57 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
57 lines
2.8 KiB
Plaintext
An Unpublished Text
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(from "The Difference Which Makes No Difference" in "Les Textes
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Inedites" by Jacques-Louis Charlatan (Prospero, 1987, 450FF)
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Translator's Introduction
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To recover what is insignificant is always more significant than what is
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significant. In translating what is not-written, the translator allows
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us to recognise ourselves as the empty yet ever-changing place within
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which what does not exist may yet fill the space of writing. What is
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trans-lated _overflows_ in its replenished void and yet circles around
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forever in its vertigo of insignificance.
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In his book "Qu'est-ce que c'est le point?", Professor Rene Gade
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proposes the End of Writing as the most formidable transgression of
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post-modernity. How are we to write After Writing? This is the
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challenge posed to the intellectual at the site of superfluity, where
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the (literal) pointlessness of the text intersects with the (virtual)
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interminableness of sentences which deconstruct themselves after their
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"author" has been dethroned. Such is the question addressed by
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Charlatan in his newest outrage.
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"How is it possible to ask any longer for the conditions of possibility
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of a _question_? To ask a question is to set in motion a possibility
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of a discourse of truth and thus of a stage upon which "meaning" may
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parade its authority in face of the multiplicity of disposals (1). If
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there is no truth, then to pose as interrogator is to enter the seat
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of pretended power of judgement of anticipated answers, to allocate to
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each one its measure of relevance.
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To go beyond relevance (relevance) is to seek relief (relief): to ask
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a question is to execute a sentence, to circumscribe the possibilities
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of all responses. In future, answers must be freed from their
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questions and the chains anchoring my sentences together are to be
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dissolved without resolution."
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Author's Postscript
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These words were rediscovered (retrouve) from a wastepaper basket. In
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consigning them to the region of disposibility they are displaced and
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decentred beyond their own principles of coherence. They assign the
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mark of pure disfigurement by which the simulacrum is distinguished
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from the "original". But what privileges the original from the
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residue? By what right does the blank piece of paper claim priority
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over the crumpled text salvaged by the impatient writer? All paper is
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merely potential waste-paper. Just as words evaporate into the silence
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of the inaudible, so too does the solidified page leave no trace of
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itself in its self-erasure...
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(the manuscript breaks off at this point)
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(1) Translator's Note: Charlatan distinguishes disposal or disposition
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(dispositif) from supposition (suppositoire); the former is the
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exteriorisation of that which is not necessary; the latter is the
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insertion of something-into-the-behind.
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_______
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[Originally published in Here & Now No 12, Leeds, March 1992]
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