Great writing, in my opinion…
BEGIN-ING, a story by Antoine Volodine
Category: Current Reading
What I’m buried in this week or this moment
Current Reading Sampling – 2016
I realized I have neglected this ever-changing list…for any who might be interested. So I updated it today…
2016
“I decided to continue drinking and living in just this way.
My whole life long”
– Georges Bataille
Chin-deep in labor, family, relationship & studies…
Works for survival:
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
Samuel Beckett, The Grove Centenary Editions
Franz Kafka, I Am a Memory Come Alive
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
William James, The Writings of William James
Edmond Jabes, The Book of Questions
Works that expand:
Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900
William Franke, A Philosophy of the Unsayable
Ian Hodder, Studies in Human-Thing Entanglement
Paolo Virno, When the Word Becomes Flesh
Werner Hamacher, Minima Philologica
Self-metaphor
“a writer has no proper existence”
-Maurice Blanchot-
“I can’t say I want to kill myself, but I can say I don’t want to appear”
-Catherine Malabou-
(click link to read the lecture)
simply, naively, if I decide to retreat from others, to look from some seclusion, or solitude, or shelter, and if retreat has retreated from the distinction between its proper and its metaphorical meaning, what can I reach where and when I retreat? Nothing proper, no authenticity, I can’t obtain any truth, any essential way of being, because the difference between the proper and the figurative, between authenticity and inauthenticity, between truth and falsity, between what is essential and what is not have withdrawn.
-Catherine Malabou-
The Neutre Becoming : Untitled Writing
“the writer must expose himself to his exteriority”
-William Brogan-
In the process of inscription, I am neutral. Ambiguously being. Neutered.
Existing via language that has not yet been written opens a sort of potential – possible becomings, as yet unknown, unidentified – possible positings of the impossible – WRITING enaction. I am unspecified before the letters which commence demonstrating what / who / how as It (this human) encounters them – imagines, recalls, learns, selects, experiments and undoes, chooses and deletes. Engaging with the sea. With hearsay and learning, words read or perceived, borrowing, borrowing, sifting and hybridizing.
From wherever, therefore, whomever, toward knows-not-what…IN THE MIDST…WRITING: activity, action, attempt…Everything trying.
A human. A person. Acting. Toward what ends? Perhaps to say. To express. To communicate. To discover. Invent. Investigate. Imagine. To play. To die. Not to die. Becoming / evincing / composing / traversing ‘knows-not-what.’ Anything. Nothing. Living…to Death.
This is why. This is why my own ‘need-to-write.’ To become. To try. To live on. To keep going. Living toward, forward, into… perhaps.
Not-knowing I do not know. At the edge, or a limit. Searching a way. To say. To discover. To hear. To emerge. Wanting to express, to find out, to dialogue – capable of expressing “Very little…almost nothing,” I “try again. Fail again,” and hopefully (but “no matter”) “fail better.”
The internal urgency to write rather than speak, or to speak writing or even write speaking arising when I don’t know the words with which to.
‘The need to write is linked to the point at which nothing can be done with words.”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Selecting the pen, scribbling into the paper when there are no words (that I know) for that which (before words) I experience an urgency toward.
Therefore…working and playing – experiment and effort – name-changing and changeling – It commences. Exploring. Expeditions into letters and language. Into sounds, mouths and breaths. Into indeterminate dreams and dubious memories. Desires and wishes and hopes. To connect or converge. To speak or hear back. To know by finding out. WRITING: to learn by failing.
“becom[ing] the empty place where the impersonal affirmation emerges”
-Maurice Blanchot-
Melancholy (Lispector, Pessoa, Beckett, Jabes, Kafka, Blanchot?) and ecstatic (Rilke, Mallarme?, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Cixous?) human activity/task/capacity. “Need.”
“That there is language.”
Begin. Again.
at the point at which nothing can be done with words
***************************
I attempt to express the extent of my experience of love…
Endeavor to language particular beauty…
Strive to tell you how I… try to say…
Make effort to describe my children, the cheek/lip/ankle/voice/presence of my beloved, the eye contact and thought-contact of a friend, paw of a kitten, core of a concept, element of a scent, a breeze, a trace, a view…
Venture some new construction, a world, characters, possibilities…directions and directives…
Ache to communicate…
Will to connect…
Crave to continue…
WRITING: TO LEARN (something?) BY FAILING
perhaps
“the attempt to open a space for the unsayable”
-maurice blanchot-
to fail…
Context for Alias Harlequin
from Michel Serres’ Troubadour of Knowledge
Oracles
The Delphic Oracle that has guided philosophy – “Know thyself” – in Nietzsche (in my “reading”, opinion) realizes itself as “Trust thyself”: mine, articulate your experience: or (from Heidegger, et. al.) “start nearest”: perhaps even better – Notice the Nearest.
Tendency = looking past. Going “large”, going “small”, searching causalities, progress, development, Time. Being.
But no. Always already “being.” Always already a “that there” EXPERIENCING. Once there, one might re-cognize (A-tension, attention). (A new “there”). And consider possibilities. Partially, or collaboratively, present-ly, select some more-than (…), NEXT THAT-THERE. (see Eugene Gendlin).
That’s something. Could be labeled “awareness”? Don’t know. But something, certainly (? – is this possible?) EXPERIENCE: which perhaps synonyms to some potential degree – HUMAN BEING.
“We” don’t need Dasein. In very many ways any word will do. Nearest, native. “I”, “me”, “Nathan”, “Rachel”, “Mark”, “Luanna”, perhaps beneath (before) that: no substrate: : That-there (I/you-Here) EQUALS. Nearest. Now. Native. (An archaeology of the generalized “we” – it’s ok).
Simply following thoughts, attempting attention, another “more-than” (…) BEING THAT-THERE (WHOM? – within).
Simple thoughts. Drawing (?) near. We (?) are such “beings” as might attempt/assent “to be.” Strange, that-there.
(notes, 08.10.15)
other jottings spilled from the fuel-can:
“Dasein has its being to be, and has it as its own” –Heidegger
[The Unknowable Alive]
for each “kind”? of being (perception) I wonder if it is not “turtles all the way down” and so, perhaps, eventually, we just “be”?
(Paul Bains)
“THE QUESTION OF EXISTENCE NEVER GETS STRAIGHTENED OUT EXCEPT THROUGH EXISTING ITSELF” – Heidegger
Inquiry into existing: “How can we ask about asking?” in any meaningful way? Access (Eugene Gendlin)
There is nothing that we “do” that is not what we “do.” We cannot get around a corner and become something else/other. Therefore we must content ourselves (or, it behooves us to) with being. Ourselves. Being.
Creeping through it. trying (?) merely (fully?) to BE. BE IN WITH AS WHAT – does he address how we have the capacity to imagine otherwise? (than being?) (Heidegger)
-Why do I consistently feel that I need/ought to SPARE others from my own “existing”? that I might make my way somewhere somehow that would not tax them?
Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine
I am extremely honored and anticipating studies this summer with the guidance and instruction of Simon Critchley. If you attend to this interview, you will probably notice the many resonances and ideas I “sense” and look forward to engaging…
Writing Outside Philosophy: An Interview with Simon Critchley » 3:AM Magazine.
All my Words are Silent 