I'm thinking, at the moment, of this idea of the reconstructed voice. This follows my absolute break with aesthetics, and with the pursuit of good and bad. ...That's right, I've decided that the pursuit of good and bad is an error, but perhaps a necessary one. But, what's important is this idea of the
absolute rejection of aesthetics, which means, indeed, that we want to dismiss from thinking the pursuit of good and bad. But it is undeniable, still, that literature has an
intention, or has a
distinction (the two are the same). Yet, to pursue this intention, or to pursue this distinction, would be to step into the realm of the good and bad, or it would be to hunt, and to think aesthetically. Now, our argument here is not that we have found a new way of thinking that would avoid the problem of the hunt, but rather we must think about
redemption or
repression rather than of truth. Well, this is all fairly difficult to formulate, but let me just remark that I think the role of reading to be the redemption of the reconstructed, retrospective voice.
Here's what I mean. We had insisted, earlier, that literature and thinking was a kind of hunt, or the following of the distinction between good and bad, or the attempt to isolate the good from the bad, as if out of a background. So whichever way. But literature is not, in fact, the hunt, but rather, always occurs after the hunt. Literature speaks of a far more radical relationship to good and bad than the hunt, since, for the case of the hunt, the only possibility seems to be that the hunter becomes the hunted or the hunter draws close to the hunted, or becomes intimate with the hunted.
The problem of thinking beyond the hunt is the attempt to deal with this problem. On the one hand, literature becomes a performance that takes place after the hunt, but still resembles the hunt in all respects. Literature, even in its melancholy (after the hunt) continues to think about this distinction, but this pursuit is now solitary, it is no longer linked to the distinction between good and bad. It still looks like a pursuit. But in rejecting the hunt, literature gains a new holisticity. What I mean is, we reject hunt, and we reject presence, but we are still able to read and to understand literature. But this reading would itself no longer be of the order of the hunt, but 1) something much weirder.
We now remark, that literature is about a latent intention that is everywhere, and, significantly, possibly within the text itself, within the materiality of the text. And in this materiality, every moment becomes a turning towards, a new intention -- in a kind of atomization of the text. But at the same time, there is also a holistic aspect, which is the sense of the author writing for the future, despite the fact that he is no longer of the hunt, and cannot possibly, it seems, ever inject his subjectivity into his work. We are thinking, then, of a kind of paradoxcial subjectivity -- the ghost.
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Why is literature so melancholy?
Now, you may be wondering, whether it is necessarily the case that this reconstruction is somehow "less real", since it is not, it seems, localized in time and space. But it is real in the sense of it being a responsibility, and furthermore, we must remember that the intention or the distinction familiar to us is not localized in time and space either, whatever it's claims...
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