fragilekeys

1

Every genuine beginning hesitates to begin.

No deed, word, thought, or activity suffices to prove that beginning has begun–not that these nor their “real effects” would be denied, but because the genuineness of the beginning requires hesitance. At no moment will we have established a foundation upon which we might build; nor can we be content with facile assurances, as those who build upon abysses would like to taut. Our responsibility to begin, and to begin well, forbids us any modicum of good conscience. Our conscience is not then bad, for at no point have we failed the beginning either. Nonetheless for the beginning to be genuine–to be an open beginning amenable to others–our conscience must remind us: as yet, we have failed to begin.

The beginning withholds itself from us: we will never know what we ourselves have inaugurated, yet we will have inaugurated it. For we are also withheld in the beginning. Our place in it we experience as our own suspension–as the mystery of an event that is “productive” of a language that grounds the possibility of a beginning, though without guaranteeing it. The beginning remains concealed in the product: this remaining is something other than the standing-there of an object. What lies concealed is only revealed as the possibility of another beginning as the genuine one–which, in the event, we experience as impossible and as first and last. It happens, it befalls us, as an irreplaceable.

No beginning is intimable; this is just what every genuine beginning intimates.

Predication belongs to the realm of calculative thinking appropriate to daily dealings. It implies maps of beings, sets of laws regarding motion and interaction, according to which tasks can be planned and prospects assessed. It needs a busy mouth and a busy hand. Preparedness is something very much other and belongs to the realm of meditative thinking appropriate to genuine beginnings. Preparedness is the capacity to remain in hesitant receptivity for the happening of the event as unexpected–that is, as exceeding all forehand representing on the part of the subject. It is a readiness to meet what exceeds knowledge (the event) with knowledge in order to grasp it and give is “permanence” (genuine beginning). But the permanence of the beginning is the most ungraspable, the most impermanent: no evidence for it exists save for a trace whose place and status remain undecidable. Thus is the beginning permanent solely in preparedness, in our preparation for it. The event never happens.

What prepares us then? The decision to ready ourselves. No doubt this calls upon our creative energies to organize the chaos surrounding us with an eye to disposing ourselves to Being. But the event comes over us, which is decisive for decision: what makes these starts (which may be “false” or indeed have to be) genuine is that representation–and with it predicating, planning, programming–is suspended indefinitely. The event effects this suspension and confers another sense of selfhood, one that does not dominate or master, or even create, but prepares for and receives the beginning. In the open region where the self approaches its own truth as a truth that originates in the other, readiness is a gift from the future and every orienting decision comes as a surprise or surplus. To maintain oneself in the “indecisiveness” required of this decisiveness is the ultimate effort: readying.

Ready eyes shuttle, unsettled, with one goal: to bring something home, that is, to transport into a realm of ownness that which is worth preserving so as to share with the other. We seek beginnings as some would seek certainties–we are not at home, we are heading there. Our “there,” our realm of ownness searching for the shareable, is our heading. Therein apprehension shuttles and exposes itself to the unknown of that goal, creating its home ahead of it, by readying itself. 

Ready words reckon with nothingness and do not despair. In them lamentation and jubilation are reconciled, for they are both similarly withheld. Such words come from and return to the pregnant silences of coming beginnings–to be-ing as possibilization, which encompasses death and embraces the without-me (and the without-them) of the coming world. In this way, what is one’s own becomes secluded entirely in the posthumous; afterlife is “lived” “today” as the enduring truth of one’s being. The silence that reigns there is a child that gives birth to its own father.

Business, lost in objects and programs, ensues when sufficient readiness is assumed and meditation on the self is superseded in favor of self-assertion, appearance, enjoyment, immersion: one heedlessly enters a world and its orders presumed to be valid presently, demanding and urgent, instead of encountering things as a chaos calling for creative reckoning, let alone experiencing oneself as belonging to a to-oneself-unique truth that is without precedent in anything already given, and that demands commitments from us that no knowledge can prepare us for, let alone any lived experience.

2

How to preserve the absolute commencement in its initiality? How to abide and remain in this fructifying reticence, this delay which appears to precede time and the representation of beings? The event comes over us and is in no way masterable, never verifiable. What could attest to it? Only receptivity to its possibility, which it itself makes possible. Does it not leave traces of this possibilization? Yet the trace is ash; in it there is no trace of activity or progressive step. Assimilation to the wreckage is total. Words have never safeguarded the event. It occurs only as the insistence of a withdrawal that summons us to a vigilance we only rarely honor.

Our tendency is  to appropriate the truths as our own or humankind’s treasures, reckoning discoveries as ours and interpreting the event or the word as that which befalls us: we remain entangled in metaphysics to whatever extent we take it “personally” or more broadly let the event settle in to an interpretation or view on things and the world. But doesn’t this truth call upon us to take it to heart in the most severe way? Are we not inspired to organize our commitments around the receptivity we have tried to name? Thus the question remains enigmatic for us and grounds our reticence: who is called thus? Is it proper to say that the event befalls us, appropriates us for the saying of its truth? Is the difficulty brought out by these questions a genuine difficulty, or only so because of the entanglement it seems we are trying to work ourselves out of? But we are not trying to overcome tendencies. Honestly spoken, we are not trying to do anything.

We are: not. So runs the inevitable conclusion, if conclusion we must have, though we don’t. A conclusion: that is what there is not. 

The event never happens. We ourselves are hesitating to begin, refused any being of our own. We are listening to the traces to prepare.

3

Dwelling in the opening just named, as what is most proper to oneself because never a property of or ownable by oneself, because only “there” in the decision (to decide) to be “there” in the withdrawal of being and removal of oneself (=existence), and not to unleash fury or hatred or indifference at this crossing fact, but to affirm the ungraspable beginning that one is in the midst of beings, the inception that befalls while keeping to itself and alone gives one one’s chance, leaving a trace of its emergence in a movement of erasure of that very trace, on the horizon of a time that only dawns–well, who could have the stamina for this, or the courage to withstand and not understand? How will we ever transcribe what occurs essentially? How will we ever remember how to believe what is happening?

We shall have more to succumb to this vertigo that rings, to risk a voice that never represents, to prolong the hesitant spreading of our lips.

4

Last minute preparations, the final touches: is this not the moment itself when possibility is most fecund and acts for all time instantly?

Each bend in the verse, every utterance moving towards its end, ferocious but calming steps, focused on the difference that erupts, the nuance that will seal the total affirmation with a kiss, and then exist, or fade, or carry on–we’re preparing for that as we act on it, in gate with a bull become tender, strapping ourselves tight to the violent wag.

September 2015

It is thus up to us to create, nearly “from scratch,” using new parts transformed and amplified with the old, an experiment on philosophy in view of a non-standard philosophy, of inventing a generic as invention-in-person, force (of) invention. This is not a wager in the absolute or philosophical sense, where it is sensible to expect nothing while one covertly awaits a unique Fate or the Absolute. It’s what we call the generic risk or the radical wager, it demonstrates something; we hardly know what it is but we don’t pretend to expect nothing. We expect the immanent production of an apparatus that we know has the precise property of being a process of invention, and the invention is “our” generic finitude, our transfinitude, we humans who are neither transcendental nor absolute. We know that what we have to invent is not just one new particular form of thinking among others, but the very form of invention, the generic in-person. It is thus necessary to announce and decide the Generic Science, to attempt/encourage this experience. To announce-and-decide this posture with the same gesture, through special axioms. It’s a generic extension of the quantic probability of presence to the probability of the futural existence of a new conceptual writing.

—François Laruelle, Non-Standard Philosophy (in the French, p. 140)

By way of economy – and in order, in a single word, to formalize this absolute economy of the feint, this generation by joint and simultaneous grafting of the performative and the reportive, without a body of its own – let us call the event of such sentences, the logic of this chance occurrence, its ‘genetics’, its ‘rhetoric’, its ‘historical record’, its ‘politics’, etc. teleiopoetic. Teleiopoiós qualifies, in a great number of contexts and semantic orders, that which renders absolute, perfect, completed, accomplished, finished, that which brings to an end. But permit us to play too with the other tele, the one that speaks to distance and the far-removed, for what is indeed in question here is a poetics of distance at one remove and of an absolute acceleration in the spanning of space by the very structure of the sentence (it begins at the end, it is initiated with the signature of the other). Rendering, making, transforming, producing, creating – this is what counts; but, given that this happens only in the auto-tele-affection of the said sentence, in so far as it implies or incorporates its reader, one would – precisely to be complete – have to speak of auto-teleiopoetics. We shall say teleiopoetics for short, but not without immediately suggesting that friendship is implied in advance therein: friendship for oneself, for the friend and for the enemy. We all the more easily authorize ourselves to leave the self of the autos in the wings, since it appears here as the split effect rather than as the simple origin of teleiopoesis.

—Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship (in the English, p. 32)

The split effect Derrida mentions — where “the self of the autos” is the effect of a splitting, of a division of the teleiopoetic event, which itself is complete and “final” — is a good example of the philosophical procedure of doubling: it presupposes a division and then strains to reconcile it with thinking (in this case the ever-delayed, yet perfectly announced reception of the messianic sentence by the other in an unforeseeable future).

This self produced in this split retains its integrity as a responsible self capable of promising (‘ipseity’ in Ricoeur’s sense), in relation to an other whose presence remains both called for, feared, and deferred. Derrida can only look at the teleiopoetic sentence as a completion that uncompletes itself in order to reach completion in sending itself to the other who thus will have co-signed the sentence from the very beginning; (and/or) the other is given prior-to-first-priority and (as hinted at in The Postcard) in a quasi-metaphysical way gives the self to write what it will have written (though this gift is nothing and cannot properly be received, if it is to be well received, that is). This is the auto-tele-poesis: the self relays to itself as other its a priori death and differance and “existence” (however ghostly) in/of/from the other. It is filled with the all of the world to mourn and a black hole of intelligence equally, and all this no doubt on the other’s inspiration, at its beck and call (Blanchot: “Keep watch over absent meaning”).

The self as ‘auto’matically self-interrupted by the other-than-self; the present ‘auto’matically unhinged, out of joint, at-the-end, or even in a ‘delay’ before world-time starts; a look at the other that is ‘forever ignorant of death’ (cf. Athens, Still Remains) — all this is symptomatic of a self-hermeneutical interpretation of radical immanence. It requires that the splitting be maintained, and with it the drama of recognition and recovery, recoil and friendship, crypts and secrets this split effect initiates: the ‘kernel’ of the self-confession, bearer of a passion for justice, witness to the instant of (the gift of) death, etc. It is unable to make the leap into the generic, the pre-emption of the lived by immanence (undulatory, non-egological) and the fall into-immanence of the transcendence that had, philosophically, been separated off (or projected or promised). Yet the splitting was, in its very presupposing, meant to disappoint and deconstruct itself — or worse, to prove itself a lie, an egological game. To prevent this appearance, and to prevent it in reality, Derrida must affirm (as he does everywhere, this is his duty) that every responsible decision (one not calculated according to a program, etc.) is a decision “of the other.” The self split off from the other — the other as phenomenologically inaccessible to the self, as “never present,” “illocalizable” in time and space, etc. — this self must nevertheless, by a sustained miracle that suspends the self in différance ‘auto’matically, it must let itself be affected by the other in its depths and/or in the indeterminate exterior. While upholding the decentered or operative status of the responsible self at the critical (quasi-sacrificial) moment, it still must submit itself to an ex-propriation and its quasi-mystical contact with the Unawaitable.

Thus the aporia of a decision for which the self is fully responsible yet which is “unconscious” in a non-psychoanalytical sense, a decision that comes from and returns to the other. Event, hospitality, justice — all of these are animated by the (im)possibility of this decision of the other “in me” (conceived with the help of Augustine’s interio intimo meo and Levinas’ “obsession” by the other prior-to-self and prior-to-being). In the sphere of ethics, it results in a meta-performative powerlessness and an exposed vulnerability, exposed to the other and to the self through the other. Yet more hints in the direction of a generic science, but the doubling enforces itself, even when the strictest duty is set out. Philosophy and the philosophical self are, in a last stage, tempted to dream up a new story, one about “a god who deconstructs itself in its own ipseity” (Rogues) — but why all these ‘itself’s’ and figures, these splittings and transcendentalizations, the suggestion of time travel, telepathy, a communion of phantoms? The deconstruction of the self gets caught short in its own allowance, and the other is forced to foot the bill.

Rather than relishing in double binds and aporias and making them into the engine of more deliberations on selfhood and its ‘distance’ from the other, a science of the generic takes this doubling as part of the philosophical symptom: to seek in the macro-physical and corpuscular (thus the ego-form and its double, the world-form or All/Whole) a metaphor for a mechanism that doesn’t in fact require it but only tends to overdetermine it in the direction of the personological and thanatocentric. Though Derrida crushes the traditional notion of the indivisible soul or the indivisible letter into ever more divisible pieces beyond all gathering, this is ultimately only meant to magnify the responsibility of the exposed and vulnerable self before the other (wound, trace, “fear and trembling”) in a time out of joint; and to destine the thinker to an even more profound task of “holding-together the disparate” in a “community of those without community.” Once again, the sentimental paradoxes demand to be transformed scientifically (algebraically). The self-referential loop is not broken simply by referring the self to its transcendental grounding in the other, even as wholly other or any other. It remains in some sense a (Kierkegaardian) self resting transparently in the power that established it. Whether that be the archive, a heritage, a language, or the other-mortal-messiah who reads me and blesses me without asking for my help, with whom I exchange a “hello without salvation,” all these figures can be summed up under the heading of: the unconditional, non-sovereign/universal, singular-exceptional, encountered-as-never-present, quasi-sacred, coming-without-coming “other.” The result, however, is that the other is commissioned with carrying “my” lost wor(l)d: the other becomes the handler of my remains or of what remains of my thinking, and to think death is to consider this unknown other as a handler quasi-immanent to all of my own personal considerations. I even have the power to, I even must, give the other the freedom, as friend/enemy, to not read, to burn-before-reading, to not answer my call, to abandon me, etc.–but these are more symptoms of the personological hesitating in the melancholic before the generic or Last Instance.

In the generic, friend and enemy could only be seen as “partners” ‘occasionally’: in this case, an occasion to highlight the structure of the teleiopoetic (messianic) sentence. Instead, this occasional element is redoubled as a secret ultimate referent – even if the argument then contorts itself to deconstruct or indetermine these referents. The inverse operation would be to under-determine the ontological sufficiency of those references (self/other) tout court. “O Friend, there are no friends” (words of the dying sage) and “O Enemies, there are no enemies” (cry of the living fool) could be generically translated as, “O Clone, there are no clones, only liveds added to themselves generically, superposed with an ascending vector of salvation that is non-global and non-egological but immanent.” This is to take seriously, without reflecting an image of emptiness back to itself like a specter, the “no-one.” The generic-in-person does not designate an in-body or in-presence or an X-phantom, but a priori in-no-one, in-anyone: a form of invention, a radical wager on the One-in-One. There is no call to an other who would come to complete the message, even if such calls and messages remain occasional ‘motivators’ for the hermeneutical and corpuscular subject; but this motivation comes under a “quantic” and generic condition, subtracted a priori from the individual and the macro-physical, a pre-emption of the lived wherein the self/other “split” is under-determined.

To want the encounter is never to have it; the act in relation comes to you, relates you to the relation happening, inspiring, breathing life into you, into that act yourself, the repetition, at bottom, of relating: the relation happening. With the latter we confuse ourselves: we combine ourselves to it as it renders us inassimilable to any order. As a “combination” of acts (selves), we remain enigmatic to ourselves, in the combination of relations that the instant is.

The distinctness of these relations, of all these relations all relating to one another each to each, and without any ordered assembling or combination, is the instant, which is itself another relation, of itself and to itself, combining itself with itself to create a “constantly impossible” combination, impossible to distinguish from its very surge: the atemporality of an instant that constitutes no present (Derrida), neither present nor absent, and that at best, in secret, comes to you. Combining ourselves to it, “we” are the relation happening, the act in relation, the impossible interaction or “haphazard” combination of distinct relations in a self, in a world, in an encounter, constituting an outside to everything, suspending the given in the distinctness of whatever “new” relation is there, or rather surprises us, vanishes in air.

Each one of these (relations, selves, worlds, encounters) suspends the combination and its real, or rather, makes itself manifest in and as its very surge… even and especially when the manifestation comes in secret. Can there be a materialism of the secret? Only at the suspension of real activity, of ethical being, of the “already given” combination. The tutelage of the secret is suspense, and the suspense (of knowledge, of thought, of categories) is what it offers to us. It’s what comes to us in the surprise of the encounter—the one we can’t and have to open to, the one we open to by being opened by it.

This surge of the wholly other in one, “veiled” in what we call the real, in the given combination, is not veiled in the sense of a deprivation. The veil of the real never fails to allude to the combinatory thrust, however obvious its outcome in dissolution (“at one” with unity, as Hölderlin knew). The veil (“of the present”) is an appeal, not a cover. It cuts across the present and lets its relations combine. It is itself caution. Even a god could be born there…

This instant is the lifting of a veil that never lifts (at least not so far as we have any time left for ourselves; we will return to the time that remains); but it is an unveiling that is indistinguishable from the outcome of dissolution. It is in this sense that the instant is abandoned (is never god, and never allows for one; unless it be a “god” desacralized, god as the sharing of interiors, as the surge of relations in secret), abandoned along with every instant of relation, self, world, and encounter— into an outside of time in time, to a type of manifest genesis, to an ‘original origin’ of the instant, in the instant of…

Hips, spiders, glasses, chains… mirror images, words, playthings: all these are promises of relation that interrupt the composition of things, the given combination in the world.

And perhaps desire is just this excess, the relation-in-act: an appeal and an attraction that comes from the outside in and from the inside out, where the arrangement of things cannot be made clear, thus evoking the strongest passion to relate. Desire is like water: every unit is both a bonded relation and a combinatory force; each unit’s weight or thrust a product of attractive and repellant relations that do not “balance out,” but displace. And yet, as non-combinatory and not countable, desire also represents something like the “haywire of structure.” Each of its instances are inalienable in their quality of suspension, in the uniqueness of their “singularity breaking through,” the singularity of a world, a self, an encounter, a relation.

The differentiality of instants has no telos or intention, no more than the ebbing tide does. It only ever escapes behind itself up front, disoriented around anything like an object. It is a differenting without end that is nevertheless complete in every instance. It is, manifest and in its arrangement of veiled relations, utterly original, causal, or “occasional,” in the strong sense as “opportune”: through the blinds of the given combination, a decision comes through to you, through the other to you (the impossible happens).

It welcomes the bodily expression, the veil that urges on the surge of the uncountable and uncontainable relation, which does quite well without meaning: the “only” chance that this manifestation of veils and relations reveals and appeals to itself: the encounter at a standstill, absolutely and forever “unhad,” desire communicated, sealed, sent off, reachable.