Writing and Difference

1. Structuralism's Essence: Beyond Fashion and History

The structuralist stance, as well as our own attitudes assumed before or within language, are not only moments of history.

Language as Origin. Structuralism, like questions about language, transcends historical trends, delving into language as the very origin of historicity. It's an astonishment at language's role in shaping history, not merely a product of it.

Universal Anxiety. The anxiety about language that fuels structuralism is a strangely concerted development, not easily captured by historians. It's a fundamental questioning of language's significative nature.

Beyond Fashion. Reducing structuralism to a mere fashion is a violent act, ignoring its profound implications. It requires a serious reconsideration of imagination, affectivity, and fashion themselves.

2. Criticism's Melancholy: Separation from Creative Force

Form fascinates when one no longer has the force to understand force from within itself.

Criticism as Structuralist. Literary criticism, in its essence, is inherently structuralist, reflecting a separation from the creative force. This separation is a condition of the work, not just the discourse about it.

Melancholy Pathos. The triumphant cries of technical ingenuity in structural analyses often mask a melancholy pathos, a consciousness of diminished ardor. This melancholy is a reflection of the accomplished, the constructed.

Catastrophic Consciousness. The structuralist consciousness is a catastrophic one, simultaneously destructive and destroyed. It perceives structure through the incidence of menace, focusing vision on the keystone of an institution.

3. The Allure and Limits of Spatial Models in Literary Analysis

A city no longer inhabited, not simply left behind, but haunted by meaning and culture.

Neutralization of Meaning. The relief and design of structures appear more clearly when content, the living energy of meaning, is neutralized. This is akin to the architecture of a deserted city, haunted by meaning and culture.

Spatial Metaphors. The notion of structure, strictly speaking, refers only to space, geometric or morphological. Language can determine things only by spatializing them.

Energetics vs. Geometry. The best literary formalism risks explaining everything with figures and movements, ignoring force by confusing it with the quantity of movement. This geometry is only metaphorical, but metaphor is never innocent.

4. Writing as Inaugural: A Dangerous and Anguishing Recourse

Writing is an initial and graceless recourse for the writer, even if he is not an atheist but, rather, a writer.

Writing's Risk. Writing is dangerous and anguishing because it is inaugural, not knowing where it is going. No knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning it constitutes.

Second Best Course. All faith or theological assurance aside, the experience of secondarity is tied to the strange redoubling by which constituted meaning presents itself as prerequisitely read. Meaning is neither before nor after the act.

Freedom of Speech. Writing is inaugural because of a certain absolute freedom of speech, the freedom to bring forth the already-there as a sign of the freedom to augur. It is a freedom of response acknowledging as its only horizon the world as history.

5. The Anguish of Writing: Responsibility and Constraint

Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.

Restricting Meaning. The necessity of becoming breath or speech restricts meaning, and our responsibility for it. Writing restricts and constrains speech further still.

Hebraic Ruah. Writing is the anguish of the Hebraic ruah, experienced in solitude by human responsibility. It is the moment at which we must decide whether we will engrave what we hear.

Tragedy of the Book. There is no tragedy of the book, only one Book distributed throughout all books. To write is not only to conceive the Leibnizian book as an impossible possibility.

6. The Book's Tragedy: An Impossible Possibility

Meaning must await being said or written in order to inhabit itself, and in order to become, by differing from itself, what it is: meaning.

The Leibnizian Book. The eternal fraternity of theological optimism and pessimism: nothing is more reassuring, but nothing is more despairing, more destructive of our books than the Leibnizian Book.

Writing's Power. The literary act recovers its true power at its source. Communication in literature is not the simple appeal to meanings a priori, but the arousing of meanings through enticement.

Writing's Future. Writing is dangerous and anguishing because it does not know where it is going. It is an initial and graceless recourse, even if the writer is not an atheist but, rather, a writer.

7. The Ultrastructuralist Method: A Focus on Form

The work is a totality and always gains from being experienced as such.

Structure as Object. Structure becomes the object itself, the literary thing itself. It is no longer a heuristic instrument, a method of reading, or a characteristic revelatory of content.

Spatial Models. Despite his theoretical intention, Rousset, in his analyses, grants an absolute privilege to spatial models, mathematical functions, lines, and forms. Time itself is always reduced to a dimension.

Teleological Structuralism. Everything within the dynamics of Corneillean meaning comes to life with the aim of final peace, the peace of the structural energeia. Outside this peace, movement can only be sketch or debris.

8. The Unhappy Consciousness: Division and Irreducibility

Speaking frightens me because, by never saying enough, I also say too much.

Oppressed Consciousness. The consciousness of having something to say as the consciousness of nothing is not the poorest, but the most oppressed of consciousnesses. It is the consciousness of nothing, upon which all consciousness of something enriches itself.

Angustia. The anguish of writing is the responsibility of angustia: the necessarily restricted passageway of speech against which all possible meanings push each other, preventing each other's emergence.

Secondarity. Is not the experience of secondarity tied to the strange redoubling by means of which constituted meaning presents itself as prerequisitely read? Is not that which is called God the passageway of deferred reciprocity between reading and writing?

9. The Violence of Light: Concealing Meaning

To comprehend the structure of a becoming, the form of a force, is to lose meaning by finding it.

Apollonian by Virtue. The meaning of meaning is Apollonian by virtue of everything within it that can be seen. To say that force is the origin of the phenomenon is to say nothing.

Metaphorical Eye. Force, ceding its place to eidos, has already been separated from itself in acoustics. How can force or weakness be understood in terms of light and dark?

Phenomenology's Limits. One would seek in vain a concept in phenomenology which would permit the conceptualization of intensity or force. All value is first constituted by a theoretical subject.

10. The Attempt-to-Write: Freedom and Duty

The will to write reawakens the willful sense of the will: freedom, break with the domain of empirical history, a break whose aim is reconciliation with the hidden essence of the empirical, with pure historicity.

Will to Write. The will to write is not an ulterior determination of a primal will. It reawakens the willful sense of the will: freedom, break with the domain of empirical history.

Way Out of Affectivity. In its relationship to Being, the attempt-to-write poses itself as the only way out of affectivity. A way out that can only be aimed at, and without the certainty that deliverance is possible.

Pure Language. In the extent to which the literary act proceeds from this attempt-to-write, it is indeed the acknowledgment of pure language, the responsibility confronting the vocation of "pure" speech.

11. The Question of the Sign: Beyond Simple Signification

By enregistering speech, inscription has as its essential objective, and indeed takes this fatal risk, the emancipation of meaning—as concerns any actual field of perception—from the natural predicament in which everything refers to the disposition of a contingent situation.

Emancipation of Meaning. Inscription has as its essential objective the emancipation of meaning from the natural predicament in which everything refers to the disposition of a contingent situation. This is why writing will never be simple "voice-painting."

Attempt-to-Write. The attempt-to-write cannot be understood on the basis of voluntarism. The will to write reawakens the willful sense of the will: freedom, break with the domain of empirical history.

Pure Speech. The literary act is the acknowledgment of pure language, the responsibility confronting the vocation of "pure" speech which, once understood, constitutes the writer as such.

Last updated: May 3, 2025