Albert Camus
Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
Category Archives: Phantom books
The Being That is Lacking to Itself
Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 2002
The human being can survive the human being, the human being is what remains after the destruction of the human being, not because somewhere there is a human essence to be destroyed, or saved, but because the place of the human is divided, because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human. That is: the human being exists in the human being’s non-place, in the missing articulation between the living being and logos. The human being is the being that is lacking to itself and that consists solely in this lack and in the errancy it opens.
Wanting What is Wanting
Anne Carson, Eros: The Bittersweet
The Greek word eros denotes “want,” “lack,” “desire for that which is missing.” The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. This is more than wordplay. There is a dilemma within eros that has been thought crucial by thinkers from Sappho to the present day. Plato turns and returns to it. Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s posession nor in one’s being: eros entails endeia. As Diotima puts it in the Symposium, Eros is a bastard got by Wealth on Poverty and ever at home in a life of want. Hunger is the analog chosen by Simone Weil for this conundrum:
‘All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.”
Emily Dickinson puts the case more pertly in “I Had Been Hungry”:
So I found
that hunger was a way
of persons outside windows
that entering takes away.
[…] Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented Eros to express it.
The Passage Which We Did Not Take
T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Four Quartets
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
Failure to be Equal to the Possibilities
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station, 2011: 144
But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures …
Avoid Thinking Like a Writer
Paul Cézanne
The artist must avoid thinking like a writer.
[So should the writer.]
The Echo of Poetic Possibility
Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.
[See Witold Gombrowicz.]
Only Footnotes
Roberto Bazlen
I don’t write books. Nearly all books are footnotes that have been swollen into volumes. I only write footnotes.
Except What is Invisible
Roland Barthes, The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France p. 13
As a general rule, desire is always marketable: we don’t do anything but sell, buy, exchange desires […] And I think of Bloy’s words: “there is nothing perfectly beautiful except what is invisible and above all unbuyable” [via].
Fragments of the Lost Library
Chris Petit, “Fragments of the Lost Library,” Museum of Loneliness website 2013
The Answer to Life is No by Anonymous (1960, Rupert Hart-Davis)
Blaming by Elizabeth Taylor (1976, Chatto and Windus)
Negative Space by Manny Farner (1971, Studio Vista)
A Voyage in Vain by Alethea Hayter (1973, Faber)
Nothing by Henry Green (1950, Viking Press)
Exquisite Pain by Sophie Calle (2005, Thames and Hudson)
Let me Alone by Anna Kavan (1974, Peter Owen)
The Greater Infortune by Rayner Heppenstall; dedicated to Muriel Spark (1960, Peter Owen)
The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño (2012, New Directions)
A Sense of Guilt by Georges Simenon (1955, Hamish Hamilton)
ANDREW GALLIX 