NIGHTCAP

THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)

This film was the first film the actor Charles Laughton directed
and is worth watching because:

The screenplay was written by James Agee (reason enough to watch it)
A brilliant performance by Robert Mitchum
And the photography of cinematographer Stanley Cortez is absolutely beautiful
and reminded me a lot of the work of photographer Walker Evans (I have posted on him before) and the artwork for Earth's Hex: Or Printing in the Infernal Method (this album deserves a separate post sometime)

BECAUSE YOU'RE WORTH IT

HEGEL'S PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT


THIS SHOULD GIVE YOU AN IDEA... http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
(I AM FULLY AWARE THAT A MARXIST WEBSITE MIGHT NOT BE THE BEST INTRODUCTION TO HEGEL FOR OBVIOUS REASONS)

PARAGES VIII

I began to read these syllables for you in the parages of Thomas l'Obscur, from the first few pages: "...the next [moment] the absence of water took hold of his body and drew it along violently. His breathing became slower; for a few moments he held in his mouth the liquid which the squalls drove against his head: a tepid sweetness, strange brew of a man deprived of the sense of taste [...] the same sense of foreignness that the water in which they were tossed [...] reverie in which he confused himself with the sea. The intoxication of leaving himself in the thought of water, made him forget every discomfort. And even when this ideal sea which he was becoming ever ..."

- He is your ideal sea, the real sea. For you, to love his text, to drown there, now, to have loved it, as the original first name...

- "...more intimately had in turn become the real sea, in which he was virtually drowned, he was not moved as he should have been [...] his endless journey with an absence of organism in an absence of sea. The illusion did not last. He was forced to roll from one side [bord] to the other, like a boat adrift, in the water which gave him a body to swim. What escape was there? To struggle in order not to be carried away by the wave which was under his arm? To go under? To drown himself bitterly to the end? That would surely have been the moment to stop, but a hope remained; he went on swimming as if, deep within the restored core of his being, he had discovered a new possibility. He swam, a monster without fins. [...] so perfectly suited to him [...] he tried to tell in which direction he was gone [...] he discovered a man who was swimming far off [...] the swimmer was always escaping him. He would see him, then lose sight of him, though he had the feeling that he was following his every move: not only perceiving him clearly all the time, but being brought near him in a completely intimate way, such that no other sort of contact could have brought him closer." This is from the first chapter. The second, as you know, [p. 116] begins thus: "He nevertheless decided to turn his back on the sea..."
Here, at the end of the last chapter, the twelfth, in the parages of a time which is greatly distanced from both: "Could the world be more beautiful? The ideal of colour spread out across the fields [...] an immense sea spread out across his feet. He walked [...] The man immersed in the waves piled up by the absence of flood spoke to his horse in a dialogue consisting of a single voice. [...] Thomas still went forward. Like a shepherd he led the flock to the constellations, the tide of star-men toward the first night. Their procession was solemn and noble, but toward what end, and in what form? They thought they were still captives within a soul whose borders they wished to cross. [...] But little by little forgetfulness came. [...] Some who proudly plunged their glance into the sea, others who clung with determination to their name, lost the memory of speech, while they repeated Thomas's empty word. [...] The guardian of the impossible seized them, and they were engulfed in a shipwreck. A prolonged, heavy fall [...] the monsters which had terrified them when they were men came near them, they looked on them with indifference, saw nothing, and, leaning over the crypt, remained there in profound inertia, waiting mysteriously for the tongue whose birth every prophet has felt deep in his throat to come forth from the sea and force the impossible words into their mouths. [...] they all recognised the ocean, and they perceived a glance whose immensity and sweetness awoke in them unbearable desires. Becoming men again for an instant, they saw in the infinite an image they grasped and, giving in to the last temptation, they stripped themselves voluptuously into the water."

---

- Viens.

- Yes, yes.

PARAGES VII

- Friendship does not give the name, nor does it take it. It renders it anonymous. Not [Pas] to another. It gives, if it is possible, the anonymous in the name. It harbours and delivers the name without name. The words that you [tu] just detached (for example, blanchâtre or eau), without any right, can well resemble the elements of his name: as much the (indivisible) parts of his name as its elementary (indivisible) middle. But the element is also infinitely divisible, anonymous, in things and in syllables. The name does not include more of its elements than it disperses like the foam "before his eyes" or drowns in the absence of water of the anonymous sea. If this was the case, the signature, more anagrammatical than another, would lose the name to the infinite measure of its care. No more name. Not only because the name that we know him by can act as a mask, in his eyes or ours, working for a completely different name in silence, even using his text as a mask (literature can always play this role), but also in order to insist on its place and to track down the most ingenious readings, and therefore the most naive in the police kindness of the investigation. And then, again, by signing, whether it makes his name untouched and complete, safe, at the top or at the bottom of the text, on the border or outside it, whether it abandons the seeds in language, to the state of dispersion or magnetisation, it both keeps and loses the name, signs without signing. And the more it keeps, the more it loses. In both cases, the anonymous is the effect: by effacement or monumentalisation. This double bind is the structure of the proper name, before any decision as to its subject, before any subject. In any case it will have drowned in the waters of his name with his name, where everything is swallowed up: here is the no-more-name [plus-de-nom] or the no-name [pas-de-nom]. The gift of the name (to give a name to the other or to be given a name) is perverted in advance in the no-name. According to this syntagm, this false syntagm, the step [pas] crosses the line, toward the name to be put down, or toward the transgression of the name, beyond the anonymous or beyond the name; but it immediately folds up before itself, on this side, the pas of negation having marked the retracing. It does not pass beyond: it takes place in language, whilst beyond it and leaves the fold of this re-folding in the pas as you [tu] understand it here, but you could never take [prendre], take by surprise [surprendre], take in [comprendre]. Pas-de is impregnable [imprenable], but...

- Thus what surprises me is that it remains.

- Not even that/The same pas [Pas même].

- But then what do you [vous] do with his name? Do you want to give it to him or help him, or even urge him to lose it? Where, in which of these two cases, is the most friendship...

PARAGES VI

What should one do in order to read everything? And even if one can read everything here, quoting everything "integrally" once more, the everything would still be missing... I turn some three pages and read again: " he/it: at the border of writing [il: au bord de l'écriture]...".
It-paralyses it. Is this the coat of arms of his name, this "barred zero, heraldic"? of his name without name (not Without-Name, this is still too much), or equally, of an anonymous island, bordered on every side, as the borders of the o or the o of the borders, without any other quality or determination, white or black island, white water [eau]/black water, zero degree of the appearance, of the first step [pas] or of the first word, when this begins to walk or to speak, to heave up upon itself or to raise its voice. The white and the black are just as suitable to this o of the name without name. Isn't the eau, white or black, the o, clear or obscure, day/night, this double zero, this "equal power of the 0 and the 2 in the distance not marked and not measurable as difference", this equal power that the Eternal Return neither permits nor identifies, nor resembles, nor excludes the one nor the other? Thinking of the o, I then allow myself to drift towards what he says about 0/2 in Le pas au-delà, or about the "word-gap" in L'Entretien infini ("a hole-word, hollowed out in its centre by a hole, the hole in which all the other words should have been buried": so he quotes Marguerite Duras and he [il] is this word-gap, "immense, endless, an empty gong", he is the "narrative voice"), but there is also a similar hole in all names, in all words, in his name, in his words hollowed out by the o at [p. 110] their centre (le bord [border], la bouche [mouth], le mot [the word], le mort [death, the dead], le trou [gap], le nom [name, noun], le non [no], le moment [moment]). The double colour (white/black) of the o, the opposition day/night is effaced without confusion in the night remarked upon as follows: "All that which Anne still loved [...] were called the night. All that which Anne hated [...] were called night. Absolute night where there were no longer contradictory terms, where those who suffered were happy, where white found a common substance with black. And yet, night without confusion..." I read this in Thomas l'Obscur which you [vous] described, at the moment when, from the start, from first word, "Thomas sat down and looked at the sea", as a genesis of colour, from the "absolute night" "where white found a common substance with black. And yet, night without confusion..."

-We test only a preface here, scarcely, failing [échouant: can also mean grounding a boat] before Thomas l'Obscur, "To the pages entitled Thomas l'Obscur, begun in 1932..." (Thomas l'Obscur's warning).

-Is it for this, a prelude to the warning of a first récit, that you said viens to me?

-Listen when I say viens. I yell and hold back a murmur that nobody has heard, this unique time, in the close and transparent place. My cry is very imperious and very soft, it obeys you, it replies to you. Its urgency allows you the eternity in order to give me, the first, the affirmation that I repeat once more again, the unique time. Viens-speaks and elaborates nothing, cries out, but patiently, silently, upon each of our bodies, writes itself. You understand it yourself, now, here, very close to you, as if you just pronounced it but you remembered it and would remember it eternally, in the same forgetfulness where he will have left us, when finally what will happen to the other...

-Which you called: death, the other name of viens-which thus only happens to the other...

-To you [A toi]

PARAGES V

- Since you [vous] affect to speak to me, here at length, there briefly, opening or closing your mouth, all that you pronounce o (like zero, eau [water], faut [necessary], faux [false], fors [except], fort [strong], mot [word], moment [moment], mort [death, dead], and now bord [edge], always outside [dehors]), with a detective's eagerness, are you not going to decipher the identities once more, are you not going to shadow a signature there, a concern (Sorge conceals or [gold] on his body, in Le Tr&egraves-Haut, Dorte also, the other character; and then, in the same novel, there is Louise and Roste, and then elsewhere, as if he never choses his names by chance, there is Thomas, and once again o, om, mo at work or sleeping in his titles), an insistent preoccupation with his name? the more or less anagrammatic dissimulation of his complete signature, in each case around its edges (maur / chot, m' : o [ie, nullify me, drown me])? Do you seek to take everything, as though in a round up or a net, with so over obliging a zeal as to unmask the absence of name, the pas-de-nom, no name; are you still going to say, playing page after page with the name of the name, with the letters (n,o,m), from right to left, and why not the non of pas, since you have already pointed out the a and pa redoubled in his titles (Faux Pas, Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas, La Part du feu, L'Espace littéraire..., etc.)? Isn't this consequently a little facile? too short? Where would all these letters be absent the words of our language? in Me? in the Other? and isn't his concern also the forgetfulness of the name, and the false name of forgetfulness? yes, why, since you affect to speak to me...

PARAGES IV

- "I sought, this time, to approach [aborder] him." In what follows this strange attack without capture, the assurance (that of the negation, for example, and of the dialectic or negative theology) is foiled by the unpresentable time of the récit. In the unlimited, elementary medium of a present floating without authority, breathless after the completely other past which no longer even has the form of a past present, of a past which would still resemble it, of a presentable or representable past keeping some common measure with the quasi-now of the récit, the event it derives removes its simple past ("I sought, this time...") over an indefinite depth of repetition or habit. Depth without depth indicated by the imparfaits of state or of recurrence: "I mean I tried [j'essai] to make him understand that, although I was there, still I was couldn't go any farther, and that I, in turn, had exhausted [j'avais épuisé] my resources. The truth was that for a long time now I had felt that [j'avait sentiment] I was at the end of my strength. "But you're not," he pointed out. About this, I had to admit, he was right. For my part, I was not. But the thought that perhaps I did not have `my part' in mind made it a bitter consolation. I tried to put it another way. `I would like to be.' A manner of speaking which he avoided taking seriously; at least, he didn't take it with the seriousness that I wanted to put into it."
In this sequence from the start [d'abord] (start [abord] of the récit in the récit of the start which does not start: without edge [a-bord] without deprivation) from which I always interrupt the quotation most arbitrarily (this logic of the abortive interruption-cutting, border, violence of the centring- brings us closer here, to one another, from one edge to the other; it is this strange logic of the share [part] or the division [partage] which interests us both), in this starting sequence, [p. 104] affect one another nearly four times, in which an imparfait never has the same value. That of the "he pointed out, he was pointing out" evasively implicates the indefinite repetition of similar events; the others, a durable and continuous state ("I felt, I was feeling", "I had exhausted, I am having exhausted", "I was not", etc.). Every single dislocation of the entangled, ephemeral chains is not even separated from any fixed system of reference; it is engaged above the hollowed abyss in the same presence of the narrator who seems only to speak in the present of his presence, but in order to say: "although I was there" ("...I tried to make him understand that, although I was there, still I couldn't go any farther...").
Seemingly homogeneous with the other imparfaits (to the extent that I was there: if is true, agreed, that I was there), this imparfait lets itself be contaminated , in a small, determinable way, one would say vague [vague, also "wave"]-floating-in these parages, by the conditional suspense: if [si] one could think that I was there, supposing that I were there. The decision is not only suspended by it for him but implied, I say implied carefully, between two readings, as always.

PARAGES III

-To make tremble from the start: I sometimes have the impression that for him,-not for him but for you [vous], with him, as though helping yourself to his strength-you seek to frighten, to frighten me. And in view of what? And why less in beginning by making tremble from the start, than in making tremble with the approach of the approach [l'abord de l'abord], with the beginning, to tremble from the start [trembler d'abord], refusing the fear, in order to frighten always more, the least possibility of it happening, of recognising a beginning, of taking a presentable landmark, of touching whatever this is, of appearing to itself from an edge, a bank. Pure dread, without life, without phenomenon, without relating to oneself. In view of what and from what dread does so organised a fascination...

-So little organised, all things considered, that it can only practice starting from the one who renounces making use of it, mastering it, dominating it, who subjugates it and would not know how to signal the effects or the organon. Whence the difficulty I was talking about earlier. The I, as the proper name of the signature, signs its own retreat, effaces, without remainder, its own signature, withdraws its retreat [retrait], and also itself, "pas-of-insistence", distances the approach. What I just called the "pas-of-insistence" he will have described earlier, in a still very Hegelian text, in accordance with the era, but already far from a certain Hegel, going toward himself: "The man who speaks at once demands the negation of the being about whom he speaks as well as his own existence, and this negation is demanded from [à partir de] his power to distance himself from himself, to be other than his being. The example which he then gives of this, on several occasions, is not [p. 99] only "I say a flower!" but "I say this woman". H–lderlin, Mallarmé, and all poets whose theme is the essence of poetry have felt that the act of naming is disquieting and marvellous. A word may give me its meaning, but first suppresses it. [...] Of course my language does not kill anyone. And yet: when I say, "This woman," real death has been announced and is already present in my language [...] my language essentially signifies the possibility of this destruction [...] My language dos not kill anyone. But if this woman were not really capable of dying, if she were not threatened by death at every moment of her life, bound and joined to death by an essential bond, I would not be able to carry out that ideal negation, that deferred assassination which is what my language is." Literature supposes this double death but if "it does not abide by it", it is powerless to be effaced like death: "If it were to become as mute as a stone, as passible as the corpse behind that stone, its decision to lose the capacity for speech would still be legible on the stone and would be enough to wake that bogus corpse." "...inexorable affirmation, without beginning or end-death as the impossibility of dying. (La Littérature et le droit à la mort.) My emphasis.
False step of death, starting from the distancing of self: the effacement itself ought no longer be effaced. To remain close to itself in its effacement, to sign again, to remain in its absence of remaining: the impossible, death as the impossibility of dying from what announces the death without death. The remainder without remaining of this effacement which is no longer effaced; this is perhaps what there is, by chance, but which is not or which is step [qui n'est pas ou qui est pas]: here is pas under the name of forgetfulness such that it wears it down, such that one can no longer think it, the thought "coming from" ["à partir" d'] a thought of being. If "being is still a name for forgetfulness", it names a forgetfulness of forgetfulness, which violently encrypts it, and not a synonym of forgetfulness, interchanging with it as its equivalent, making it think. [le donnant à penser, lit., giving it to think] Naming it, or rather, being names it, makes it disappear under its name. This thought which is no longer from being or from the presence of the present, this thought of forgetfulness perhaps says to us what would have to be understood [p. 100] under the name (thought), you remember it, which named, without declaring its name, about which L'Arrêt de mort said "eternally: Viens, and eternally it, she, is there"; or unique speech, to which, in Celui qui..., he said viens so that she cries out her name. "When I say `this woman..."
It is you, [C'est toi], your own name. Not yours, but the name to you, the one which is given to you in the call, without it ever belonging to you or possessing you.

PARAGES II

- Pas of negativity in this retracing, pas of negation of denegation in this neutralisation. The without (of) Blanchot must operate but it does not operate, it allows what has always been dissimulated to return as the entirely other and can only be dissimulated. It must operate without the negativity in which the without is taken care of in natural spoken language, formal or dialectical logic. And in this passive work the etymology as such is not of any help to us. According to a singular most untimely step [démarche], which we are perhaps least ready to follow or to recognise, we his so called contemporaries or readers; according to what would be the form of an advance only in the order of a slanted history, no longer having currency from the moment that this advance without advance is produced (try to read "my step without goal" in Celui qui...), the without is self-affected from all else (without without without...). It is thus infinitely passive as regards the entirely other which affects or approaches it. Such that he writes it, to him, and initials it, or rather he leaves it to recover its signature, to neutralise the sense, the language, the discourse, the writing, etc., all the words or [p. 93] words of the order of our "modernity". He does not play against them, he has, on the contrary alway written unreservedly for them, but without them, beyond them, in the course of the most discrete and most fascinating crossing. How, distanced from his signature, does this without mix with the water? and with what water? In view of what shore? in which parages?
Close to an abyss without depth, it is, in such a setting of scene of "Viens" (Celui qui...), sea water [l'eau de mer]. It [Elle] is, firstly, the sea [la mer].
This is not the only marine place of the récits. A remarkable reading of the "undecidable edge" has recently been proposed (I quote the reader) which opens and closes, on the sea, Thomas l'Obscur. I cannot name here...

PARAGES I

A few slices of

Derrida's "Pas"

from Parages (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1986)

translated by Clive Madder

[p. 90]

- You always return to the water [eau], without my ever knowing what you are talking about, what you utter or denote (o sign of nothing, the letter, the cry, the syllable, the words, the names, the thing); and as for the thing, is it the water [eau] from the "drink", from the "beverage", the luck of a fate [lot], the water [eau] from the "glass of water [eau]" which often comes up again in Celui qui..., the water [eau] from the sea [la mer], or some other thing which would signify, rebus, a morsel or a moment of mot mo, for example, or ot, or mor, mors, mort, or the first proper name affecting or biting closer, accompanying him without stopping, but like a stranger, the one who...

- Yes, yes, I always return (see what he says about returning and about the "always returns" in Le Pas au-delà), and I would like to quote more often, for these récits demand it, even the one which I ought not quote, save ever bending it from its unique route.
The water [eau], which I denote by way of rebus, is not a theme, a sense, or a signifier, by reason of all the resources which you have just recalled. One must say this, for the same reason, about the orality of rat, of pas, sans [without] or sauf [safe, save, except], and from then on all that they emphasise and which is advanced or distanced in these récits. Which are récits in this, by that, and no longer discourses or stories, narrations or poems.
If I write, for example: the water without water, what has happened? Or again, a reply without reply? The same word and the same thing seem removed from themselves, taken away from their reference and their identity, while continuing to be left to traverse, in their old body, towards an entirely other, dissimulated in them. But not [pas] more than in "pas"; this operation does not consist simply in depriving or denying, it is necessary in itself. It forms the trace or the pas of the entirely other about which it is concerned, the re-tracing [re-trait, also withdrawal] of the pas, and of the pas without pas. In its syntax, it plays, between two apparently identical words: "it describes without describing", "this death without death", "survival which is not one of them", La Littérature et le droit à la mort; "death without death", "death but without death", "the origin of what is without origin", "air without air", "thought without thought", Thomas l'Obscur; "speech without speech", "resemblance... without resemblance", Celui qui ne m'accompagnait pas; "being without being", "anew without newness", "place without place", "distance without distance", L'Entretien infini; "approach without approach", "waiting and without waiting", "spaced out without space", "respite without respite", L'Attente l'oubli; "secret (without secret)", L'Amitié; "the other, in his attraction without attraction", "the name without name", "other unhappiness, of an unhappiness without unhappiness", "the end (without end) of books", Le Pas au-delà; "myself without myself", "destroys without destruction", Discours sur la patience; "To live without living, as to die without death: to write returns us to these enigmatic propositions", a primal scene; "the aletheia, such that one thinks it without thinking it" (L'Šcriture du désastre). Without plays like a strange resilience, neither an energy nor a functioning. X without X no longer appears to function. But if it does, it is not as one thinks. Without doubt this no longer functions, this no longer walks, this means nothing and rejoins a o degree of the thesis, of the discourse and the sense. This means o and yet there is not o. It remains a remainder without remaining from this passage (there is-not [pas]-anything, a text, a récit, already). This is why none of these "words" (without word in turn), of these old words of natural language, separated from themselves, can be replaced by a conventional X. A certain formalisation of it is impossible, or in any case always limited. The without will have walked. Not without. Step of without [Pas de sans]. And he will have invested the paleonym of a completely other, archi-ancient, more than ancient, sheltered by the paleonym but without relation to one. Without-trace of pas.