fragilekeys

When I was in college I became interested in the question of “listening,” in relation to both “religious callings” and “poetic dictation” (“Pneumatology as Listening” was the name of my major). In some authors, listening meant something like tuning in to the present, into an awareness of God’s voice in reality, of how the divine is “speaking” to humanity. In others, what was at stake was something more like “literature.” But they both shared what quickly became for me the question of the other. The question of listening is a question about the outside, the unfamiliar, the strange and foreign–even if this “outside” seems located in my very breast and head. Listening concerns receptivity to the other-than-self, to that which exceeds the ego and all its representations. In its most refined forms, it implies becoming an antennae for the invisible, a microphone for the unsaid–or to put it more religiously-poetically: to feel the spirit in the breath, to hear God speak in presence.

For me, the difference between a religious vocation and a writing practice could never be decided out-and-out: both had too much to do with this question of the other, and, in my experience at least, the other does not allow us to choose one way or the other. But they both also had ways, it felt, of repressing or sidestepping the purity of listening itself. The choice for religion puffed up “one’s own being”; the choice for writing, “one’s own voice.” They both over-wrote the listening, dramatizing it into an “ordeal” (I’ve done my share of this…), whether it be a spiritual one, waiting on God’s voice, a literary one, waiting on “inspiration,” or some other mix of amplification disorders and fuzzy signals. (I dispense with the objection that writing is not waiting but work. It’s true, but it is just as true in spirituality. As much as either works, it waits. There is a kinship between the artistic Nulla dies sine linea (no day without a line drawn) and the idea of “praying without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:17): both imply applying oneself to a failure of representation to establish the connection between self and other. Both recognize that any sure link is impossible, that love demands work (writing, prayer), demands erasure and spacing: to make room in oneself for what is not one, not “one’s own,” to act instead as a medium for something “excessive,” however unknown, to grant the One+.)

It was not a question of the religious or aesthetic interpretation of this phenomenon, but what made it possible. Now, it became clear that every writer had his or her own way of making this clear, and this “way” was the work itself. The relation to the other is never incidental to the identity of the text–no less than to that of a person–because it makes it possible. And yet, among them all one found certain overlapping “concerns”; what Paul called kenosis and Keats negative capability: something like an emptying of the self for the sake of letting “in” the other, for letting something pass through beyond the filters of cognition. The glorification accorded to authors seemed to mimic that once accorded to Jesus: one is glorified to the extent that one empties oneself to be refilled by otherness. Praise went to those “animated” by the Outside, those passive passionates, and those who practiced best were the saints and poets for whom practicing meant “death.” Something spoke through them at an exit of themselves, and while it was obviously in no way the same “Outside” calling and shaping them all (for the void is multiple), it was clear that in every case a receptive “being” was called to receive something that was not and could not ever be its own. (I put “being” in quotes because ultimately it isn’t even that clear.)

Soon, reading took on another function. It was no longer to understand the author’s ideas, to track concepts, to enjoy styles or verses, or even to be inspired by the voice through the intermediary of the text. I no longer heard an author’s voice but simply some relation to an outside, reflected in words. It was that other that I longed to hear, that other other. The decisive question became: How much power does the author imagine they have over it? How far do they go in the direction of powerlessness before it? How much do they pull back and reinstate, for themselves, a power? Should we interpret this grab as a defensive reaction to a lack of it? And what about those who go the furthest into that lack?

These are the questions that drive to the heart of writing and identity–to the heart of any listener. What power do we have over listening? What do we attribute to ourselves of what we hear, what do we attribute to otherness? How do we make this attribution, what kind of negotiations do we make? It is undeniable that everyone navigates this question, because the outside always insists. But so do we, however uncertainly. What can we tell from this friction–from the insistence of an identity rustled through by otherness, by language and this outside that resists it?

Here is the spectrum I have in mind to help us consider all this: it stretches from a total appropriation of and identification with the Power that fills (thus endowing it with being), to the powerlessness that results from a total incapacity, dispossession or non-hearing (thus losing of every notion of the Powers). We always begin from zero, but we all people the void in differing ways (all imaginary, if we ask Simone Weil), according to the different ways we “find ourselves” capable or incapable of doing so. How does one relate to one’s own “power”? Does one comprehend it as one’s own? Does one comprehend it as a power at all? How does one consider “what one can”?

I have–perhaps unfairly–taken for granted that the division between religious calling and poetic dictation was superficial, that there was always something of the one in the other because both have to do with listening. The decisive factor turns out not to be what the author professes in terms of themselves, their own lives, their beliefs, or what they think they are doing, but their relation to the outside: their relation to their own blindness. Who takes care of this blindness and how? Who gives this lack, this darkness,  its due? And what would it mean to? (Perhaps it would lead us to not say anything. Perhaps it would lead us to Derrida’s expression: pardon de ne pas vouloir dire, sorry for not meaning…)

Our culminating question is a simple one: how presumptuous is our author? Upon affirming that there is nothing to hold on to, how far does one go in trying to hold on to something? A question of conscience: what is the justice of the host? It is here that writing and prayer are irreversibly merged.

My hope here has been to suggest that there is a continuum between a total presumption and a total lack of one. The one fills up the lack of power with the radiance of a full, sagely voice, a divine presence which it hears intimately and speaks empowered; the other honors a lack of power through the pain of waiting and listening and hearing nothing to be heard. In my eyes, that could be a criterion of justice, if only it weren’t the ultimate presumption to think that one knew how to tell it. And yet we must try to tell it, however impossible. And we can tell the justice of something by how the other was dealt with or left out of the deal–oneself being only a host. A host for what? The other.

And now is where we have to say: an other that may not be. The other is never there like something to grab hold of, to see or to hear. The other that we listen for is not known as present. Nothing is ever there to guarantee it. Otherwise, it would not be other, but only “some other” in our intersubjective space.

And so, to cut to my tentative hypothesis: to presume that one is listening in for the Voice of Being, that one would have a direct connection with God or the Law, with the script of History or with the will of the Muse–all this is much too much for the other, over-writes everything and makes way for every injustice. This implies believing in the being of books and authors. To do so, to presume any being whatsoever, does not automatically make one a bad host (we all do it, obviously); but it does show a kind of blindness to being blind. It covers up the dissymmetry between the call and the one called, forces too much about the relation, such that even to “bear witness” risks corrupting the witnessing, risks sullying it with intentionality, identity, argument–presumptions to be, to be “in the know.”

Of course, to root the question in “one’s own being” is not surprising: how could I listen if I were not there? How could I keep from saying, “Here I am”? How could we, waiting, not think we were waiting on the Voice of Being? How could we, responding, not think we responded with “our own voice”?

And yet, if we look closely, it has never been that simple. Perhaps concerns about “being” do not guide but shipwreck listening. Perhaps it marks a failure to listen, a will to forget right where one appoints oneself the bearer of Remembrance. Perhaps prophetic hearing always gets lost in professing what’s been Heard, gets lost giving it substance or power. Who would write without this illusion? And yet what great waiting is not foregone when we fall prey to it! What an injustice to stay hush about the silence, the lack and the uncertainty over what escapes things and words and human categories, to say nothing of the anxiety that nothing may happen, that one may very well be waiting on what will never be there–save in the obligation to listen, in the listening itself.

To ask how presumptuous an author is, is to ask what they presume and presume to be. We are all presumptuous, then. Something always comes to compensate for the hole in hearing; in a way, it is the writing itself. What we have here is a kind of indebtedness that can never be remissed; or as in Kafka’s story, a law of listening where no law is ever given. A door of listening has been opened for you alone; only when you have heard everything that there is for you to hear will it close. And so there is no way to get your way past its very opening–listening, no doubt silently, or in prayer.

Let me quickly return to the old post mentioned initially, itself a good example of unjust presumptuousness, Adi Da and the ‘Radical’ Truth. Recalling it sparked a funny thought–that Adi Da’s and Heidegger’s discourse are not so far apart, precisely in connection with their “presumption of being.” My reference above to “listening to the Voice of Being” was meant to call up Heidegger along with the whole metaphysics of the voice; but it struck me as best illustrated by Adi Da’s hyperbole, representative for many forms of “speaking as the enlightened.” I quote only a small passage from his spiritual autobiography, The Knee of Listening:

In every apparent conditional state, I remain Aware at the Free “Point” in the bodily apparent heart, unbounded in the right side– non-separate and indivisible. Prior to every apparent conditional state, I remain As the One and Only and inherently indivisible Conscious Light, always already above and beyond all-and-All (and As That in and of Which all-and-All potentially arises). Everything only appears to me– and I remain As I Am. There is no end to This.

I do wonder what Heidegger would have thought of a text like this! which not only claims to hear the Voice of Reality but to speak it, to Be the speaking of It, to be at one with the destiny of Consciousness. Here we have someone who burst rights past the door of the law and melts without residue into the “Bright” inside: he identifies with a clearing so wide it embraces every heart imaginable; with the Form underlying the conditional; with the one and indivisible beyond the all-and-All, supreme Being; the God of “presencing” itself. Such excesses would not be possible without presumption, which can (and maybe always do) assume guru-like proportions. But however crazy Adi Da may sound, doesn’t he show how presumptuous we all can be? Especially if we take ourselves to be messengers–of Being, Beauty, Bliss, Truth, History, Us, whatever? Isn’t the greatest temptation to say, “I am love”…?

I have not meant to ridicule any of the listeners, only to draw up some affinities and differences. Identifying with the voice, “I am love,” only shows how close one feels to the one who calls. So close that we can barely refrain from endowing that caller with being. So close that we fall into that being and feel merged with endless love in responding to the call by sounding love’s claims. I don’t want to discount this experience; I know it is part of the phenomenon of resonating with the other–is its resonance. I only want to follow Lyotard’s analysis (in Heidegger and ‘the jews’) and stake out another claim: that by endowing the other with being, as much as by letting ourselves think that we have actually heard anything, that there is “good news” to shout, we cannot help but slip into a betrayal of listening. That would be the sum temptation: to forget that something remains unheard in hearing. To honor this fact–to remember that one always forgets that nothing is heard–would be “just listening.”

Back when I was first writing about these questions, I dreamed of a text that would not say anything, but that would be “listening” itself. It would insinuate itself into the reader’s being so deeply as to utterly undo it, to make it hear all the “deeper calls” of itself. It would introduce into the soul a movement of pure diremption, cutting itself off from itself, from every source of being, while calling it back to presence as that which was purely outside of itself. It would achieve a state of resonance with the question of the other (of “alterity”) and would “be” nothing but this call–a kind of written listening meant to simmer in what calls it to listen before writing, with its back to all writing. A just summons, before anyone takes the stand.

Perhaps what I have learned since then is that this desire to write listening betrays its law. It has to admit that it cannot be written. Otherwise, it couldn’t be written. Because it is not just something that cannot be represented here or there, but anywhere ever, because it is just listening, which procures for itself no resources over time, does not once encode itself in rhyme, and does not reason. It does not predicate, cannot inscribe in memory anything.

As writing, it is interminable; listening never comes through. As listening, it is instant; writing doesn’t do. It is not there. It waits.  And so it remains: just listening.

Some recent readings have led me to some thoughts about “beginning.” The first comes from an untranslated lecture given by Peter Sloterdijk, Zur Welt Kommen – Zur Sprache Kommen (Coming to the World – Coming to Language). My German is not good enough to read it with much accuracy, but here is my rough translation of an early, key passage:

An author, I said, begins with himself, in that he exposes himself; but he is only able to expose himself because he has already been exposed.

The verb “expose” is used here to translate sich aussetzen, also “to set out,” meaning that we could also translate the passage like this:

An author, I said, begins with himself, in that he sets out; but he is only capable of setting out because he has already set out.

Sloterdijk then continues:

If we wanted to go in search of an absolute beginning, we would lose ourselves in that groundless movement the logician knows as infinite regress. To deduce a first, spontaneous beginning would be as difficult a task as asking the devil to spin a solid rope out of sand. Not only that, it would also be a superfluous requirement. It is enough for an author, as for the rest of those who exist, to step into his or her on-going beginning, so as to catch up with his or her on-going existence… For us, the real beginning is never there except as in the results of already-being-started.

I would like to pair this passage with some remarks recently given by Jacques Rancière at a conference in Dublin titled, “The Pedagogics of Unlearning”:

There is no adequate guide because there is no right point of departure and no right order. The whole is everywhere… The book that is in your hands is a whole from which you can discover your own capacity of making an infinite number of connections, hence your capacity of making links and making wholes in general. (18:25)

Let me sum up the early portion of Rancière’s talk, in anticipation of applying it to this question of beginning. He starts with two remarks by Jean Cocteau: 1) “Everything is in everything” and 2) “Learn something and relate everything else to it,” in accordance with the principle that all intelligences are equal. First, “everything is in everything” is lodged against the idea that there are some who see the connections of the whole and others who do not, i.e., the principle of inequality between intelligences, where those who are supposed incapable of “seeing the whole” must bind themselves to superiors who do. Second, “learn something” is opposed to “learn such and such a thing”: the one says that “from anywhere you can go anywhere,” that what matters is that something be learned, less than “what” or in what order; the other says there is a definite starting point and a definite order of progression in the things to be learned, again presupposing a privileged position that would know beforehand not only all the connections of the whole but also all the steps the “ignoramus” must take in order to gain that knowledge. It implies that there is a tried-and-true method that the beginner must take in order to rise above beginner status; and it implies that there is a knowledge of the whole that can only be attained through this method. For Rancière, this well-accepted notion of pedagogy embodies inequality, whereas the “learn something” aims at the emancipation of all intelligences as equal. (Listen to the rest of the talk for all the nuances here.)

Now, what I want to suggest is that we have all, to some extent, internalized the drama–and with it all the fear and doubt–that Rancière is describing. We imagine that we have to know beforehand where to start and where we need to end up; but since we don’t know this, we feel dependent on something or someone external to tell us where to start and where to head. We wait forever for the “go ahead,” we never feel adequate in relation to the possible knowledge of the “whole.” For example, someone who has not studied philosophy compares herself to those who have and thinks, “Well, this is impossible, I will never catch up!” This comparison is the “opinion of inequality” in action. We find ourselves saying, “I’ll never get there,” as if the point were to reach the same place as others, as if the goal were to be on an equal level with them in terms of “knowledge”–as if our intelligences weren’t already equal! We find ourselves saying, “I don’t know where to start,” as if it were possible to know “where” or “how” to start–save by starting somewhere.

This “I don’t know” is tied to another uncertainty: “I don’t know what’s being asked of me,” or even, “I don’t know what I want from myself.” Again the beginning is paralyzed because we think we must know this beforehand. We remain dependent on something else to give us guidelines, reasons, and criteria for beginning. And so we alienate ourselves from both the end and the beginning, the purpose and the way, because we do not believe we have it in us to make a “correct start.” And so we never do, but only get dejected, distracted, and disappointed in ourselves.

Extending Rancière’s comments on Cocteau’s motto of “learn something,” we should at least affirm that (1) there is no correct place to start (all beginnings can give equal access to the whole) and (2) there is no correct goal to aim for (no “knowledge of the whole” is given beforehand to attain; the point is to realize ones own capacity to make connections and wholes). But, in addition to this advice (start anywhere, there is no “starting point,” all starting points are equal, etc.), we must add Sloterdijk’s, (3) that you are started. Not just that you “have started” (Angefangenhaben), as if starting were something you did in the past, but that you are started (Angefangensein), that you are starting, presently. Given the way this throws us back on ourselves, on our being-ahead-of-ourselves, we might even say: you start before you started starting; you started starting long before you started to start…

That last sentence sounds strange, and for a reason. We do not easily comprehend or believe in our “being started,” and sometimes we need odd phrases to think through this odd temporality. I titled this piece, “Beginnings began begun,” for this reason: it says that, yes, we start started, and that yes, our starts start started. In Being and Time, Heidegger is forced to devise a long compound word to express this fact: we are always already oriented “toward” our own potentiality-to-be, by the very fact of being-there: Sich-vorweg-im-schon-sein-in-einer-Welt, being-ahead-of-itself­-in-already-being-in-a-world (§41). Because we care about our potentiality (and this care structures our being), long before we “understand” our potentiality we are sich-vorweg, “ahead of ourselves,” projected into possibilities and into the future. We have already left behind countless tracks and traces of our own concern for ourselves and our world, and so for our future, which is then always already coming toward us to meet us. We began begun in the beginning.

Of course, many things make us doubt the validity of the tracks we’ve laid, including the “opinion of inequality” Rancière critiques. They make us doubt whether our starts are real or “false.” Or they distract us from seeing them at all, from keeping in tune with our own care for ourselves, such that we forget how much “on our way” we already are. Then we look for a devil who might turn sand to a solid rope. We look for a “new start,” instead of picking up what’s started.

I write this because of how much time gets wasted waiting to begin, and because of how many potentialities thus go undeveloped. I only want to suggest that we will never know “how” to start and don’t need to, and that therefore we should feel free to start anywhere. But I also want to suggest that, in another sense, we always “know” how to start, because “the beginning itself began begun.” Down to our very ontological ground, I’m tempted to say, we are our beginning, our being-begun. We do not come with pre-fabricated ends and purposes, with a horizon of usefulness and knowledge to attain; and long before we are this or that thing, this or that person with this or that quality, attribute, or skill, we are (the) beginning (of) ourselves. This beginning is not “owned by” or “owed to” any cause but our own potential-to-be. Being the beginning of ourselves ourselves, we are the end and purpose to start, and we are already “being” that start. And because every beginning begins equally with that cause long begun, perhaps we ought to see everything we do, every activity undertaken, every word spoken, as such a beginning, as a repetition of ourselves as beginning, along a long trail of beginnings long begun.

Perhaps “ethics” is to hold to that beginning that we are, that potentiality-to-be, and to reach for it as to reach for our very selves, for our very being-in-the-world. Because in truth, where are we if not there in what we started? And where else will we ever be, but there, at the start–the started start, the future that we are, the future that we always will have been?

There is no image [Bild] of deconstruction, no more than there’s a unity or a “one” to it.

Deconstruction is the impossible: that which arrives to us, but without arriving, that which is only ‘there’ in arriving, which cannot have taken place yet, however tied to the immemorial it is or seems. And so is justice: the future without prevision, previsibility, or foresight. Differance like the beat of time, of the present absent with itself, of thinking death, a work of mourning, anxious gladness, writing. But the question is alive in that joy also, the joy of listening, of being in what is coming: where we are situated with respect to it [ce qui arrive comme impossible], with the other that comes, inside and out. What will it have us say?

A side cannot be chosen, but the division (inside-outside, me-other) is still there. It is the hit and resonance, the wall crumbling while moving elsewhere, while we also move elsewhere along the wall. Le phantôm du mur est toujours là. The ghost of the wall is always there. “Berlin is the temple of this metaphor.” (Vive le phantôm, wrote Derrida, long live ghosts.)

The power of deconstruction is a kind of energy that puts us in harmony with [nous accordons]… [unclear]…

Deconstruction in der Welt, the Raum of Literature. Think only of Albertine disparue by Marcel Proust; he writes that he dies then (emphasis) when Albertine disappears, but he writes this in the “I.” Who is it—Proust, the narrator, Cixous, you, me? When did “she” disappear—was she still on stage, could I still hear her? When was the world I shared with her gained, when lost? And how often? What slips away in the instant is the truth we share, I with her and she with I, we with us, on a path of infinite flight away and towards, neither and both; I only share it in the instant, when it comes. (Love: the melody of memory put down.)

(Later, Cixous speaks touchingly about her mother (I understood neither her French nor the translated German through this part: my account relies on the account of friends), her mother who had said, “all writers die young,” and that she was the only one left. She and her daughter, Helene, exchanged letters until she was 101, and she lived to be 104.)

If we ask about death, it’s about the impossible: you can’t wait for it, you can only wait for it, it never comes. Though we think we see it happen to others, we never see it; either that, or it only ever happens to others, including myself, which means I never get to see what would be most proper to me. But this “we never see it” is right there on the face, like the visibility of the invisible, the “exposition of a soul.” “We never see it”: not the words either, not even these glances we exchange.

It’s a question of what comes in not coming [ankommt was nicht kommen an]. We still exchange glances, their letters, ours. Deconstruction as a factor for undoing or un-ordering: of welcoming disturbance, estrangement [dérange bienvenue]. —A prior(i) hospitality, where the other [autrui] is anterior to me, incessantly antagonistic to the relation I entertain with “myself” (another call from Levinas): inseparable from the question of language and relation, right there in movement, it is “as” energy—as a welcoming of what can never be seen before it comes—as passion.

Deconstruction, simply: the other who speaks in me [l’autre qui parle en moi]. Come, then, let him speak.

*

After the event, I found myself (where “spaced” I had wandered) in line for her to sign books. As I didn’t have one of hers with me, I showed her a passage from Nancy’s newest, L’Autre Portrait, which I had just discovered that afternoon: une mêmeté essentielle de ce autre que je reconnais comme “lui-même” [an essential sameness of this other I recognize as “himself”]. She read it and asked, “You want me to sign Nancy’s book?” Pressed, no doubt—was this the moment to defend love? the same love she’d just proved to me?—I said, “We are only absences… we only have absences to say and share with each other… so…”

What could I say about our departure, when the meeting had already been that? She looked at me and I looked at her. I was grateful, she smiled, nodded perhaps. For a flash, it seemed like I saw her, the face of another. A face on fire, eyes deep as a trinity. A look of graciousness, hope, and forgiveness. The face of a thinker, of a saint, and to her, what else, a writer.

Waiting for the U, I remembered to look. She’d dedicated it: “une autre, Hélène Cixous.”

*

Either she or some fellow sitting a row or two behind me said: ich kenne mich nicht: I don’t know myself.

“Don’t know myself”: that’s what I can’t pretend to be able to do, that’s what I can’t stop pretending isn’t true. That’s what I keep saying outloud, and writing, but that’s what’s true for everyone. That’s what we don’t want to know anything about– that about ourselves, we know nothing– not “this”: which comes without coming about, that, in the instant, is neither now nor then, but pure passage [différance].

My hospitality to the other in me is hostile (“I resist change,” I don’t listen to myself), but I can’t decide if that other is inside or out, or whether I myself am outside or in. I can’t, must not figure out: who welcomes whom? And yet not only must I welcome. The welcome shapes my own figure, my own life, my own text. I was welcomed before I could.

We are the surprise of each other in the welcome, the surprise of self caught in common with all then, lacking all “properness” and place. We are together the derangement. Et elle fait toujours autre chose que le même. Nicht mit Absicht philosophische. Wir wissen nicht was das Ich ist. Aber: l’idée de ma mort m’oblige à penser à l’identité de moi. [And it is always something other than the Same. Without philosophical intention. We don’t know what the I is. And yet: the idea of my death makes me think about the identity of me.]

*

To imagine the worst, one must see it, find it in oneself. The mission of the theater is to portray this worse (“portrait” it?), without making a character out of the criminal. To show the worse in the everyman, the every-me, in every discourse: derangement.

The theater takes place in a hole in the wall, and the wall is there. L’étrange in mir nous étrange.

*

Hélène said: spiritual practice [Übung]: accepter de déranger [accept and take on the derangement]. Respect what has not come yet, beyond whatever evidence never comes.

No, it is not natural, it is not proper to anyone. It can in no way be said to have begun, because it’s what we always start with: a look, at ourselves, at another.

Life’s thought in a death’s sentence, shredded by the distance that renders it, while we share it: infinite passion.

(To write, love, to work, the hardest approach: letting a “not” be, without destroying it, understanding it without understanding it. Writing as a permanent philosophical mediation: to love a subject that does not rest, that does not remain. Writing, that is finally: prayer.)