On the Commerce of Thinking: Of Books and Bookstores

On the Commerce of Thinking Of Books and Bookstores

1 Liber: membrane occurring between bark and wood, between cortex and lignum, between exposed thought and knotty intimacy, interface between outside and inside, itself neither outside nor inside, turned toward one as toward the other, turning one toward the other, turning one back over into the other. Although the book can become—digitized, immaterialized, and virtualized as well as bound in leather and gilt-edged—however slim it may become, it can be produced only by remaining “ for this reader pure block—transparent,”1 through which we gain access to nothing other than ourselves, some to others but in each to hieroglyphics. The veritable property of the book, its virtus operativa or vis magica, or what we would have to call its librarity, is to be found nowhere if not in the relation itestablishesandmaintainsbetweenitsopeningand On the Commerce of Thinking Of Books and Bookstores 2 closing. In contrast to the proverbial door, a book cannot be open or closed: it is always between the two, always passing from one state to the other. Such a continuous and endlessly reversible transition —for the open book closes in exactly the same way that the closed book opens—derives from the fact that the book can be considered neither plainly as “container” nor quite simply as “content.” It is not an object that can be put away on a shelf or placed on a table, but neither is it the printed text found on its pages. Instead, it shifts from one to the other, or else resides in the tension between the two. It produces that tension, provokes it, and doesn’t stop maintaining it throughout its pages. But it also relaxes and appeases it, entrusting it to its volume as to a type of repository . On the side of tension, expectation, and temptation , one finds the feverish intention from which the book always issues. No book ever flows from a source: one doesn’t write a book as one writes a letter, memoir, or lampoon (libelle, “little book”). One projects, rather, an enterprise that thinks of itself, each time, as having no example and no im- 3 itator. One envisages delivering [livrer], or delivering oneself, as a thought that is perfect in itself and sufficient to itself, never a simple means of communication, representation, or imagination. A book is born in agitation and anxiety, in the fermentation of a form in search of itself, in search of a deployment and appeasement for its impatience . On the side of repose, the book proposes its composition. The latter should not, all the same, be understood solely in the sense either of organization or construction, or, generally speaking, of the systematicity or indeed synesthesia that the unity of the book is presumed to imply and articulate. Rather, in a more modest and empirical manner, one must begin by recognizing the assemblage represented by its material oneness. Its binding and stitching create its volume: if it is “a book” in the transcendental or archetypal sense of the term, that is, if it responds to what is thought within the pure Idea of “book,” that is another matter, which can be accounted for only by a reading. It is already sufficient that pages succeed one 4 another and link one to another in the name of such an Idea. That supposes the linking not to be simply that of a logic or of a narration or exposition . Wherever one is in the business of presenting or indeed receiving a demonstration, history, description , or analysis, the form of oral discourse, that of the lesson—to give it its name—will suit just as well and even be preferable to the form of the book. That is, moreover, the essential if not unique raison d’être, for those who teach: professors speak. Inasmuch as they are professors, they are speaking beings. If they write books, it is not in the same capacity. One could say the same thing, and in a strictly parallel manner, for painters, mechanics , lawyers, masons, doctors, etc. Each of those, as a member of a profession, professes, as it were, by means of gesture, word, or by one’s conduct as a whole. But should one of them compose a book, and should that book be not just a “manual ” of the knowledge professed, then we have another subject, another personage, indeed, another person, or other than a person, no less, one who becomes...