On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

The Matter of Books

46 The Matter of Books Perhaps what we name thus is only the name and the idea, its ideal, its ideality, the pure scription of an available truth sealed with a clasp of ink and paper. Perhaps there is never anywhere, all through its deliveries, a single book. Perhaps the bookish always stifles writing, or perhaps writings murder voices. Perhaps there are only reports and studies, accounts and compilations, fantasy and sycophancy. It remains nevertheless that the commerce of our thoughts, by means of which we are kept together, however loosely or badly that be, relies on the circulation of a currency whose incalculable unit is named “book.” It is not the unit of a sense, but of a matter that carries the promise of thinking. By means of a peculiar relation to liber, Baum and Buch in German , book in English, the tree and the book have the same root, derived from engraved wood. Wax, wood, papyrus, parchment, vellum, luminous screen—what is always involved is sensitive matter, a supple and ductile thickness that offers 47 self for cutting or imprinting, that is capable of accepting the mark and retaining the trace without taking away from it its transitory character, its potential effacement: a collection or gathering [recueil], a reverent contemplation [recueillement], and a fugitiveness, a forgetting, a fragility. Books are heavy and light, they come one after the other, they substitute one for another even as they remain immobilized on solemn library shelves. They are simply books [bouquins] and illegible mumbo jumbo as much as first editions and incunabula. They are easily set alight, but difficult to consume. They are the matter of our thinking, serious yet elusive, available yet secret , obstinately shared among us as the promise of nothing other than this commerce itself. ...