it’s so discouraging sometimes, writing.
it’s not that nothing will come out
it’s not that i don’t have any ideas
it’s that i’m afraid of something, the judgment from elsewhere
at least, that’s what i tell myself i’m afraid of. and while i think it’s obvious the judgment exerts considerable influence, it very clearly does not act alone.
though (tee hee) might we say that, if it is not a ‘judgment’ from elsewhere of which we are afraid, it is nevertheless a fear that in some ways begs to be reckoned with, that fear being of an exterior, of forces outside of ourselves, forces that would decompose what we have written and what we have thought, forces that would produce effects which would render that which we have written unable to affect anything, unable to produce new compositions, and thus unable to transmit life.
i chose the pseudonym jonathanatographer because, in the wake of a death of someone i was very close to, i was trying to understand death, death as the end of a life, death as a part of life, death as an event, death as The Event in the sense of deleuze (or blanchot). my original claim was that death was the one thing whose power was great enough to take the life of even the most insulated thing and open it onto time.
i also knew a quote by henry miller: “I realized that I was free, that the death I had gone through had liberated me.” it’s from his book on Rimbaud, The Time of the Assassins.
quite a title
so…it was not enough to try and understand death, or how the death of a person opens her life onto the world…it was necessary, even, to go beyond an understanding of miller (quoted by Deleuze)—how to die in order to live?
jonathanatographer wasn’t a name invented so that i could circumvent my old identity, to get away from it. i knew it’s important to get to a place where it doesn’t matter whether i say I, so what need for a pseudonym…? jonathanatographer was a signal, a reminder—writing to or from death, in a way…a writing beyond death.
but a writing beyond death, fine, that’s easy. one writes something, dies, someone else reads it…?
perhaps it’s not just the judgment from elsewhere that i’m afraid of. perhaps i’m afraid of what i think, what i will think if i do not restrain myself…—and know that it is precisely this restraint which restricts the flow of what might come out when ideas are had and beg to be followed: not what i will think but—what will be thought!
it is to the writing and death problem that i return, tonight, in search of new lines of thought to pursue. and these new lines are there for the cruising. and that’s just the thing: to get to these new lines…(to allow myself to follow these flows of thought…?).
(henry miller and deleuze we feel we are to use, we hear them from beyond the grave — oh no no no no NO! My! what an ugly writing style you have!)
henry miller and deleuze have laid out something very neat—to die, but not the death the depressive desires or the tyrant demands.
no
to die as an individual
the individual must die
and in dying an individual unfolds its life onto a world of pre-individual singularities,
singularities which organize bodies and thoughts, singularities whose expressions are productive of experiences which individuate—arriving again at individuals!
sort of…
it is true that individuation happens in this way—experiences create individuals. but no, it’s not the case that we ask the individual to die in order to access a world of pre-individual singularities only to produce experiences which individuate. what would be the liberatory powers of such a procedure?
if an individual finds its death, accesses pre-individual singularities, it is to lead an impersonal life in which flows of thought enter into unlimited becomings with each other, unconstrained by the limitations of personal experience.
(how curious would it be to find one’s own death?)
jonathanatographer was supposed to be a writing which would find a death, which would expose a thought beyond a subject, a thought which would move with the absolute necessity of life itself, which would attain to the impersonal Event of a life.
but a certain fear prohibited this task not just from being realized, but from being pursued at all. an inquiry into this fear? perhaps that’ll be necessary but why not try to develop methods, processes which might sneak away into the night, into an outside which glorifies every risk, because on this outside each chance that is taken affirms the whole of chance and endlessly ramifies it.
i do not need to tell you what is being risked…?
the judgment which condemns, which appears to come from the outside, loses all of its power in the face of this chance/chaos. the once-and-for-all of condemnations is located as a point on a line of chronological time—once-and-for-all indeed! for each time someone wishes to pronounce this judgment, the judgment itself must be repeated, the occasion must be marked; thus distinct iterations are a necessary actuality of Judgment.
tribunals punctuate their own discontinuous chronologies!
judgment deceives itself, and is itself a deception.
thus the aporia by which judgment comes undone, judgment in accord with eternal dictums—the cases to which a judgment is applied are of necessity distinct, fixed according to their historical locations. these cases communicate with one another, not just in the infinite causal chain of chronological time (which, it must be said, is not to be easily dismissed), but also by referring themselves always back to the judgment itself, always, even, affecting the judgment itself—where is its eternity now? the judgment swallows the individual cases and believes that it incorporates them into an already known interior with a smallness which is, alas, immeasurably incommensurate with the actions that devastate the bodies in which it realizes its pronouncements.
all the while the thought of the outside, an absolute exterior, flows on, unperturbed…
whereas chance!
chance which affirms and ramifies—one chance for all of chance—is not punctual. (hah! indeed! following deleuze, we can definitively say that it always arrives too early or too late). it is the same chance, the same cast of the dice, infinitely subdividing itself between the past and the future, eternally circulating along its formless line of time.
time and life and thought as continuous variation.
to go through a death, like miller? perhaps…? but to write as jonathanatographer will be to disappear within jonathanatographer—the personal dissolves and the world of impersonal singularities rises to the surface; a surface whose infinite movements do not allow the closure of judgment any power; a surface which is blind to distinct futures; and most importantly a surface which glorifies the chance which risks everything, each time for all time, no matter the outcome…
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