But without this passing, even unto the irretrievable passing, the moment, the advent, hangs, an interminable passing, itself, the crypt of the living, a prison cell, buried alive. The advent unbecoming.
× 452. All intercourse as sexual. Passing the particular for the general. The crossing, equivocation, × that goes on between any two in discourse, even men co-implicated. But this is making a pass as giving the slip. It is the evasion, the ulteriorization, the fleeing and escaping and missing of the pursuit, the general drift of the seduction. The play of the erotic is not reducible to the production, adequation or appropriation of what really always amounts to a petitio principii. The aim taken is the parti pris. Bearing fruit is always a matter of interest, investment, an egagement that could never do without the artifice of nature. A cocksure, rogue gesture of making off with this fruitful production is no less pregnant with it. This errance -- this one here, picked, played, subjective, and on the other hand, the one in general there to be made use of -- is what defies even the homologous teleology of a libertinism, sensualism or sexual naturalism.
× 453. The fetish operation, to operate everything in terms of this fetish for "x", in turn for a general equivalent of this operation. Relative or absolute? Relative absolution? Absolute relation. Jazz -- codes, signs, improvised. The scatter assembly of notes (imbrication, intersections). Sex, ensemble performance. Scattered seed.
× 454. The aim. Is it love, desire, reflex, instinct? Whatever integration, reclamation, appropriation, comprehension, will presuppose -- divide, diverge, implicate, compromise, take with -- this dissociative coordination, the externalization of principle, the internalization of (the) matter. To comprehend, to consume, compromise is to be the matter of. You are what you eat. Whatever this relation can be called, whatever form or expression of this force, direction, vector, bearing, «one» is riven. The singularity of an identity is not only the problem or matter of this ulteriorization, projection, erection towards or vagination of, any of the complicating relations or actions are thus complicated themselves. Which way love? Which way lust, hunger? The absorption/assimilation, incorporation?
× 455. Stroke. Repetition. Re-pulsion. (Etym. "repel," "pel," to thrust, strike, drive.) From craft to art, by impulse of pejorative, no less a matter of the repetition. Stroke as sex, as fetishistic or mesmerizing repetition, as the work of insects, the becoming mechanistic, an inertia, movement tending towards stasis, a station of movement.
× 456. Passes as articulation. "Writing." Moments of condensation. A smear. Impressions made by rubbing, thus circumstance as much as "expression."
× 457. As I walked over circles and squares past triangles, I thought of you, oh my aimlessness, you my misdirection.
× 458. Plus or minus. The extra. The unnecessary necessary, the necessary unnecessary. What about envy? (A question also for Nietzsche?) Certainly there is "becoming," the gist of it. But in the Eternal Return, what is there of the return of the will of the other, to be different?
× 459. Share. Shares. Scandals. Comminglings, intermingling, collusion. Miscegenation. Adultery. Isn't it scandalous already that I'm sharing this with you? Respect boundaries: how does one avoid sharing this? Internalization, contamination. Recognition, then, as infection. This crosses the definitions of intersection, optics and prohibition, as well as transference. Cross. Not to mention the Cross.
× 460. Here we are after all the yous, scattered. Returned? Ended up? Is this the fate of life itself, so unlike the stories or dramas where all is told as fate? To be aside, in the wings, in the audience of an empty house? Not even telling the story? Does life end as the witness of one's own oblivion? A train of all the parts played. A kind of afterlife, a realism after the art: the jaded banality of actors with their costumes packed away, or puppeteers with their puppets deflated in trunks. Not without its appeal, sophistication or grace or perhaps resignation, or just being tired of wiles. All the parts played, the affairs, the conceits. We'll do what we can for each other, except love. Nobody deserves that kind of punishment.
× 461. Supernumerary and lust. This is relation. Looking out skyscraper window at city, the inability to encompass the detail. Is this how the desire for abstraction was born? (As opposed to the operation regardless of desire, of volition, the unavoidable, which gives the desire to not be abstracting, or the delusion that anything could not be.) The infinity of material is already beyond imagination. The author is jealous of this. "God" is jealous of this. To this is opposed the lust for material, lust precisely as the sensation of expanse, the exceeding of material. The number of people -- overwhelms all notion of grasp, of duty, of control, of authority, but is thus the basis for the obviations of ethics, morality, domination.
× 462. The demand of total recall, or an absolute recall function: absolute in a doubling, supplementary sense. What might be called the imaginary pure indexing function. One would be given to imagine that at any specific moment, a leap can be made such that, within an idealized field (already having everything arrayed as the list of all possible bits or examples), it would allow the thinker to "come up with" the next precise and pertinent example. But this function, a kind of fiction which leaves the trail of its effect as what would lodge or have lodging, accretion, effect -- situates itself with respect to several strange axes. Nietzsche' reversal of cause and effect provides analogy. Also, let's suggest a thinking machine programmed with two impulses or command vectors: one of them Wittgenstein, the other Husserl. These two ceaselessly supervene upon each other to "process" any data. By Wittgenstein, we assume a kind of micro or nodal tactic which fixes upon the indicative function of any statement in a sort of "blind" logico-grammatical questioning; by Husserl we assume the suspension by the circumferance or field of any datum with the very question of how it can function. This is the provisional model of our examination of the index.
× 463. Our eternity is our mortality. And our mortality is our eternity. (The sense of thinking about things, the same little flashes, after years had transpired. Specifically, flirtatious thoughts, looking and the conceit of being looked at, not merely "good looking," as if that operation were only a property of me, of mine, but as the operation, the whole formula or equation of attracting another, or more not thinking I may not be. Then I see the picture of me, right after flirtatious encounter, and realize that picture is of me seven years earlier! Same thoughts back then. Only now I've aged. And age only another factor of adolescence.)
× 464. Consciousness left with itself. We are permanence: endure, traverse, remain. The gap, the interval, the flicker of this. We are the significance that there be any forgetting. In this way, the life that preserves is no less uncanny than the life that leaves things behind.
× 465. Principle of excess of relation -- cf. expanse. This goes for the thought or notion of the ideal of relation as well. No "idea" as such (no monad or tautology, as earlier arguments put it, except inasmuch as those already are not anything but relation) and no restricted correspondence or signification. There is no ulterior because the ulterior process doesn't stop. Referring never stops. (All idealisms, dogmatisms, naive maxims, act to stop or arrest relation.) Thus, for instance, a two-edged implication, as far as "purpose" or "intent." There is no proper purpose in an absolute sense: either "for its own sake" or for some other, "higher" (hasn't it always been this), absolute sense. These, also, either amount to the same, essence or immanence, essence as immanence, the "for itself" of being, but which in turn reduce to the particular sense of "presence," the station of value. It doesn't even make sense to refer to a "proper" purpose outside of a perpetual relation in which purpose could be confused.
× 466. Desire of desire. This genome monad is also the burst of iteration, replication, mutation, perversion. How could nature fail to be ascribed to every variation it has set off? This is even presumed by all those demarcations set down in its name, all those lines drawn, marks of censorship, prohibition, all the attempts to prevent crossing by making crosses. Desire of desire is the supernumerary, the exponential, the recursive effect whereby the double affirmation floats over the projected dumb fact. I want to say yes to yes, have to have this idea, this dream of impulse, assenting to it in the little diorama of it in the theater of my imagination. Look, I'm doing this! I want to imagine I'm doing it!
× 467. Ex-perience. Etym. root, to try, risk. Ex-view, exhume. The × interposed between subject and object is also between subjects and subjects, objects and objects, and the axes on which it turns are also those leading elsewhere or otherwise. We are pulled into interview as by the strings on talking dolls, ex-pression being this mechanical cue or prompting. But this ex-hortation (cf.) is also the trap of the impromptu, as much as the program, a script or drama of what lines lie in wait. What is this encounter causing as catastrophe? One that produces or even sustains?
× 468. All this about sex. Why? Because I do it. Because I make it. Because we make it. Because I am made to make it. Because of compulsion, obsession, intention, desire, will, all divided, crossed, counter-crossed, a complex of forces, the subjection of subjection. Pulsion. Made to make it. Effectively. Affect. Setting about to do, to mark, to formalize or signify above, over a "pure" or "instinctual" or unarticulated operation, which is to leave a mark, a legacy, a legacy of one's legacy, to refer to genes. (After all, it's in my name.)
× 469. The overall fiction science. (Lacoue-Labarthe's, "The Echo of the Subject.") Memory as the function of it's own opposite: forgetting not opposed, but memory as what interferes with it. The "internal" division, then, as it were. Riven. Which makes an "external," or at least disturbs or displaces the notion of integrity, integral, etc., the opposition between a presence and a lack. Or is this relation "itself"? A matter of? The × then comes to stand for a relation rather than a thing, inasmuch as anything already "is" (×) "such." Epiphany, then -- what it would always have been a matter of. Epiphany is fetish. Juxtaposition, association. The undoing fetish of the doing of fetish and fetish of doing. The fetishization of everything.
× 470. Men and women can't be friends. (See 124, 287.) That sex is some essential, or essentially distinct, matter, quality, state, relation-ship, that comes to alter any other, or that can only define the relation between the genders (the complication, running all directions, for same gender and sex). Sex is not what ruins relationship. Sex is the acute form of the desire that otherwise "ruins" or runs all relationships, more particularly, sex is an excuse for an exceptional, abject claim on the other. Propriety, of course, but compare this with the propriety of "like" kind or same. Belonging with and belonging to. Does mutuality then only come to the form of fraternity, of -- race? "Men are too disagreeable," she said. He replied, "But what if I agree with that?"
× 471. You win imagination. The figure of the figure, again. Who were you, my most intimate, ever but a ghost, an abstraction, an ideal? You eluded me in many forms, guises. No one cared to make it otherwise. You are my ideal. The delight of this is also anguish. The anguish of falling, incarnation. But at the same time, the anguish of rising, evaporating, leaving, relinquishing to become spirit, abstraction. You want to be the person of my ideal, but you must even so become ideal, simply take place for it. Do you even get a number? Can you be in series? Would you fall to that, incarnation, incorporation? Will you get your moment in the flesh? Or do you lift, float and defer, divert, refer, the ideal of number itself?
× 472. Sex. The interpersonal. Divestment. The a/propriate, a/propriation. Our intimacy is interstitial masturbation (see) whereby the other becomes interposed "between" the positions of myself. Neither subjectivity nor objectivity is achieved in sex. In another, through another route, along another axis (is this analogy, homology, when the lines cross?), the waste × 473. The form of our relation is not harmony but contradiction. Fascination, desire, in thrall. The difference between this thrall of the child, and this after -- what is this after? -- a developmental state, a custom of the notion acceding to a claim, like a right of passage whereby we grant ourselves the ideal of having? -- where we stand off in our fascination, then later feel we have any claim. With the relationship comes this contradiction, that the other still defies this apprehension, the grasp of him that is this ideal. Stitched to the other via this substitution, this sublimation, drawn out of the self by this imago of identity that is always the other.
× 474. Agency. At the outset, from the outset -- does one start with the thing or with the name, the word, term, sign, image, sound for the "thing"? What is the outset? Where has one started with "things," as far as the via? What is the way of saying these things? At the outset, then, presuming there can be determined this frontier which was crossed, for which there was inception, the breaking of ground, a touch of, let alone a planting in, virgin soil, every "thing" will be the problem of this name, term, word, representation. For how to refer to this "thing," something, that is not a "thing," but other? How can this deference, relation, reference, referral, allusion, evasion, effacement, ulteriorization, be put in terms of a thing, or even a principle, albeit of alterity, suspension, supplementarity, excess, uncertainty, etc.? Then again, wouldn't it have been that these terms of the "thing(s)" have always really been possible because of this agency? (Cf. etymology, Indo-European root genealogy in American Heritage Dictionary, entry for "ag-," the entire cluster of meaning, here, including doing, acting, agony, ambiguity, to drive, to draw, to move, weight, worth, of like value or weight, pursuing, grabbing, seizing, then particularly o-grade form "*og-mo-," furrow, track, metaphorically "incised line," whence Old Irish "ogham.") The reproduction of reproduction. It is fruitful that the sense of the fruitful is this sense of the fruitful. Division, replication, offspring. The very principle of reproduction is the division of identity (whether by recombination). Reproduction in one sense will not get out of the way of reproduction of the other. Diversion, dissemination, waste, going astray, erring, casting.
× 475. The "value" of life is death. What possibly defies even Nietzsche (certainly "existentialism") is the ex ampere aspect of the "x": the remainder, excess or supernumerary that at once can redouble, substitute, simulate and thus ex-cerpt his superlative form. (Cf. the circular superlative. See also the letter quoted in Klossowski where Nietzsche says greater than any human ever.) Nietzsche already produces this, that is, is this "x" of another: Hegel. Before any demonstration of how another can be this for Nietzsche. In wanting to surpass (and there is no doubt here of singularity, of other passage, passing, i.e., this is not a sort of revenge leveling of Nietzsche with respect to Hegel or anyone else), in surpassing Hegel, and a fortiori, in surpassing everyone (cf. N.'s exact phrase, from the letter), Nietzsche was like Hegel. Did the same. Committed, performed the same act. Is it imposing to see in Hegel's Jena moment of messianic subsumption of history and philosophical consciousness (so well explained and insisted on by Kojève) the same thing Nietzsche did with all his superlative "prophetism" (as Salome called it)? The moment at Jena like the moment at Sils Maria, of the Eternal Return?
× 476. Jealousy -- The divide logic, the logic of divide. Incomprehensible. The act itself in this reaction. This is not the divide or division of logic as comprehension, or object(ivity). It is the internal division of the working of the action of this logic, of this attempt, this play at, this grasping for, comprehension. The attempt to comprehend is a jealous act. (Levinas analysis of totality.) Jealousy is the separation of the subject and object within «itself», the subject divided from itself by the very condition for itself. If I place the other's action on a scale, in a modus tollens logic (she wants someone else, therefore she doesn't me), how is it that I am exempt from the same? I would immediately fail by this same condition, even though I demonstrate first, foremost, for me, how this is not true for me. But all this is the instance of comprehension's failure. Comprehension as the reach or grasp for comprehension, but which must fail the comprehension in the strict sense. And this is, in its turn, the next comprehension (which is also not complete, total, comprehension, as much by this very movement itself, supplementary, though it would certainly allow as much error-gance as savvy, Hegel's knowing the unknown, for example). More/less, the supplementary logic, Derrida. This is all also Feuerbach's analysis of the separation of one's own predicates from one's own subject, what leads again to: god -- the model of jealousy, of the subject, the absolute gaze. Because we cannot have justice without passion, and we cannot have passion without justice. Look at what happens with these scales.
× 477. Experience × always in/out. Occulted as "direct" and vice versa. Jealousy is the abjection of this. Acute.
× 478. Goal, telos, intention: propriation, removal, at once projection and erasure, loss and founding. Rapture, ecstasy (ex-stasis, ekstasis, existanai: displace, derange), transport. Rapt. A glance, a whim, desire, excursion, abandonment, being lost, overtaken, overturned and carried away forever -- something we believe even if only to be polite when making love. To believe it after is the gravest imposition, on one's self if not the other, no matter the iteration. To want, again, is not to have (had).
× 479. Make a pass. Start over again with persona, with theme. The exercise of thought, the repetition, the movement. The exercise of sense. The sense of ex-ercise. A theme, a premise, a point is the rehearsal of a characterization. To play a part -- heard again in many different ways. Even that one must play the part of truth. Why would truth need to be told?
× 480. Of course all these things go on at the same time, apparently contradictory impulses and feelings, these lines, swells, charges inside of one. (A swarm of tangled eels whose general movement can appear coordinated, a ball or single flow.) The more "refined" we are, in tune, sensitive, the more manifold, the more we recognize this manifold. We (if we become keen enough) can be neither the passive simplicity of those beholden, nor the active simplicity of those, obsessed with quashing this scramble, who try to assume control with one line, impulse, disposition, will, over all the others, often externalizing this -- it always has effects on others -- to divert the problem of mastery on others, take advantage of their passiveness, but this is actually as beholden, if not more so.
So, for example, I flow to you before I've even decided on it. On the one hand, I'm the biggest flirt, it's nothing but the biggest flirting. But, also beyond that, it's because there is so much to flirt with, certainly because of what you offer, what you open up, how you play on so many chords for me, but also because, in general, more generally, this is the operation of us, this discourse and coursing, this agency and via, even before we get to volition, desire, thrill, joy, inclination. And, then, of course, it's all that. It is inclination itself. Where else to go? Where else for even a self to go, but through the other? What else would even make up a self, but all these agencies? And in wanting to divulge, you open up so much more that works in two directions. Perhaps it's a matter of your own self-irony. It's the desire of talking, the talking about desire, and thus the desire of talking about desire.
Because here's the hook for me, and really it's the same one as for you, the crazy ideal of that all-encompassing affinity. What if you are the one to whom I can really tell everything? Everything in all the kinds of complications, personal or general. Everything through all the agencies and relays, and all about the agency and relay. Everything as in any kind of escapade, imaginary or real, but even how more significant the imaginary is for the real? And even through jealousy. So that I can also tell the significance, the amazing inversion of experience, of this through, what that means? What if you are the one whom I can even tell of the complication that one can't tell everything? That even with the intent to tell everything, this "everything" is itself not strictly possible, because of the structure of telling itself, "everything" itself a complication with which we can only be more or less naive? What if you are the one with whom I can be knowing strangers, the outsiders inside with each other, the accomplices even in anything else that is only a detour or relay for us?
What if there is even the chance for that I can't pass up? So much desire to tell. Are we the life we never had? Would it be this same rush to address our whole lives to each other if we had in fact spent them together?
× 481. "You're only telling me all this because we haven't had sex." Presuming that one only makes his play, that anything is only a strut. Not a bad thing to generalize, for many respects (cf. Nietzsche). But why be so cocksure in return? More so, the attribution outbidding the attributed? Why assume that only one thing can be ulterior? Why, for example, wouldn't I have sex with you to be able to tell you all this? Don't the moralists, the naturalists, the liberals and the libertines all assert an ulterior anyway, that sex has some other purpose? Produce, legacy, extension of ego, health, therapy -- ideology? By that ratio, again, my talking is like the sex of sex. Or, vice versa -- and you see how I love the vice verses -- sex is like the other intercourse. All sex is oral.
× 482. Way to think about anything. To think anything not as any thing, although that is also to think any thing. The way to think anything as relation, the relation that, not any thing, gives anything to be thought.
× 483. You keep changing the subject. I thought we were talking about sex.
× 484. I told you. Sex was just the way to talk about everything.
× 485. Courtship -- discourse -- flirting -- expressing -- showing off -- sex -- love. Already so much after before. X relays all these purposes, operations, motives, factors, ulteriors, methods, forms and contents. X relays xs. Verging.
× 486. Crossing, not equaling. (Against the entire order of the "is.")
× 487. Ulterior. This was going to be about sex. But it was going to be about how sex is always other. Crossing. The acting of sex already a crossing before issue.
× 488. Inscribed, set down -- made matter by text! Both directions.
× 489. Contamination, degradation, mutation, transformation. Crossing and exchange. Naivete will be what is susceptible to the worst aspiration. Sophistication will find that to be touching, minus the current state, forgetting there the seed of flight. A conundrum of time travel, this cusp of regret. Time travel: wanting time to have brakes. One adds, subtracts, divides times. Even a pure state must be referred to, qualities mingled as much as subtracted. Relation the temporal axis, the temporal itself exponential.
× 490. Camera -- chamber, kamara. In camera. Off camera. Movie box. Life in the theater. Projection. A moment there, flat inside the theater stripped bare, opulence shorn in favor of the figure of light, as if the empty space of the light's spread. In this empty box of lingering, with a window on the phenomenal, as if this flattened, stretched spectacle were the form of life, and the cubed volume of space its subtraction, its dispersal, its hollow. Sitting there with old gum and food trash, strewn concerns, sticky floors, the shrivel of decor, antsy, idle, unorchestrated. Then that too is lifted, floated, vaporous as the image sensation, and becomes a spectacle marker. A passion play of life inside the image theater in the theater of memory.
× 491. Verging -- shaping -- forming (mouthing, grasping). The form is not fixed. Everywhere they forget this gesture of the circle, that it is to be done, anticipated, and even acting as this. Forming.
The way and the fall.
Way -- fall.
way × fall
obliterate: 1. To do away with completely so as to leave no trace. See synonyms at abolish. 2. To wipe out, rub off, or erase (writing or other markings). 3. Medicine To remove completely (a body organ or part), as by surgery, disease, or radiation. ETYMOLOGY: Latin oblitterre, oblittert-, to erase, from ob litters (scrbere), (to write) over letters (ob, over; see ob– + litters, accusative pl. of littera, letter) and from obltus, past participle of oblvsc, to forget; see oblivion.
oblivion: 1. The condition or quality of being completely forgotten: “He knows that everything he writes is consigned to posterity (oblivion's other, seemingly more benign, face)” (Joyce Carol Oates). 2. The act or an instance of forgetting; total forgetfulness: sought the great oblivion of sleep. 3. Official overlooking of offenses; amnesty.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin oblvi, oblvin-, from oblvsc, to forget. See lei- in Appendix I.
lei- DEFINITION: Also slei-. Slimy. Derivatives include slime, slick, and oblivion. 1a. slime, from Old English slm, slime; b. slippery, from Old English slipor, slippery; c. slick, from Old English *slice, smooth, and -slcian, to make smooth; d. lime3, from Old English lm, cement, birdlime; e. loam, from Old English lm, loam; f. slight, from Middle English slight, slender, probably from a Scandinavian source akin to Old Norse slttr, smooth, sleek; g. slip1, from Middle English slippen, to slip, probably from a source akin to Middle Dutch and Middle Low German slippen, to slip, slip away; h. schlep, from Middle Low German slpen, to drag. a–h all from Germanic *sl- with various extensions. 2. Suffixed form *lei-mo-. limacine, limicoline, from Latin lmus, slime. 3. Suffixed form *lei-w-. oblivion, oubliette, from Latin oblvsc, to forget (< “to wipe, let slip from the mind”; ob-, away; see epi). 4. Extended form *(s)lei-, with metathesis *(s)le(i)-. a. Zero-grade form with nasal infix *li-n--. liniment, from Latin linere (perfect lv), to anoint; b. suffixed zero-grade form *l- (< *li-). litotes, from Greek ltos, plain, simple; c. suffixed metathesized form *le-wo-, whence *l-wo-. levigate, from Latin lvis, smooth. (Pokorny 3. lei- 662.)
-- American Heritage Dictionary
"Yes. I have killed her, / I -- my adored Carmen!"
Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a work of art above thousands. For on the average, artists do what all the world does, even worse -- they misunderstand love. Wagner, too, misunderstood it. They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another human being, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person. -- Even God does not constitute an exception at this point. He is far from thinking, "What is it to you if I love you?" -- he becomes terrible when one does not love him in return. L'amour -- this saying remains true among gods and men -- est de tous les sentiments le plus egoiste, et par consequent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins genereux (B. Constant).
-- Nietzsche, "The Case of Wagner", Ecce Homo
principle function comes to even the "pure" "phenomenality," the mental content, image or concept, sense of the act. No accomplishment in the act of the sense, thus none for the sense of the act. To commit (to) this act -- in thought or in deed? -- but when does desire happen, what is its moment, or, to put it another way, how can an "act" be a thing, a noun? -- is to engage in such undoing, to set in motion this scattering of seminal prospect/return. It is to give, precisely in a way more general than any of the senses this act has given us to think: to give oneself as material, but material for, to give up oneself for the sake or sense of another precisely as one would achieve another for oneself -- already subject stuck to object. It is to be given in figuration (what sex, what love, without all this metaphor). The idealism of the absolute love cannot be divorced from the material, corporeal violence and violation (cf., vis, force, vigor, desire), neither can the most brutal, crude or insensate objectification free itself from the fidelity of -- sensibility.
| Immutability -- mute ability. Before the sign -- before the sign of the sign of the symbol of the idol of the ideal. Altar, fetish, ceremony, ritual, cross, grave -- marker. The scar that marks the past is the wound of the opening of the future. Connected to and barred from anything, lines going out, in the way. The arc of distance separating what we carry inside, we are subsumed by. |
Poesis not even action, operation, verb, compared to this state, fait, noun of meaning. (There the confusion of text record, fixture, with reality.) But the passive acting of anticipation of impulse, desire, will. The track before the track. |
× 492. The face[ing]. The complexity of representation, along the lines of Levinas, but with the "technical" aspect of Caillois. Inter-corporation. This must, however, subsume the distinction of subject/object in two ways -- two axes (x) -- the distinction between seer/seen (esse est percipi), but also between perceptive "things" and those that are not perceptive. Representation/representative. That any "thing" presupposes representation in both these senses does not provide an escape of the system of representation for that which represents, for that which holds or takes or has such representations. The confusion or slippage in the terms, "that which represents," is no less pertinent, here. In other words, there is no privilege for the face qua human interaction, precisely by virture of this privilege. A kind of structural condition. This is the condition of subjectivity, like ego/geo-centrism, a limit and a constraint of exemplarity, not to be stopped at, left at, aspired to or raised to a paradigm.
× 493. Lost in it. Distracted. To be "into" amounts to being lost in one's self even if the other is, too.
× 494. If not motion or stasis, remains, persists.
× 495. Hypocrite, alibi, surrogate, relay, agency, subject/object (scapegoat). Everyone is a hypocrite when it comes to -- love? Perhaps, conversely, this is the definition of love, this hypocrisy, double standard. Beholden to the other. We know enough that sex alone is much less hypocritical, if at all, takes all comers (so to speak). What, then, love is jealousy? Love = jealousy? Perhaps only because "love" is the acute form of the ×, the not equal to, the seismic relation, the fault, the greatest proximity, intimacy, encounter with -- the incommensurable.
× 496. Reiterate: jealousy -- love logic, logic love. To be passionate is to have «reason»! Jealousy is this divide, this fault, the being riven, of subject with object, the other form of -- I. (Reiteration as warning label for the literal-minded: This neither restitutes the subject nor abolishes it. It is not a justification for what simplistically, or narrowly, or short-sightedly are the reflexes of "jealousy," the actions born of reactions that are supposed to be uncritically valuable as emotion. There is no "pro" or "contra" jealousy, as jealousy is this contentiousness already, this being riven.)
× 497. × v. = . Crossing the lines. The taste, the cultivation, of this x-ception. The stroke to give and take difference, that standing with is as much standing apart. Not merging, not the clamor to belong (which nonetheless presupposes being set off, apart, distance, distinction). Just as from the point, side, pole of singularity, solitude, independence, × marks the inextricable relation, of other, others, even within, the self-division, the track of the other (language alone, even "I"), from the standpoint of "we," × marks the division, the being riven, of what it relates. Community is never consummation of one. (Cf. Blanchot, The Unavowable Community.)
× 498. What is the point of existing? Of doing? If not to tell? Even to not tell is to tell (yourself) of this doing.
× 499. Acting over(-)acting. (Another pass.) The × of acting is of a difference that is at once internal and external, thus also the internal division that makes external. Because the difference between theatrical acting or pretending and "real" behavior is already there in the term for the real "behavior," which is also: acting. The difference there is between "just" doing, and pretending one is doing or being demonstrative. So "real" life already carries this, which ought to otherwise be obvious because "theatrical" acting is part of "real" life. Or, as Antonin Artaud put it, the theatre and its double. The trick, the matter, of acting is that in the premise that acting must represent what is "real," it strives even harder to create this "real," the sense of it. Thus you get a disingenuous earnestness. If, however, you see the problem as imitating the way that we are already acting, in both senses, as doing and representing ourselves, you solve the problem. You close the methodological gap of fidelity to the object, by understanding more precisely the matter of this gap, that it can never be closed. The Stanislavsky method is the surest way to imitate the religious aspect with which people seek to convince themselves of some immanentism. This proves utterly wrong -- it comes off very badly -- when this is the point, the comment, of the work acted for: The Cherry Orchard. As with soccer, where the first instinct is to mob the ball and you must learn to check this to play as a team, the surest sign of naivete, the first error of acting, what makes for lack of "presence" as it's called, is thinking one must act, distinctly, on stage. To transfer the carriage of "real" life, one must learn about how one acts there, become conscious, then, of one's own acting. To avoid the excess of theatrical acting, on stage or off, requires the temperament of acting in real life. (Cf. Diderot, Paradox sur le comedien.)
× 500. Expand/contract; converge/disperse; flirt/split. Array.
× 501. Dislodgic.
× 502. Taking together, setting off from. Assimilation, discrimination. Even any more refined aesthetic is a matter of association, of reading something as an index for some previous encounter or experience. The vigilance for this should go on to keep even the keenest perception from amounting to kneejerk at a "higher" level. But this is also to be aware of the other side of the puerile opposition of this naivete: the snowy white, chaste blank page of pure innocence of judgment. Just as distinguishing emotion from analysis, simplistically or not, is immediately to commit an analysis, the problem is not that there is discrimination, it is that there is not enough discrimination. One assimilates to crude oppositions, reduces to one scheme, when the material itself is an indefinite extension and division of traits to distinguish, crossing -- dividing and attaching (sharing, parting) -- members and classes.
× 503. Facing, comprehending, grasping. Diagram (axonometric?) to include the negotiation of mutual blindness of facing parties. (Levinas.) How to include this axis? How to include what cannot be included, to encompass what cannot be? And which would then raise to another level this same matter, another blindness elsewhere by virtue of the representation. There will always be this distance, gap, cover, mask, lapse of perception or sense -- what we could also call a fixion -- that will keep anything, any representation, any presentation, from being flush, adequate. Even in, even if, an order or hierarchy of simply attraction, the levels of more or less beautiful, or who is appropriate to or for whom, the weight of conceit cannot be closed. I will always have a certain arrogance of my objects, whether above me or beneath me. This is complex enough to exceed comprehension, depiction, but it is also simple in the sense of most banal, ordinary, mechanical, technical, what happens. Just like handwriting or drawing. Can one analyze the process of brain, hand, eye aiming and coordination, capture it? Or is one already derived, deprived of it to hold it out so?
× 504. The symbol to stand for all symbols which lush, tawdry, effusive, signify the inflation and reduction of the sacred as kitsch. (Praying hands on a T-shirt.) Icon, parody, burlesque -- the sacred makes the profane and gives this currency to be lifted. Counterfeit. Making with and against, apart from, copy, image. The truth requires cadence.
× 505. The cross of self. The axis of difference between us and the axis of difference within us. We are identified by our division, divided by our identity.
× 506. The scandal can be read when you are past. A key.
× 507. Mark. Custom or nature, amounting to the same. What do they do? The scars of experience. Whether encountering humans or others, another culture whether or not another species, it is a matter of knowing behavior, and this is the record, the memory -- knowledge or information as transmitted -- of experience, of how they have behaved. Even propensities, traits ("internal") can only be known through this ×-pression, which nonetheless involves this ignorance, the unknown in the encounter. ×, the algebra of this connaissance, this matter of familiarity, encounter, un/known. The question of how they will behave is that of how they have behaved, but the question of how they have behaved, presupposed by how they do behave, is also aimed "forward" -- how will they. Coverage -- open, closed; mask, scar, aim, variable.
× 508. Time, the face, striking, striking through; transfer, exchange, disaster; continuity discontinuity. The face covers and uncovers, reflects an ideal, contradicts it. But it's also through time that the face may grow more or less dear, and even "true." True to itself. One may suddenly turn everything that went before into a mask -- confuse between the face and the mask. And one, perhaps even in the same turn, may come to carry the growth of that fondness abandoned.
× 509. Talking to, expression, encounter. The I is an ×. I ×. The extraneous and extemporaneous aspect of expression. The other is what makes the expression. When I speak, as Blanchot says, the other contests me absolutely. (To what extent different between speech and written expression? With writing one faces the absence of the other as what makes one absent, while with speech one faces the apparent absence of this mediation.) To go up for the misapprehension of the other is to make one's own thought expressly subjective. Thus, the realization that has the necessity of the other can as immediately be the production as affect. One submits the affect of one's own reality to the reality of the other's affect.
× 510. The line thrown down that makes between us the between us that is us, the us that is the line between us, the us that is between the lines, that makes between the lines, that makes the line cross, overlap, divide and stitch.
× 511. Look(s) -- time(s). What passes between us -- the look that subsumes, traverses, transposes the looks, eyes within eyes, even the you and I -- gives eternity as an instant -- it must pass, else it has no pathos -- all potential as mystery in the emptiness of that circle, the perfection of that poise, brink, precisely non-existence. Suggestion, allusion, apprehension, projection. All the swell of the touch, the hold, the couching, the motion. This completion cast is always a matter of this turning us out again. We have always known each other in these instants -- flashes, time figured -- of unknowing.
Which is more personal, "I" or "you"? The familiar strange, or the strange familiar?
× 512. Promise, pledge, swear, vow -- These verbs mean to declare, more or less solemnly, that one will follow a particular course of action: promises to write soon; pledged to uphold the law; swear to get revenge; vowed to fight to the finish. Could there be anything more unappealing? "Promise" -- to send before. Doesn't this also have a sense of opening up, rather than closing? Shouldn't it? A window, a portal, a potential -- a future? With so many, having a course charted is rather a reduction of any other value or relation, any other association in life. Hard enough for some that this is circumstance of which they are victim, but that there are those who aspire to this -- aspire to a reduction, a restriction, a straight and narrow. What future's grandiosity could survive such constriction? What vessel could contain the overflow of -- event?
× 513. Clips, cuts, segments. Out of time. «Time». A time -- clipped out, as fixed, is also a passing, inachevé. The consequences of this unthought, not always in mind, undisclosed behind the expedient, detachable sense of time as discreet unit. A flow of time thus detached was as unfinished as the "now" from which one remembers, and this flow even runs up to the current one, lapping with all sorts of consequences that entails. As if one made a space in time, used markers or an impression, a convergence in one character or person, encounter, as a heading to gather a strand of time, or even characterize it. Which brings (to) again: figure. Figures.
× 514. Like the Eternal Return, not only more specifically as the CRM, but more generally as epiphany, as those convergences, but also representing the forgetting involved, the lines crossing, but which are also cut out, and which cross over or out -- obscure, cover. The lines which cover. To make these crosses, to make this cross, is to dissociate in the same movement as to associate. Not only the inscription -- implication -- of the mortality of writing. Remember, too, the scar, the imbrication/implication of matter -- "itself". Like the wax of the Mystic Writing Pad, the symbolic is also matter, takes its place in matter, displaces matter, falls to matter.
× 515. Scanning, floating, passing. The significance of any moment is its bearing toward another, its passing, passing on. Thus it's mortality. "Moment" cannot even be precise, cannot have precision, whatever form for even precision would be model, whatever would be the precise form of precision. Precisely precision into the bargain. This is being riven, internal division. The structural implication of "moment" is thus that of the sign, of figure, which is precisely not strictly literal. The mathematic paradigm, or ideal of one-to-one correspondence, necessary as it is, cannot hold, or is superseded or subtended by figural play. Tautology (which can only express unity in division, extension, syntax) ⊆ metaphor (making equal what is not). More particularly in this example: What does it mean to have a date for a memory? Rather than assimilate all memory, thus time, to some absolute rule, dating, like any measure derived from correspondence of other things, not vice versa (cf. general equivalent), is as liable to forgetting. What is momentous persists, exceeds, becomes the dator rather than merely dated. "That time when such happened."
× 516. The fact that we grow, learn or heal is not so much that we perfect as that we distance.
× 517. Acting/acting (acting (over)acting) -- The "over" of also fractions and floating, linguistics. Gratuitous with respect to nature. Longer rehearsed. One must be both bound to and freed from -- also bereft, missing -- one's nature. Drift. The mark. What mark, what trait, can be singular, absolute, without also having the most general trait of the mark, which is generality, generic? And this makes the mark full of it's emptiness, empty of it's fullness.
× 518. Concentric exes. Each pass is a move to encompass the others. From the contamination of distinction, the intercourse of form and content, even with intercourse, it (like the "it" of "it rains") spirals out broader and broader -- the most minute of perception being that of (the) all.
× 519. Encounter -- inclusion × exclusion. Principles or company? Scruples? Does one sacrifice all society for one's own -- taste? × -- the sacrifice «of» the other. We are always laid before the other in this context. Be-longing. To be, longing. Principles are always what are sacrificed because of the other. One has them because, on behalf of, the other. Principle is stand-in, alibi, sacrifice of the other. Everyone(thing) belongs to itself via the other.
× 520. Is the world represented? Does it represent itself or present itself? This expresses the matter of representation. Is the world of appearance? Substance. (Cf. Heidegger.) Underlying. Not the pure ground of the code or palimpsest, but this onion skin -- reality experience. ("Experience" precisely the term for the issue with Husserl: the repetition of pure presence, or the necessity, the condition of repetition, re-presentation. The word flickers with these senses, the ordinary use loaded with the matter of the metaphysical arbitration: experience at once what is supposed to be immediate, present, but which also refers to past, trail, trace, history, memory, retention -- and all in and most of all, to try.)
× 521. Sex as partaking of the more general "urging." Of the urge to urge, the urge to define urge. Of partaking in general. How this mixes with eating, with consumption, with incorporation, with otherness. Not the narcissism of an ego, nor the effusion, resumption in the ego of a larger set or of another. The intermittence of the self, that is really that of the other. This gives all the results, effects, such as the preening that serves for a sense of acquisition, accomplishment, resolution. Sex is never well done.
It's just as "proper" that sex is a matter of eating, that one eats the other or is eaten, as that one loses oneself in the other or on or under the other via copulation or conjugation, by joining or bonding supposedly represented by this insertion. Just as "proper," when the very movement of desire, the very matter of agency, even if it could be ultimately placed to serve purpose or function, is a draw or sway that turns the "self," the organism if you want, away from its "self." But more so than that, desire or agency floats the entire notion of purpose, precisely as notion, as sense -- makes it sensual in more sense than one -- that manner of putting itself showing what duplicity, division, drifting, is involved. It floats, derives, detours, or absconds with purpose, one or the other, one because the other. One can never get to the end of this bidding. The urge to the meaning of urge, to the urge of meaning. (Precisely because) You can't stop meaning.
× 522. Meaning means also.
× 523. Time empties all content. What are we with time? Not content. We are not things or places, but times.
× 524. Exchange. With the other. Double sacrifice. Envy. Equivocation. Everyone is transformed by the other, the contrast, path, opposition of the other. Even the utterly selfish are dependent on their victims, the blank they are required to fill; the mutual, the twins, on this reciprocity, the willingness to be a mirror.
× 525. Everyone is ultimately unobtainable. Ungraspable. Elusive. Some people make this their only virtue. They make their only quality that they flee any other, are already heading out the door.
× 526. Contour. Feeling -- shape. Inside out. Isn't the desire to "get inside" another way of expressing, an exchange for, what is passed for, the caress, the feeling as articulation -- feeling as what fulfills seeing -- the outside? It's rather that we have even this sense of "inside" the other by way of this feeling, caressing, passing, articulating -- not only the containing surface as of a receptacle, but contour even as the volume, the extension of the other.
× 527. Happening doesn't happen which makes it keep happening.
× 528. Unjustified. Like Kafka.
× 529. Excuse. If you made it explicit, you would become the scapegoat for all the tacit estimation, discrimination that everyone does of others. I can pass notes of regret and perhaps more false overture -- I'm so sorry we don't see each other more often, we must get together -- but if I state this as my explicit intention, or any reasons why I don't want to be around you, whether they have to do with you or me (beyond certain generalized admonition, even of the self, that is acceptable as politeness, ceremony), I commit the offense, the scandal, the declaration that is the appropriation of difference. This is what keeps even friends, family, lovers -- how intimate can there be -- in an undisturbed state, of avoidance, of not even facing compromise, of laissez faire, they like to think of as, at least call, a bond. This is the «truth» that makes an absurd abstraction, a mere sentiment, of the notion of honesty and integrity towards each other. The truth that betrays this honesty and integrity. Thus is the truth «of» such betrayal, such division. It's what divides us and betrays the effusive unity of each other. But it's the division that also runs through each of us, leaving each without the same "completion" there, the division that, acting as a common lot, leaves us stuck together in this indefiniteness.
If you really have that sort of reflex affinity, otherwise known as "true" affinity or "real love," you have nothing to fear from this comment, and if you have the confidence of it, you know you have nothing to fear from this comment. But you also know how this comment applies even to that. The closer you get to someone, the more differences you must become aware of, not to say contend with. We are excuse for each other. Recursive, extrapolating, exponential -- what would be abstracted by "profound" -- implications for representation, standing in or for, taking the place of, giving for, sacrifice.
× 530. How can I tell, say, get across -- × -- to the one who sees my past as a store of accomplishments against the emptiness of her future that once you get "here," you realize the past is invested -- infected -- with the emptiness of the future. Now is the valve through which the future empties the past. Never changing enough, but never staying put, wandering ghosts, the living dead.
× 531. Repetition. Compulsion. Addiction. Habit. When something seems extraneous, unfavorable or undesirable, an activity we don't like, repetition is a factor of it, an attribute. But we thus ignore, or leave aside, the repetition in anything else, whatever we do that's not this bad habit, the repetition we either desire in something's persistence or take for granted. This is not just the matter of composition, that for example, we are this condition of even chemical dependency, food, when any drug addiction can be moralized as extraneous. It's also the matter of the repetition that is a factor of everything, making Freud's "repetition compulsion" redundant (in one sense, not rendering moot what it more particularly describes -- there is a generalizing of it). This is drive. See persistence, motion/stasis.
× 532. The necessity of wayward -- the wayward necessity. The unclosable gap of approximation. (What can't be eliminated is what is not there, neither present nor absent by those terms.) This works in more than one direction -- is the variance of direction, (makes) direction a matter of directions -- to make re-expression, expression always re-expression. Even expression of absolute (saturated, pure, remainderless, undifferentiated -- the very statement of this is the problem of how to surmount, outbid, encompass its own statement) is given to this, and shows the overshoot of either side, so that the failure of the proponent to reduce (connotation, the gap or differential factor) is also that of the opponent: how ascribe what can't be accomplished. When the Greeks expressed perfection as the circle or sphere, did this express their lucidity with looseness any less than as a constative catachresis? In other words, what use has a figure if not also a figure of perfection? What subjects perfection to the conditions of figure, as well, provisional or incidental status, variation even between limited and unlimited (cf. Parmenides v. the Stoics or Christians). Isn't the whole matter existence/transcendence, whether form encompasses all or does not -- like the circle -- the matter of figure? Like the Pacific island explorers who asked the natives if they ate human flesh, then thought they were confirmed when the natives asked if they wanted some prepared, failing to see this presupposition could only sound to the natives as an expression of the explorers' own preference, the matter of implication, inclination, disposition (and this goes for «intent», but only to render a complexity back to it) is far trickier circumstance involving adequation itself. What you see in the × bars as, qua, revelation. The figure is as perfect as error. Mask -- the expression in the impression of the other, the other side you don't see of either face. This is "like" the materialism of error, but by this we would mean that skew as much defies, exceeds or confounds the adequation of materialism as that of idealism. It's the gap of meaning, difference, that would always be exploited by idealism as a deficiency of materialism. The Greeks and the sphere again: what a strange -- uncanny -- grope it was -- and what all this means is that comprehension is this grasping that cannot encompass -- that this imagination was taken as the ideal, an other-worldly -- transcendent or immanent, Platonic or otherwise -- perfection, but was a more approximate "intuition" of the world itself, of the very ground they walked on and thus rendered less constant.
× 533. Pivot of comprehension. Covering, stand-in, sacrifice in the record, sacrifice «of» the record. Spatial exception. How many does identity make? Number, time, hollow of perception, traversal, company. If we belonged back then, as our sentiment sometimes tells us about the record, is this sentiment greater with exclusion? Or does it matter, since even if this perceiver was a party to that time, that record, there is still the exclusion of the self and the more uncanny matter of a view this party did not have: a view of the self. When we were famous -- persons, personage, personae -- a celebrated Hollywood couple who nonetheless took a certain exception to all that fame and fanfare, was a more occulted belonging of our more progressive exploits outside movies and tabloids a more assured identity? Or was perhaps our intimacy as a couple? At one time, images of us at the Oscar ceremonies were the very provocation of this sensation of us, what we were, what we belonged to, occulted and shimmering. And now time-worn and emptied by successive generations, all that was imminent (thus the eminent and immanent), charged, fraught, is as detached from those who "belonged" as those who did not, and anyone is relayed through this agency of relation, including the "actors."
× 534. My desire is skittish, finicky, flighty. It flies away like a bird on approaching it. Even gratification only serves for this. Thus elusiveness, thus perpetuation. My desire does not want to be caught -- by me.
× 535. So much easier to write, casting out there, to the general you, than to each and every one of you.
× 536. Be longing.
× 537. Desire is solitary and injustice to the other. Thus are we related: the solitude and injustice of the other. You give me another experience of being beside myself. The distance and division even of my ego -- the double helix of narcissism ought to show us the relay of these paradoxes, but another one is that it doesn't. Or is it a paradox when it does? What if the "truest," the most thoroughgoing expression of myself, were something you could only, necessarily, take entirely the wrong way? (S × P; I × U; I × I [a form of A × A or vice versa].) This is the beginning of relation, though so often it occurs as the end.
× 538. The algebra of desire, the asymmetry/dysymmetry of desire. The division of mark and thing, carried into each, doubling in each, dividing each. The object of desire becomes the mark in its own right, the symbol, image, trace or effect of itself (via the sense of other senses, as well), becomes the × of itself, deferring its own attainment, positioning itself with respect to further or some other gratification, even if only another instance -- time -- of itself. Coming back to the distinction of character and letter, the formal division in the formal, the ideal, thus for any matter. Another circle for ×, the rotation of the × creating the circle, the cross of diameter. Though this is also the unfulfillment, thus perpetuation, of the circle. And the sacrifice of the object as attainment, via satisfaction, gratification, possession, consumption.
× 539. Does the unrepresentable (the remainder) «belong» to another order apart from representation, say thought, or does it «belong» to representation «itself»? The weight of this question, perhaps one accent or cadence or emphasis of it, brings to bear everything about the limit, the «place» of the relation of separation or distinction that «belongs» to neither or no «thing» it separates, thus is not a place nor a thing, and yet determines place and thing, this relation, and about trait or belonging that opens the whole matter of distinction to the shift to the axis between representation and any other «thing». (Note the relative function of "thing," a thing other than representation, which thus becomes or behaves as a thing even as it make thing no longer that singular distinction.) This «belonging» as trait or structural possibility, even as operation or the technical, of a non-belonging, of lack or division or inferential relation, trace, also «represents» the problem, the matter, of representation «itself», what is really that between representation and thought, at least as a presumed unified field without this division. That every mark, "x," would entail this situation of hide and seek, of masking at the same time as revealing, of this phenomenal play of presence(s) and absence(s), of division and inclination, and of the stitching and scarring of this cross-implication, not only along the axis of object, but between subject and object, carries (even if the matter of its demonstration is problematic, or tricky, because this is most often what is not seen) this pleating, all these folds and blinds, even of this «unrepresentable», like the spaces in a net, beyond representation «itself», into, as it were, whatever is other than it. It makes the structural difference that is "in" representation -- that it involves, that is its matter (it is a matter of) -- and that is between representation and thought, also "in" thought. Thus also the consequences for the totality, or (any) order: the presumed immanent, the presumed merely or strictly formal, or linguistic, etc.
Penser la limite de la représentation, c'est penser l'irreprésenté ou l'irreprésentable. Il y a ici de très nombreuses manières de place l'accent. Le déplacement d'accent peut donner lieu à de puissants déportements. Si penser l'irreprésentable, c'est penser au-delà de la représentation pour penser la représentation, depuis sa limite, alors on peut entendre cela comme une tautologie. Et c'est là une première réponse, elle pourrait être aussi bien celle de Hegel que celle de Heidegger. Tous deux pensent la pensée, celle dont la représentation a peur (selon le mot de Heidegger qui se demande si tout simplement on n'a pas peur de penser), comme ce qui s'affranchit ou fait un pas au-delà ou en deça de la représentation.
[To think the limit of representation is to think the unrepresented or the unrepresentable. There are many ways to place the emphasis here. The shift of focus can lead to powerful swerves. If to think the unrepresentable is to think beyond representation in order to think representation, from its limit, then that can sound to us like a tautology. And this is an initial response; it could be as much that of Hegel as that of Heidegger. Both think thought, this of which representation is afraid (in the words of Heidegger, who wonders if quite simply we're not afraid to think), as that which frees itself from, or takes a step beyond or on this side of representation.]
-- Jacques Derrida, "Envoi" [my translation]
× 540. It's not only the attachment of my parts to me, but my attachment to my parts. Composition, make-up, being made up. As well as the different senses, also with their supposed hierarchy of logical or ontological importance, artificial versus essential, etc., of those terms (and there is a particularly ontological implication in that last one, not fortuitously with the word "being," but even by the way the semantic or syntactic or grammatical imposes itself, as if a reflex in the way we express things betrayed what it allows or determines, and checked or redressed it, showed it up: the abstraction of "Being" even on the syntactic level and the mixing of levels of artifice, conceptualization, perception, constitution) there is the psychological register of that first sentence: thinking's inclination to ignore the inclination to thinking.
X as the involution of the circle, of containment, not only the fractal differential play, metonymic transfer and exchange of part and whole, but the scar, fold, convolution of the border, tissue, lip that is this matter of inside/outside.
× 541. The proliferation of you. Of you's, youse, you all? Why dream this perfection of one when there is not quality but only the play of qualities. And even the practical, the economic, nature, has this lesson of proliferation, diversification. Domination, saturation, absorption, is a tyranny of quality, the rule of expense exacted as the greatest toll, finally of even the means itself, the sustenance of the self, thus the self -- itself. This logic of consumption is also natural, practical, economy, the lesson. The assertion of any one over the others. Every one this narcissism, neurosis, but even that all the different styles of you. Did you not anticipate that I would be this story, this trail of scandalous encounters, of stories at cross-purposes, mutually exclusive intimacies and intricacies, all alike at least in that regard, but that could not bear the honesty of the other(s)? All who would be protagonists thus making antagonists. You there too in the mirror. All the you's this mirror, the uncanny other of this self-absorption. The you's I comprise but can't contain.
× 542. Computer graphics sex, more particularly what's referred to as "3D" after video game development, a qualifier that extends the matter (necessity, pretense) of simulation (cf. 3D anime or hentai porn), is as interesting in its naivete as its sophistication, its crudity as in its refinement, for at least this reason: machination, automation, simulation in/of sex "itself." The way in which what is the very principle of organic, the sine qua non of the organic, reproduction, is also what makes it the most automatic and machinelike. Not just for the fact itself of reproduction, and how that is supposed to determine behavior, but all that behavior itself and the way in which the instinctive is just as easily affect and effect which is detachable, and no less "automatic."
Simulation, even metaphor, are not something merely partaken of with sex. To say sex is simulation, is to do the same as to say I am metaphor. A purely instinctive sex would not need even the declaration, and would be lost in itself as inexpressible act, like the constant reproductive activity that occurs everywhere without report-perception-expression (the philosophers' projected thing-in-itself), or a computer program that is running rather than being read. What sex is, what I am in it, can only be returned to me by this "expression," representation, «reproduction», simulation which the "act" already is. (Cf. the equivocation of acting.) Even the "proper" of sex must be returned in this same way.
What is thus fascinating about computer graphics representation of sex is the uncanny of repetition in the simulation, the Daedalian uncanny of animation with likeness, and this is heightened by the poles of verisimilitude. The more mechanical, the more the catachresis makes us feel the strangeness of our own machination. And the automation heightens the auto-erotic, the masturbatory mesmerization that makes us fall into the desire, compulsion and act within the self. Even sex at its most "proper" (and this is why there can't even be a simple reduction to one, to an "itself," to a "proper") is what brings us together and separates us with the same compulsion, what makes us all the matter of reproduction, of surviving and being survived.
Iggy Pop's line that love is like hypnotizing chickens -- this is not settled, but only raises the stakes, with the metaphor between drugs and love, lust for life, "real" or chemical, bio-automated affect/effect. A repetition at once mechanical and expressive, "human," artificial and what expresses the world to us like nothing else. Automation, ersatz, artifice, contrivance, that is also our feeling.
× 543. Warp and sway. The other aporia of sex is that what is right about it is that it is wrong. The compulsion is measured by this contrast, as this factor. Whether or not this can be reduced to psychology or socialization, the sense of the push and pull of it carries this factor, quality of erring, falling, lowering, -pulsion, pulling into what is not me or just me, a me in spite of myself. Again, this "contradiction," tension cannot be resolved except in the projected way of the thing-in-itself, purely instinctive, which also even by this route -- strangely? or is this the homiest thing of all? -- resembles nirvana, Caillois's temptation of space, to blend into things and not stick out as the being of perception. To use jokes or comic expressions of it, for example, in "Seinfeld" when Jerry explains that there is no appeal without some sense of depravity ("No depravity! I mean, I look at her, I can't imagine she even has sex."), is not impertinent. It doesn't stray away because this stray, this warp or removal is precisely the point. Impertinence in a certain way is what's pertinent. Whether it's the force of a moral imperative for the definition of sexual conduct, or the opposite force of a similar imperative of some proper of pleasure or even debauchery (see Lacan's "Kant with Sade"), this gap, tension is at play: the right with the wrong, the errance and putting and bringing, the missing and hitting.
× 544. x = I. When x takes the place of I -- and why doesn't it -- one sees that one is cut out from what defines it, unites it, and that it is stuck to what excludes it. X defies what it pronounces and loses itself in what it effaces. In the double sacrifice or even zero sum of one for another, an I for a you, as absolution* for decimation, neither is possible. Which is the pure possibility of relation.
* Absolute -- the etymology itself works in perhaps the opposite direction of what we might think. The absolute is derived from absolution, from absolving: to set free. Free from any relation, not contingent, self-contained. This is of course the impossibility of definition, identification -- even existence, being. And it is what is also signified by this X, "x", x, ×. The abstraction of the other occurs and it is what ties us together, tangles us in the web of relation, signification, and always by missing -- the mark, the boat, the point. The other is always exempt, excluded, always has this "freedom" regardless of any volition, interested or disinterested, selfish or altruistic, of desire or ethical. Completion or decimation -- these are both in absolution, absolving, the absolute.
× 545. The ichneumon wasp copulates with a cryptostylis orchid. The species of this genus have flowers resembling the female wasp body parts, especially to the wasp (hymenopteran visual system with ultraviolet wavelengths), and an odor that also attracts the wasp. In this way, the wasp pollinates, thus achieves reproduction for the plant. For this reason the insect is also known as the orchid dupe wasp. Cryptostylis is also known as the tongue orchid. The relationship has become thus specifically interdependent. Copulates -- attempts to? Is this masturbation, frottage? What do you call sex with plants? Or for plants? The proper here, telos or aim or end, for drive, or even pleasure itself, any proper in itself, as well as simulation and mimicry are crossed, exchanged, given the slip, brought off, but to home elsewhere. A displacement and equivocation, this is propriation, the making proper that is not. Like metaphor. = is ×.
× 546. Some algebraics and tangents possibly related. Possibly relation: The narcissist is not in control, not even of "his" -- her -- manipulation. The very problem of: his × her. Perpetrator × victim. Which role belongs to which. The very problem of role. The very problem of gender is the very problem of role. The "impossible necessary," the "unexperienced experience" × another way for saying the negotiation of «covering». Owning up × escaping. Facing, already in its own right a perpetual deferral, the back or the face of the cards, what they stand for and what more they have in store, what value for the face is always behind the back, lying in wait. If there is deciding between testimony and literature, between fact and fiction, between experience and imagination, where death is concerned, where the death is, precisely, what delimits all precision, all constative, all "is", there is no authentic relation, period. Death is the relation that disturbs all authenticity, thus for all relation. Relation "itself" is this "impossible necessary." If it is thus «forced»: in the divided, replicated, re-doubled, duplicated and duplicitous sense of arbitrary and necessary. It is the artifice of experience "itself," thus nature -- ×.
× 547. Axis:
× 548. The statement, in the form of equation:
x × X.