Friday, 5 October 2007
‘Tensile strength’ are the first words to hatch out.1
Saturday, 6 October 2007
Tensile: capable of being stretched; susceptible of extension; ductile (OED). Like writing, obviously enough: indefinitely, if not infinitely, extensible (I promise I won’t forget about breaking and cutting, that’ll come soon enough). And ductile: see what he says about the ductus in The Truth in Painting, a kind of artistic signature, but ductile is also not far from duction and even seduction, leading astray, going wrong, getting off the track, errancy.
Sunday, 7 October 2007
Tensile to ductile, ductile to (se)duction: many other words in ‘-duction’ could work for us here too; there’s a swarm of them multiplying: induction, deduction, reduction; adduction and abduction . . . An early example has the word ‘duction’ mean multiplication. And multiplication is of course one of our questions here: un ver à soie, a silkworm (of one’s own), one or just a countable few in the shoebox; very many silkworms hatched in your cabinet, multiple worms squirming, or so I imagine it, in my multiple words for worms here, tensile or ductile enough to make it round the globe, destined for your inimitable ductus litterarum as you write them up on the wall.
Wednesday, 10 October 2007
Back in my cocoon here in Atlanta (I was in Paris for the first hatchings, around and about the third anniversary of Jacques Derrida’s death), just now picking up the thread that seems, more or less incredibly, as always, to have made it across the Atlantic, six hours further away, six hours earlier than it was. I want to start thinking about size and growth (such a strange and difficult concept, growth), the sleepless insatiability that makes them grow to ten thousand times their original size, the molts along the way, what gets left behind.
Thursday, 11 October 2007
That word ‘instar’: their second instar. Form or figure, instance, maybe. In French, ‘à l’instar de . . .’ means ‘in the same way as . . .’, ‘after the example of . . .’. A l’instar d’un ver à soie, like a silk worm, like one’s own worm, following its example here more or less blindly. In English, ‘instar’ is also a verb: to make a star of, or to set with stars. Here I’m making a star of no one worm, but following the plural, instarring the scatter, the always gathered scatter, the constellation, matter.
Friday, 12 October 2007
A l’instar de Jacques Derrida, following his figure or example, following his star, even, for he is the star here: what’s at stake in A Silkworm of One’s Own? Veils, veiling and unveiling: nothing less than the truth or the Truth. The silkworm and its . . . secretions, let’s say (lovely word, ‘secretions’), as a tiny but completely relentless challenge to the whole tired Western way with truth and untruth, the hidden and the revealed, concealment and unconcealment, aletheia and its veiled secrets, the whole striptease of truth called philosophy. Something’s happening here, with the worms, and the words, that really is not philosophy. Let’s not rush to assume that that means it’s literature.
Monday, 15 October 2007
(Haunted all weekend, in the mental box or cabinet where the silk-worms are constantly eating and growing, by a childhood memory of a drawing (made by my elder brother, I think: the affect is one of slightly jealous admiration rather than pride, at any rate) in a school exercise book, illustrating the circuit of mulberry, silkworm and fish pond in China. Little semi-iconic drawings of trees fertilised by fish manure from the bottom of the pond; worms fed on mulberry leaves; fish fed on shed worm skins; farmers who eat fish and spin silk . . . There were arrows to indicate the cycle. The outsize pencilled silkworm on the stick branch of the tree was, I seem to remember, smiling broadly. This seemed so very satisfying, this circuit, so self-satisfying and self-satisfied, almost smug, like the drawn silkworm itself.)
Childhood memory might have a non-accidental relationship with what’s in play here: the form of the ‘childhood memory’ and its specific temporal quality as a kind of radical memory (by definition I cannot access this, my childhood in general, except as a memory) might be part of what won’t quite work as truth and veil/unveiled, even as the silk will also make the veil . . .
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
Derrida says his childhood memory is ‘l’envers d’un rêve’, which I translated a little flatly as ‘the opposite of a dream’. But l’envers is the other side of something, the back or hidden side of a surface: l’envers du décor means behind the scenes. There’s still some dreaming in here.
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
‘ . . . secreted its secretion. It secreted it, the secretion. It secreted. Intransitively. [ . . . ] It secreted absolutely [ . . . ] Secretion of what was neither a veil, nor a web [ni un voile, ni une toile] . . . ’. We’re not there yet, are we? The secretion to come still held back, still a secret, but we’re all waiting for it, that one long long thread turning the worm’s inside out, that thread I’ve already been following, virtually, very virtually, over the Web, what Francophone Canadians call la Toile, anticipating already the silk in the worm, ductile tensile textile. Childhood memory still dreaming a little around the absolute future still and always to come of a secret that’s not even a secret (not something behind a veil, to be uncovered, ever) but secreting itself, serisecreting.
Friday, 19 October 2007
I’m still tense here on tensile, tensor, tense again: what’s the right verb tense here? How to conjugate the specific tense of the childhood (dream-) memory (with at least a touch of the absolute past, something other than ‘normal’ memory, at least), with the specific futurity of where we are today, waiting for them to grow and molt and secrete what they will always have been going to secrete? And all this in a kind of commemorative and monumentalising re-enactment of what happened in a shoebox in Algeria in the early 1940s? What always will have been going to not happen perhaps here? Across this further bizarre configuration of non-presence that has you fifteen hours ‘ahead’ of me in the same instant now, already tomorrow: ‘Now is night’. Or not.
Monday, 22 October 2007
Still with the wordworms: in JD’s French, all those words in ‘ver-’ that defy translation, but in English a little differently, ‘idiomatically’ as he would say and love to say, something about that initial ‘W’ that marks it as a long way from French, in some more anglo-germanic compartment. A whole row of worm-words: worm, word, work, world (those last three that would be the Heidegger version, for another time); worl, worry, worse, worship, worth, there’s even wortworm . . . how about ‘worg’? Worg? Just ‘grow’ backwards, I wot, growing slowly, but growth (savour especially that ‘wth’, nothing less French) is always slow, and growth is always more than growth in the sense of increase; growth brings death with it, there’s no growth without dying too, there’s no escape, sustainable growth is not sustainable. Life is growth but growth also dies (see Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature): lifedeath, as JD was saying already in the 1970s. And there’s still that crawling multiplicity waiting for us (growth-death is also multiplication): for JD it’s related to the virus he also puts in his ver-series, along with vérité and vertu, the virus that ‘carries delayed death in its self-multiplication’.
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Growth, increase, multiplication, death . . . So what am I going to do with the other childhood memory that opens ‘A Silk Worm . . . ’, all about diminution or, as it might have been more accurately translated in the immediate context of the knitting being remembered here, all about decrease. But in French it’s the same word as, soon to follow, the diminution of the diminished interval in music, or the rhetorical figure of diminution, saying more by saying less, there’s an understatement. Here they are, all those wordworms, growing and/or dying, increasing and multiplying, and then here is Derrida talking insistently about his ‘interminable diminution’, a decrease without breaking or tearing or removing (all still figures of the veil and of truth), about fatigue and extenuation, etiolation, ‘diminution ad infinitum’ that the text itself is supposed to be or supposed to be doing, a writing aiming to stop writing, with some kind of petering out, perhaps, some fading away, or maybe just a kind of extreme refinement, an exquisite abstrusion without reconditeness – and here he is returning to it at the very end of ‘A Silk Worm . . . ’, ‘only an interval, almost nothing, the infinite diminution of a musical interval . . . ’. What am I going to do with all that, all that little, that abundance of paucity, as time starts running out, running down towards the verdict he keeps invoking, verdict without veracity or veridicity, as it gets later and later and the increase diminishes and the diminution grows? Each time growth grows it also slows and dwindles, falls.
Wednesday, 24 October, 2007
Like in the analyses of Freud in La Carte postale, ‘la mort est au bout’, death is at the end, it all ends in death. Growth and multiplication or decrease and diminution: death both ways. But not quite the same way both ways: the veil he’s trying to get away from is also a shroud, a winding-sheet, but the silkworm self-worm minutely displaces all that (the tallith is next) maybe here a different way with death and therefore truth and all the rest, of a piece with that last interview protesting against the philosophical view of philosophy as ‘learning how to die’, and of a much earlier thought, in ‘Ja ou le faux-bond’ and ever since, about demi-deuil, half-mourning, or faire son deuil du deuil, doing one’s mourning for mourning, mourning mourning, doing something other than the ‘normal’ work or labour of mourning, something that will always look a little like melancholia, a not-getting-over-it, a not-quite-return-to-self, no ‘closure’, quite, no simple ‘getting on with one’s life’. Silk not quite self, soie not quite soi, a silkworm of one’s own worms through the own and the self. Which is also what we’re doing here, every day or almost, every morning mourning mourning, as the worms worm and the words multiply and diminish, struggling to figure out what just now comes back to me, not a childhood memory quite, but a twenty-five year memory perhaps, in an antiquarian bookstore in Brighton, in gold on the spine of the leather-bound volume three capitalised words stacked one above the other: WORDS, WORTHS, WORKS. So now add: WORMS.
Thursday, 25 October 2007
Just before the tallith enters the Silkworm text, we’re right in this question of mourning, half-mourning, and mourning mourning. Rather not burden the others, says JD, with the weight of inheritance, and more especially the weight of a shrouded corpse, not impose the mourning veil, rather leave without trace, let the other live and be and have no expectation of benefit or profit from this removal of shroud and veil. Not insignificantly for me (otherwise unsuperstitious), page 43 of the original French (42 in the English, but that’s a different answer): ‘Not even leave them my ashes. Blessing of the one who leaves without leaving an address’, faire son deuil de la vérité, do one’s mourning for truth (and therefore of mourning, if mourning is bound up with truth and its veils), one’s mourning for ipseity, for soi, have no one mourn me, no veil worn. Blessing, or more literally benediction (but ‘blessing’ hides a translator’s back-reference to the French blesser, to wound: a blessing can also leave a blessure): and just now blessing and wounding remind me of the last text Jacques wrote just before he died, with a trembling hand, a paragraph in the third person, in quotation marks, to have read out over his grave by his son Pierre, Jacques writes Pierre reads ‘he asks me to thank you for coming, to bless you’; and then at the end, new line but now first person, undecidable prosopopeia, indeterminately probably plural address: Je vous aime et vous souris d’où que je sois’ [‘I love you and am smiling at you from wherever I am’]. (I wasn’t there for the blessing and the blessure, not another postcard Plato-Socrates thing, just a visa and green card thing, the kind of thing where even death collides with bêtise.) I wasn’t there.
Friday, 26 October 2007
Worms’ work’s worth words’ worst woes.
Saturday, 27 October 2007
‘Blessing and death’, la bénédiction et la mort, he says (Voiles, p. 45). I was not weaving, still less knitting, when I got the news that Jacques had died, but I was sewing. With a thread made of linen, I think, rather than silk, I was sewing a book made just for him. I knew the chances were slight that he would read on his screen the electronic book I’d just gathered up from scattered essays and articles, already I guess to do with aging and dying and mourning, so I was making a single printed, bound and sewn copy just for him. Relier de nouveau, c’est un acte d’amour, he writes in Mal d’archive.2 Some pleasure, just as here, in the mix of high technology and autodidactic manual artisanship. I never finished making the book, its signatures remain unsewn, unbound, unblessed, now scattered. Let me not start in here on all the books, bindings and unbindings in Derrida, all the reliures, everywhere that relier, re-lier, is close to lire and re-lire. Je lis, je relis et relie, I lie and rely (one self-imposed rule of this sequence, apparently: I don’t reread it as I go, I’m all in the act and event of secreting the secretion, each morning each mourning, as though each word was written indelibly on the wall as I typed it). Binding is logos and re-ligion and the ‘theological simultaneity of the Book’, all still part of the veiling/unveiling a tallith here undoes or doesn’t quite do. Unbound but never entirely unbound, read but never completely read, always (to be) reread/never (completely) reread, still somewhat scattered and scarred, a little scared, regular secretion but no secret, no one secret, nothing sacred, no secret on screen, but perhaps rather in every sense a screed.
Sunday, 28 October 2007
Sundayscreed: among others, Screed, n., A fragment cut, torn, or broken from a main piece; in later use, a torn strip of some textile material. [ . . . ] An edging, a bordering strip; the border or frill of a woman’s cap. [ . . . ] A long roll or list; a lengthy discourse or harangue; a gossiping letter or piece of writing. [ . . . ] A piece, portion (of a literary work). [ . . . ] A (drinking) bout. [ . . . ] [From the verb.] A rent, tear. [ . . . ] A sound as of the tearing of cloth; hence, any loud, shrill sound. Screed, v., To shred, tear, rip. [ . . . ] To produce a sound as of tearing cloth. Hence, of a musical instrument, to make a loud shrill sound. [ . . . ] to screed off, away: to give audible expression to, to relate or repeat (a matter) readily from memory.
Monday, 29 October 2007
(Surreptitiously, written almost blind, almost literally under the table, during an indescribable meeting about The University Strategic Plan; I’m squirming and worming): A tallith is not a veil, not simply a veil, because of: touch (not sight); gift (not revelation); law (not Being); event (not truth). Verdict, he keeps saying, without veri-diction.
Tuesday, 30 October 2007
Here, for example: ‘If there is a “truth” of this shawl, it depends less on the lifting or the unfolding of a veil, on some unveiling or revelation, than on the unique event, the gift of the law and the “coming together” it calls back to itself. Even if one translates the gift of the Law as Revelation, the figure of the veil, the intuition and the moment of vision count for less than the taking-place of the event, the singular effectivity of the “once only” as history of the unique: the time, the trace of the date, and the date itself as trace’ (Voiles, pp. 69–70) Unique event, timed dated (my atomically accurate clock has 7:27:46 as I glance still typing) this time only, taking place now: as always caught up in repetition, iterability, transcribability (as your writing on the wall, for example). That’s the law: once only always repeated, that’s its secret in full view, that’s what it still secretes, however clear you make it look or sound, that’s why there’s never just the law, but also the case, singularity, this time, and thereby multiplicity spinning out again, each time, each date.
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
Repetition, multiplication spinning away out of control of the law. (But even if they are doing their worm-thing with a view to reproduction and multiplication, we’re really waiting for them to do that strange thing they do along the way, we’ll wait until it’s late, until the end or almost the end.) En attendant, the thought is that that’s an event, perhaps, the event-of-the-law as gift-of-the-law that the law can’t understand, the always necessarily possible interruptive undecidable state-of-exception that haunts the law as its always singular this-time case or instance. Law is law insofar as it governs a possible multiplicity of singular cases that it is there to predict and that it can never quite predict, and which it is therefore called upon to decide. That’s where decision comes, the crisis-moment of decision that JD likes to recall from Kierkegaard is a moment of madness, the moment of what we’re still circling around here, what his text calls the verdict. Law requires ver-dict because of failure to predict. Translated slowly, inching its way from French ‘verdict’ to English ‘verdict’: ver-dict, worm-dict, worm-word. Each and every growing multiplying dying wormword worth a verdict as they spin out the thread of times and dates.
Thursday, 1 November 2007
You will perhaps have been waiting for this, traditionally read, or so I imagine, in the direction of ‘man’ rather than the direction of ‘animal’: Lear and Edgar – ‘Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow’st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. [ . . . ] Thou art the thing itself; unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal as thou art.’ (Spin the anagrams: Real Lear, G. read Edgar; lag re-read, a real dreg, this rag dealer in dear Alger). Naked as a worm, as JD says in his fantastic discussion in Silkworm . . . of Freud’s account of pubic hair weaving, that we may not have finished with yet. And why not, while we’re at it, talking of dates and anniversaries, in the middle of this Halloween-All Saints-All Souls sequence, Desdemona’s fated handkerchief: ‘The worms were hallow’d that did breed the silk’. (The only places I know, among all the silk and all the worms in Shakespeare, where the worms are silkworms, productive, rather than direct agents of death and decay.) Owe the worm no silk.
Friday, 2 November 2007
A little later in Othello, follow the handkerchief a little further, a little later and it’s already too late: at the end of a famous sequence all about confession and perjury, Othello’s last words as he kills Desdemona on the strength of the handkerchief, almost, one might say, with the (tensile) strength of the handkerchief: ‘It is too late. [He stifles her]’ Too late, sero, late is always too late, says JD in Silkworm, late is always already absolutely late, already in the first sentence of his text: ‘ . . . before it’s too late . . . ’. Too early too late, the absolute contretemps that could take us back to his earlier lovely little piece on Romeo and Juliet, ‘L’aphorisme à contretemps’. Juliet, who’s just seen Romeo, and fallen, and found out his name: ‘Too early seen unknown, and known too late!’ Too early too late the aphorism but ‘all writing is aphoristic’ he also writes in an ‘early’ essay on Edmond Jabès, all writing aphoristic like this too early too late now is morning here in New York this weekend, now is morning but in Melbourne now is night here now today already there tomorrow where you are over the other side writing always late so late too late.
Saturday, 3 November 2007
Fall back. Only today, late (or rather tomorrow, early, in the early morning) the USA falls back to the hour of winter, a week later than in Europe (and than in Melbourne, I think, though you must be going the other way). At 2 a.m., officially, it’s suddenly 1 a.m. again for a doubled hour, compensating for the spring forward where that hour had disappeared. (I was almost too late, flying back through the time zones the night my mother died, at 2 a.m. to the minute in the early morning of 28 March 2004, time of death undecidably 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. or any time in between: the doctor wrote 3:10 on the certificate to keep it simple. ‘She was singing’, my father said, having misheard the death rattle in his dream, though it was true she’d somewhat turned into a bird in death. My mother had taught me when I was a child how a silk scarf would spring forward out of a suddenly opened clenched fist into which it had been tightly packed, its elasticity distinguishing it easily from synthetic fibres.) That missing hour (but represented as a time during which the clock stands spookily still for an internally unmeasured hour) is the time for crime in some old movie I vaguely remember. As time goes on and it gets later, time speeds up (just as early time is slow: a few nanoseconds after the Big Bang are like an eternity, time hardly moving, energy all going into spatial expansion instead), we get into what JD often called ‘precipitation’, suddenly a desperate hurry to get it in as time runs out and we all suddenly get older.
Monday, 5 November 2007
It’s getting late, I lost a day to travel yesterday, and now this last week ahead . . . Sero te amavi, the epigraph for the whole of JD’s text . . . Sero, ‘late’, ‘very late’, ‘so late’, ‘too late’. But sero is also a verb in Latin, not only the future of esse, no less, but in its own right as sero, sevi, satum: to sow, to plant, to bring forth, to produce, to scatter . . . to disseminate (Lewis and Short). Sero sero: late I disseminate, Derrida’s motto and at least one signature encrypted here. And signed too by the silkworm itself, le ver à soie en soi, seri-culture as sero-culture, I’m quite serious and serene about this series here, for sero-culture just is culture once sero means I plant: I plant and watch it grow, watch it bring forth and disseminate in deferral later, always later. The future is late again, a gain again ago.
Tuesday, 6 November 2007
A signature signs too late, after the fact, after the date, à contretemps, as JD says in Silkworm. I sign and date everything I write, everything I write also escapes that signature and date, first across the ether to Australia, but already, anyway, as a condition that it be at least minimally readable. Like the fringes on the tallith, a signature ends the text it signs but is the place (one place) where a text frays out into other texts, more text, for example on your walls. A signature hems the text and times the text, mis-times the text it signs, makes it always early or late, sero. Each go ago.
Wednesday, 7 November 2007
Ago again. Late again. ‘Ago’ not now Latin (‘I act’ in the sense of ‘I take action’ but in innumerable idiomatic turns too: ‘animam ago’, for example, I give up the ghost, it’s the final act, the agony), not Latin and not all those ‘-ago-’ words from ancient Greek I could get pedagogical or even demagogical about in the agora, like ‘apagogy’ and ‘agonistics’ – not Latin or Greek, then, but English, ‘ago’ simply enough by contraction from ‘agone’. What’s long ago is long agone, it’s late. But simply add an ‘I’, there’s Iago and we’re back to Desdemona’s handkerchief, and thence it’s only a step to Santiago, where JD writes part of Silkworm. Santiago, St Iago, St James: in French, St Jacques, another signature for our protagonist.
Thursday, 8 November 2007
Here I a-go again: today to Chic-ago. (‘Chicago’, however, seems to come from an Algonquian word meaning either ‘skunk’ or ‘onion’. I learned this morning from the New York Times crossword that an onion can be referred to as a ‘skunk egg’.) The thread is reaching its end as the worms finally get ready to spin: as so often with the figure of the guiding thread in Kant, the leitfaden, the thread leads only to its own end, and leads back nowhere. The end just is the end, never The End.
Friday, 9 November 2007
JD signs off finally with the silkworm, the childhood memory, the worm that has spun its thread, its double secretion, its single double thread hundreds and even thousands of feet long, spun its thread and waited out its time. And abandons us, cuts us off, late, just at this point of emergence. This is where it starts. That’s the verdict. Salut.
1. These fragments were written at the invitation of the Australian artist Elizabeth Presa to accompany her installation ‘A Silk Room of One’s Own’ at the Linden Centre for Contemporary Arts in Melbourne. The installation, inspired by Jacques Derrida’s text ‘Un ver à soie’, involved cases containing live silkworms which hatched and developed over the five-week period of the installation, during which the artist transcribed onto the gallery walls, alongside other textual materials, these fragments, sent every day or so by e-mail.
2. Mal d’archive (Paris: Galilée, 1995), p. 41.