Simple Sonnet

Notes beads broken necklace Or my glass a burst of laughter Yours Notes leaves blond and rust In a thick layer beneath the trees Notes tossed into the forest The panther’s intermingled spots Clear voice keyboard notes Slender crystal hint of foam Suddenly your blood unbinds you....

Psyche

“Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nicht davon.” This is a posthumous note of Freud’s. The psyche is outstretched, without knowing it. Everything ends, thus, with this brief melody: Psyche ist ausgedehnt, weiss nicht davon. Psyche is outstretched, partes extra partes; she is but a dispersion of infinitely parceled out places in locations that divide themselves and never penetrate each other. No encasement, no overlap; everything is outside another outside—anyone can calculate their order and demonstrate their relationships. Psyche alone knows nothing of this; for her, there is no relationship between these places, these locations, these bits of a plane....

Responding for Sense

Write to me. Write anything at all.1 —EMMANUEL LOI The sentence—literature—is oral.2 —PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE To whom or what he or she responds, has been given many names by tradition. The Muse, poetic Fury, Genius, with or without capitalization, inspiration, sometimes mission or vocation, sometimes a necessity of the soul or the nerves, heavenly grace, sacred injunction, a duty of memory or forgetfulness, self-creation of the text. But the oldest name is ...

Exergues

Dichtung und Wahrheit: Whence does this come to us? What is the origin of this phrase that is not a sentence and makes no sense? It does not come to us from the too-famous titles of the great Counselor Aulique’s Memoirs. He himself had already borrowed it: from an ...

On the Work and Works

Seen from a no-doubt-questionable vantage point, but one we must occupy for the time being, we can say that the idea of the “work” annoys, irritates, and excites the entire history of our culture. It assumes pride of place in an uneasy way of thinking about reality, that is, a mode of thinking in which the real is no longer guaranteed, neither by its perceptible certainty nor by its drive toward an intellect that would, when all is said and done, be no more than that certainty itself. On the contrary, it is through the disjunction between perceptible presence and a breath held behind it that we are more or less forced to represent the constituent movement of our tradition....

“Let him kiss me with his mouth’s kisses”

Let him kiss me with his mouth’s kisses Thus sings the song of songs Thus his mouth sings and enchants itself As his demand so his expectation Not kisses from another mouth Except from the one she calls The mouth of the other who loves her...

After Tragedy

Here in America—perhaps not “in the U.S.,” but in America, as Jacques Derrida states in “deconstruction is America,” that is, the world we still have to discover—here, then, Philippe did have many friends. Many of them are here. Some have passed away, like Eugenio Donato, who was close to him, like Danielle Kormoz, who has been as well an American friend....

Body—Theater

Every time I come into the world, every day, therefore, my pupils open upon what there can be no question of calling a spectacle, for I am immediately caught, mixed up in, drawn forward by all the forces in my body, which makes its way in this world, which incorporates its space, its directions, its resistances, its openings, and which moves in this perception for which it is only the point of view from which this perceiving, which is also acting, is organized. Like any point, the point of view has no dimension. And it is, as we know, a blind spot, a stain that enables perspectives, relationships, near and far, to arrange themselves around it. This dark vanishing point resides within me, but within in the sense of the back of the room, the background I could represent as a point, as a non-space lodged immediately behind the space that develops like my head, my skull, my back, and all that within-itself by which a perceiving and acting body knows it is carried forth and projected....

… would have to be a novel …

Literature is not part of written language: that is, at least, if writing is not the simple graphic record of speech. Writing is prior to speech and perhaps even to language. For a language is possible only through implicit but constitutive reference to the impossibility of going beyond itself to establish itself in another language that would provide it with meaning. A language can only be established in itself, in the circular return to its own code. This law of language can be expressed by the formula: no metalanguage....

A Kind of Prologue

This chapter approaches the study of an object nearly lost from the history of literature and the history of philosophy, an object that has never been a significant part of either of those histories, namely, wit, or in German, which is the language in which it is most at home, Witz. It argues that if Witz—for reasons and in a context yet to be established— could be called by Novalis the menstruum universale, the “universal solvent” in the lexicon of alchemy, then it is finally the very dissolution in and of Witz itself that must be addressed. Yet with dissolution there is nothing to be done—and it is even possible that nothing can be said about “it.”