Now Come Fire

There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth.

With Dionysos, the music changes. At the heart itself of life on this earth, alterity is a sudden intrusion of that which alienates us from daily existence, from the normal course of things, from ourselves: disguise, masquerade, drunkenness, play, theatre, and finally trance and ecstatic delirium. Dionysos teaches or compels us to to become other than what we ordinarily are, to experience in this life here below the sensation of escape toward a disconcerting strangeness.

Could ones address oneself in general if already some ghost did not come back? If he loves justice at least, the ‘scholar’ of the future, the ‘intellectual’ of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost. He should learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet.

Silence, as all writers know, allows the word to be heard. At a given moment, the silence is so strong that the words express nothing but it alone. Does this silence, capable of making language tilt over, possess its own language to which one can attribute neither origin nor name? Inaudible language of the secret? Those who have been reduced to silence, once, know it best, but also know that they can hear it. In the solitary lines of Paul Celan, one hears this inaudible language. A great poet is not someone who speaks in stadiums to thousands of listeners. A great poet is a very private person. In his or her privacy this poet creates a language in which he or she is able to speak, privately, to many people at the same time.

The violence of forgetting. Writing, a mnemotechnic means, supplanting good memory, spontaneous memory, signifies forgetfulness…because it is a mediation and the departure of the logos from itself. Without writing, the latter would remain in itself. Writing is the dissimulation of the natural, primary, and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the logos.Its violence befalls the soul as unconsciousness. Deconstructing this tradition will therefore not consist of reversing it, of making writing innocent. Rather of showing why the violence of writing does not befall an innocent language. There is an originary violence of writing because language is first, in a sense I shall gradually reveal, writing. “Usurpation” has always already begun.