The Stream of Life (11 page)

walk in the Alps by Mr. Saussure (not the linguist), who was an observer and botanist and who extolled when he saw a wild tulip: "I found in the woods above the hermitage, the wild tulip which I had never seen yet." This is taken up by Jacques Derrida in a work that focuses on the aesthetics of Kant, and which is entitled
Parergon,
that is to say which is on the side of the work, which constitutes the side of the work, its border, its frame. The page setting of this text is quite singular: the text sits in a system of corner, the text is put in a frame:

But a flower ... . . . does not relate to any end

Parergon
works on the frame but while working on the frame, it works on the work itself; on the relationship between work and frame and, obviously, the outside of the frame. Therefore it is written with a frame everywhere which leads to something one could call the liberation of flowers. We can work on the following question of aesthetic judgment in Clarice: What is the beautiful? What does it mean? All this in relation to
Agua viva.
I will try to do something which in my reading perspective can only come afterward, but which according to the behavior of a philosopher or a literary critic would probably be the first step. It will justly be a first
do not (ne-pas),
a non-step. This is to say that I will attempt to theorize something of a reading practice, in order to work on art, on the art of Clarice Inspector.

Let us remember the story of Gertrude Stein: "A rose is a rose is a rose. ..." Here one could compare the two techniques, Clarice's and Gertrude Steins. The hidden message behind Gertrude Steins sentence would be something about the impossibility of language to be adequate to the object. Gertrude Stein seems to say: my creation escapes me. Obviously, one will never write creation, but one will write the signifier creation. What Gertrude Stein does is to be hyperlinguistic, that is to say through repetition of "a rose is a rose," she subverts something. She subverts something of what might be repressive in the use of language, the fact that the signifier always represses. If by multiplying the signifier she insists on this phenomenon which is the foundation of language, Clarice does almost the opposite. She makes a portrait of the rose, or, as she says, the story of a rose. "I write you this facsimile" is one of the definitions. She gives hundreds of them because she is someone who proceeds by definition. Yet to say "I write you this facsimile" is to refuse the phantasm of the book that is posited as object containing something that would be on the side of knowledge. When she says that, it is a declaration, a confession, it is also ruseful and ironic, because every book is a facsimile of expression, of representation, of reality, etc. In other words, she writes the books of books. Besides, that is true. Now, I will take it at the letter: in English, simile is a comparison or a metaphor.

If there is a subject of this text, or an object, it is on the question of writing.
Agua viva
is about writing, as a verbal activity. I write you. This is something active. The circulation of blood in this text, the vital theme of this text, is writing, all the questions of writing. Everything is organized around the mystery of writing. This mystery has to be read at the level of: why I write, how I write, from where I write, to whom I write, with what I write, of what I write, about what, toward what. All the questions of writing are right here. Its thematization can be regrouped. The question of silence, for example, is the silence in the spacing of music, but silence is the ground, the earth itself, where there is soil for the plant and where there is a surging of the plant from the ground. It is silence itself which becomes the ground for verbalization. When she throws her voice up into the air—there is always something very corporeal that is being described—and at the same time the words are taken from silence as matter, silence is matter. At that moment the question of saying comes from somewhere else. Silence is matter whence the effects of voice are surging. But to speak becomes another story: to speak is the great battle with language; it is to speak in spite of language; to speak though language has
already said
everything. Clarice does not want to say what has not yet been said. It is not the
inédit
, which in any event the already said of language makes impossible. Her endeavor consists of speaking in such a way that what is normally condemned to mutism comes onto expression. Example: the flowers. Do flowers speak? They speak to us but generally one does not let them speak. This raises the question of: who speaks? Who has the word? Who takes the word in the text? What does the word take? What comes to be text? To speak comes in any case back to writing. The fact of writing is to withdraw the bodily voice from something that has been said. Clarice fights against the silence of the text, of paper, of the text. But to speak is what one does. As she says: "above all, I don't know how to speak to you in writing, I, who have become used to your being the audience." It is evident that when one speaks, it is in the present. As her strongest desire is to make things present themselves, it is to bring into presence. And since, by definition, when one writes, it is past, Clarice is constantly trying to reanimate, to recall

what there may be of an immediacy in the word: "To speak to you in writing."

One can ask the question: why the flowers in this text? I would ask the question in a slightly different way: how to write after the rose. In
Agua viva
, there is a whole parade of flowers, there is not only one. Why flowers? What does it mean? Is the question "why" pertinent? It is always pertinent, because, in a certain way, it is in a very general way impertinent in this text: this is a text which does not reveal its reason. In other words, it relegates to the past the question: "why?" At the same time, the question "why" makes texts grow, it is called upon by the text itself. Where one has a feeling of irrationality, and where one is in the position of the little child who says "why"? even if the text answers: "because." Which in fact is a very good answer. Why? I would say that this is the question "flower." So why some flowers? First, there are ready-made expressions. One has dried flowers in the form of rhetorical flowers. Our memory system cannot say flower in the proximity of books and paper—in a field that is another story—without thinking of rhetorical flowers. Everything that deals with metaphor is vital here. One has to work on the space of inscription of this text and on its play with metaphor, on its struggle or play with metaphor. The question of the flowers is the transformation of "with" into "how." How to say flowers without flowers. How to say it without betraying.

One cannot work on metaphor without working on metonymy. And there is, in Clarice, an abundant use of metaphor and of metonymy. How? Its use is in a system of violent rupture with what might be the forms of language. Language is metaphor and metonymy, one cannot avoid it. Clarice attempts to break this off the way one breaks off a relationship. When one breaks off a relationship, one always keeps traces of attachment. It is never completely dislocated. What she detaches herself from is what may be dead, fixed, gluey in the double system of language. Here, for example, when I say "Why the flowers?" there is an internal answer. I take it at random. I do not need this to answer. When Clarice talks about a tulip—which is a tulip only in Holland—first there is no article: "Tulipa so é tulipa na Holanda." In other words, one has begun to make a certain way with the flowers. One has been accompanied by flowers long enough to reach this point. The suppression of the definite article signifies the passage from the common noun to the species. But it is more interesting to think that the flower takes on its proper name rather than to say that it took the name of a woman. It so happens that tulip becomes a proper name. But tulip is properly tulip only collectively. In other words, it is a flower; one does not betray the flower. This gesture works on non-uprooting while one is in the midst of the proper, that is to say on the difference between proper and figurative. "A lone tulip . . . needs an open field to be." This must be heard in what would still seem literal but is only a facsimile. It must obviously already be understood at an allegorical level. Allegorical of what? The tulip makes sense only in its place. Clarice is very ruseful. Her story about Holland is not a question of natural science. It is not as a botanist that she writes this, though there are passages where there is the influence of botany. Clarice is not afraid—even if, in appearance, she is on the side of origins, of the primary—of associations that are almost clichés. Clichés of what? Not of the imaginary, or of the unconscious. True, all this is part of our immense cultural, symbolic memory which crosses the ensemble tulip-Holland-open field. The tulip carries with it the tulips, takes its full meaning of tulip only in the open field of Holland. At the same time, one cannot not hear it at the level of a textual metaphor. But Clarice does not say this and that

is her strength. Because she broke off with metaphor does not mean that there is no metaphor, that there is no "as."

Why flowers? If one read a story of "I talk to you about a rose, the rose is the feminine flower," one would function with a whole system of associations about a singular rose that had been pre-selected and caught in an anthropomorphic space. Besides, Clarice's passage starts with: "The rose is the feminine flower that gives of itself all and so completely. ..." To liberate the rose from the anthropomorphism which comes from the fact that it is spoken in language, the rose must be reinscribed in the species. What emerges in the passage is the need to bring in flowers in order not to betray the rose. One can think that Clarice proceeds by association as freely as possible. There is no free association because one flower calls, beckons another, but beyond the general fact that one thing calls another. There is an intense, incessant worry
(souci)
which is the moral of her writing and which consists in giving back the flower to the flower by getting closer to the place of origin. Clarice tries to be as essentialist as possible, even if there is, of course, no essence. Therefore she tries to destroy what would be the singular through isolation, captation, while taking into account that there is somebody who is in touch with the flower. In other words, there is exchange. She can say: I am full of acacias. The flower alone is a flower alone; the flower beheld, is a flower beheld, there are differences, alterations. One is in the relative, one is in relation with, and all these flowers are lived flowers precisely. At no point does she make us think that it is an absolute flower. It is a relative flower, but it is as much flower as possible. On the one hand, there is the beholder who looks at the flower, who thinks it, names it, who throws over it this kind of web of human sensitivity. On the other, there are, as in a counterweight, flowers which come to help the flowers,

which make "flower with the flower." That is Clarice's genius. First, she does not philosophize, she simply uses all the means possible. It is on the means that one must work in her text. Means are necessary ruses to be faithful to what is not I.

The technique of reading must be structured here. Let us come back to the little sentence by Kant: "But a flower, for example a tulip," in the third part of Derridas
Parergon
which bears as subtitle,
Le sans de la coupure pure
. If one says "sans" (without, blood), the ear does not know what the eye would say. At that moment one obeys associations. It is obvious that the pure cut demands or breathes blood. One could also say that, if there is a cut, it breathes a
s'en aller
, a going away. It so happens that in Derrida it is written
sans,
without. The
sans
of the
coupure pure
was therefore not blood, it was a cut without blood, but with without, that is to say, without blood. In a certain way, the text by Clarice is without blood and with without. It is written like this and that makes it hard to read. I do not consider this difference negative but as indicative of something in the text that does not give itself to be read without escaping, drowning, submerging, retreating. This is due to its fictional form. Kant's quote with reference to the tulip talks about a certain without which is a without without-blood, that is to say a finality without end, without purpose. A finality without end may be paradoxical, but it signifies something very important: without is not on the side of the negative but on the side of blood, because blood circulates. Kant's little sentence describes the non-rapport, the non-return, and not the interminable or the infinite. There is finality but finality without end. It is not a negative without. It is not, because when there is without, and a cut, one cannot not be drawn into a phantasm of castration, of lack. At some point, Derrida's text says, repeating a

sentence by Kant: "On this
sans
which is not a lack, science has nothing to say." Kant's sentence reads: "There is no science of the beautiful, only a critique of the beautiful." This does not mean that there is no beautiful, or that we cannot say anything about it. It means that there is no science of the beautiful, or that the beautiful cannot be related to an epistemology. There is positively a
non-savoir
of the beautiful. For example, in front of his wild tulip, Saussure stood with his mouth open, which does not mean without voice. But at that moment, if there is a cry, it is not cut, it is breath. In front of the tulip, one will exclaim: How beautiful it is. Go and find out later what it meant. That is what phenomena of open mouths are about. It is beautiful! But then what? How? What is there to say? Well, perhaps, the difficulty of saying it, of linking this perception to an
énoncé.
The fear of losing pleasure while theorizing is one of the questions evoked by Clarice. However, I do not think that one "loses pleasure." Such a statement is taken in the vast and vague risk of castration. One does not "lose pleasure," nor does one keep it: one scans it. And to scan it while trying to say it is what Clarice does. Her book is about the scansion of pleasure. The tulip is completely philosophical but it is enhanced with poetic charm when one has in ones bodily memory Clarice's tulip. If one proceeds philosophically before proceeding poetically, and this is central to the philosopher, pleasure is crushed. But if one begins by having pleasure, it is like knowing how to swim: one never forgets it.