DISBELIEF IN IDIOM
Notes on the Beloved as a Bottomless Pit
July 14/23, 2024

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Belief in idiom means you believe in an idiom’s capacity to make meaning, to effect meaning-effects. You believe it connects words and the real. Hence it is a kind of language-fabric without tears, or treated as without tears, so that everything is (alleged to be) covered.

It is a word-concept map or working interpretation of things that one believes is capable of generating adequate descriptions of events and experiences of every type in the world.

Belief in idiom is to trust that a language works the way it seems to work—”everyone” operates according to the assumption that it does work. It is treated as reliable, and one relies upon it nearly unquestionably.

That is an abstract way to put it. It is more concrete if one considers how idioms enable and enact worldviews. The way they structure experience and foster a certain interpretation of experience. In that sense it is similar to ideology.

To have a worldview, to represent or advocate an ideology, to accept and believe a given interpretation of things—all this would depend on and ultimately come down to belief in idiom.

(The idiom, in its many failures to encompass the real, may also and generally does signify the lack of a unified world fabric. But, in its own right, it ends up constituting its own sort of world-fabric anyhow, effectively equating reality and its own constitution. If it didn’t, the case would likely be mental illness.)

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My hypothesis is that what differentiates literature (or philosophy as literature) is that it disbelieves idioms.

You can imagine taking a ‘false step’: rejecting one idiom in favor of another established idiom. That’s the equivalent to a world-view change, conversion, commitment, etc.

You can imagine taking ‘one step’: rejecting one idiom in favor of an idiom you discover. That’s the equivalent of ‘finding one’s voice as a writer’.

And you can imagine taking many steps, an abyssal step: disbelieving as well the idiom you self-develop…

The abyssal step disbelieves that there is any articulation between the living being and the speaking being; it reckons with an interminable hiatus of speech, with an impossibility of the voice, though its place remains. That place can be framed as that of the void-bound speaker, the disappearing subject, etc.

Disbelief in idiom or non-articulation is obviously the most puzzling option. Because there is also a fatedness to idioms and articulations: there is no getting out or away from them. As much as we resist, we’re overcoded, written upon. (The extreme portrayal of this is Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.”)

The modest way of portraying the disbelief is as the awareness that there is always an inconsistency, incompletion, gap, etc., in any given idiom. No one would write ‘creatively’ if there wasn’t some degree of that, even if it isn’t formulated in that way. Something escapes the word-to-real link and one chases that down.

The more intense way of portraying the disbelief is as a kind of maximalization of the above awareness—to the point that language’s capacity to signify reaches its minimal and its maximal point in the same breath. (That is the alchemical coincidencia opposititorum, the philosopher’s stone.)

There is no absolute degree of disbelief in idiom, rather, literature is the plumbing of the depths of a kind of total lack of language. That pursuit is equivalent to ‘pairing’ language and Life.

As a writer one finds the “self-discovered idiom” very satisfying and powerful, including for its aspect as an exception to world-language. But for that very reason, it also signifies a kind of danger or temptation, which I can only name “belief in idiom.”

That is why poems come one at a time. The current (previous) poem is really only a promise of a future poem.

That is why Celan says the absolute poem does not exist, and we conduct our poetic research “in light of U-topia,” though this non-place is itself just a metaphor for the splendor of the body’s unexpected eternity.

In some sense, my idea here is to prevent the living being and the speaking being from ever being confused for the same thing, yet without leaving language in the lurch or thinking there is a simple outside to speech. That is the ambiguity of “the end of speech.”

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If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end,
The future might stop emerging out of the past,
Out of what is full of us; yet the search
And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.
~Wallace Stevens

This says it all: disbelief in idiom has its flipside in the search for an idiom that could be believed. But so long as we are alive, Life exceeds idiom—Life is the differend.

The difference is between the living sense—joy, power, overflow, inner abundance, love (not only pain, not only trauma!)—and the significations made reliant upon the sedimentations of language and history, upon the metaphors and meanings weaved together in the work as art.

The goal is to put one’s finger on that point of differentiation as a point of incompatibility in the last instance. The living sense of that incompatibility is, ironically, justice.

“An idiom to believe in”—that is an idiom where the living and speaking being would coincide or exhibit their inseparability separated, and yet without any link of representatio, such that representation of this link utterly voided, the chasm total and the hiatus revealed.

This goal is akin to Celan’s “language become person, person become language,” though putting it that way suggests the opposite of what it really means. The very notion of ‘reading’ becomes inappropriate vis-a-vis such an art (Luhmann).

4
As a living being I make no entrance anywhere into language. Language is a dead factor. I can be included as an “I”, as a subject, as a person with a history.[1] But what is all that? It is a consistency (superstition) that exists in what amounts to dead letters on a page—it is a fiction. Why should I expect to appear there?

And at the same time, there’s nothing else that would appear. What isn’t included in history and logos isn’t really anything at all.[2] It is only a promised referent—like joy’s eternity. But who will guess this riddle of this life? Some will hear in it nihilism, others will hear the most glorious freedom possible…

It is from an awareness of the non-articulation into language that the most powerful and satisfying fictional articulation (there is no other kind) can be made. Then language changes its function: it becomes “incantation” or “divinization”: it begins to pertain to future humanities, future becomings, future insights… With such language, cognition is belated: we always have more catching up to do…

This theory is no less a fiction than anything else. It certainly doesn’t prescribe a certain form of writing.

Its benefit would be to take as seriously as possible the “hiatus of speech” (non-articulation) and pursue the “void of representation” (contact without confusion of life and speech) as far as it can go.

But the goal of taking all that seriously would also be ultimately to forget about it…

Footnotes:

[1] “In order to be able to speak, in order to say ‘I,’ the subject must, so to speak, forget language, forget that he is speak ing and immerge himself unreservedly in the river of meaningful propositions, of opinions endowed with sense. He can also, if he wants, speak nonsense. But in each case, he is not alone with his language and cannot bear witness to it. Testimony is the experience of language that remains when all sentences have been said, all opinions endowed with sense have been offered-or at least are supposed to have been. When, that is, the speaker realizes that he is truly alone with his language not with the countless propositions within the language but with language itself, which is silent. When he understands for the first time that he is speaking, that he has irrevocably, poetically put his life in question in language, that he can no longer speak in order to communicate something to someone.” Giorgio Agamben

[2] See Jean-Francois Lyotard, “The Phrase-Affect”